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The end of absence: reclaiming what we've lost in a world of constant connection
By Michael Harris. 2014
Only one generation in history (ours) will experience life both with and without the internet. For everyone who follows us,…
online life will simply be the air they breathe. Today, we revel in ubiquitous information and constant connection, rarely stopping to consider the implications for our logged-on lives. The author chronicles this massive shift, exploring what we've gained and lost in the bargain. He argues that our greatest loss has been that of absence itself -- of silence, wonder and solitude. Winner of the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction. 2014.Before Owen Wister's publication of "The Virginian" in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime…
novel. This book details the evidence that Everett Johnson, a cowboy from Virginia who had been a friend of Wister's in Wyoming in the 1880s, was the initial and prime inspiration for Wister's cowboy. 2015.The devil and the disappearing sea: a true story about the Aral Sea catastrophe
By Robert W Ferguson. 2003
The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland body of water, has lost over half its surface area and 80 percent…
of its volume since 1960, due to poorly planned irrigation systems. In January 2000, Canadian Rob Ferguson went to Uzbekistan to work on an environmental project to save the Aral Sea. After a year of dealing with corrupt officials, not only had the project gone nowhere, but Ferguson was under suspicion of murder. Some strong language. 2003.The corpses of the future
By Lynn Crosbie. 2017
A sustained, confessional new collection of poems that tells the story of Crosbie's father’s battle with frontotemporal dementia and blindness,…
following a stroke. The poems chronologically recount the poet’s conversations and time with her father, and capture his still-astonishing means of communicating. The book’s title is his sardonic remark. Crosbie considers dementia to be a symbolic language and as such, similar to poetry. The author’s attempts to understand her father’s distress, pain, fear, and brave love are assisted by her understanding of the “negative capability” required of readers of poetry. 2017.The elephants in my backyard: A Memoir
By Rajiv Surendra. 2016
Actor Rajiv Surendra read "Life of Pi", discovered it was being adapted into a major motion picture, and embarked on…
a ten-year journey to land the role of a lifetime. But this is not a journey of goals and victories, this is a story of obsessively pursuing a dream, overcoming failure, and finding meaning in life. 2016.Reveals how our premiere national publisher, McClelland and Stewart, was eventually sold to Random House, a division of German media…
giant Bertelsmann, for a dollar. Drawing on interviews done with those who engineered the deal, and on documents never before revealed, Dewar tells the story of how a savvy businessman, an accountant, a University President, and three major law firms 'danced through the raindrops' to evade a thirty-year-old public policy created to defend Canadian national sovereignty; explores both how the Investment Canada Act was enacted and how it was taken down, piece by piece, deal by deal. 2017.The history of the future
By David A Wilson. 2000
A look at the way in which people in the past imagined their own future: prophets, self-proclaimed Christs, astrologers, witches,…
utopians and economists - all of whom predicted the future, and almost always got it wrong. The author argues that prophecies tell us little or nothing about what will actually happen, but reveal a great deal about the changing hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations that informed the imagination of the past. 2000.The hockey scribbler (Maple leaf audio)
By George Bowering. 2016
Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. The voices of 'Hockey Night in Canada' sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions…
of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep. George Bowering, Canada's former poet laureate, is no different. Growing up in Oliver, BC, Bowering was entranced by the kids from Saskatchewan who skated and handled pucks as easy as breathing. His fascination with hockey followed him into adult life, from BC to Quebec and back again. Bowering followed his teams with a critical eye and a fan's passion, and his stories bring us on a cross-country hockey-themed road trip, with occasional forays into boxing, poetry, and sports fashion. 2016.The house is not a home
By Erik Nielsen. 1989
Erik Nielsen was elected a Member of Parliament for Yukon in 1957 and has spent the last 30 years in…
politics, rising from a backbencher to deputy prime minister. Nielsen describes the events and the politicians of this period, and airs his opinions of public policy, party politics, and the leaders he served. 1989.The heart of the world: a journey to Tibet's lost paradise
By Ian Baker. 2004
Recounts an extraordinary journey into one of the most inaccessible places on earth, and a pilgrimage to the heart of…
Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan prophecies proclaim that the greatest of beyul, or mystical sanctuaries, lies at the eastern edge of the Himalayas, veiled by a colossal waterfall in the forbidding Tsangpo gorge. After years of investigation, world-class climber and Buddhist scholar Ian Baker and his National Geographic-sponsored team made worldwide news by finding a magnificent 108-foot-high waterfall-the legendary grail of both Western explorers and Tibetan pilgrims. 2004.The great Antonio
By Elise Gravel. 2016
He weighed as much as a horse; he once wrestled a bear; he could devour twenty-five chickens in one sitting.…
This whimsical book tells the story of Antonio Barichievich, the larger-than-life strongman who had muscles as big as his heart. Grades K-3. 2016.The author began a quest to find out more about an artist from the Cariboo named Sonia Cornwall (1919-2006). Through…
interviews, letters, original artworks, articles, exhibition catalogues, imaginings of conversations and occurrences, along with her own reflections on the experience, she pieced together a story of pioneering, love and the pursuit of art. But in searching for Sonia, the author found an unanticipated new friend in Sonia's mother, Vivien Cowan (1893-1990), who became a larger part of the story than she could possibly have imagined. 2013.The gospel according to Clarence Thomas: a libretto
By Ashis Gupta. 2007
Crafted as a long poem, a libretto for stage presentations, this book is less about Clarence Thomas than it is…
about the devastating reign of the Bush administration. The central idea of the book is: ‘War is an Evil product of Evil/Hypocritical Minds’. The ‘Chorus of the Homeless’ occupies a central role in the poem, performing a function much like the Chorus in Greek Tragedies, providing a reasonably objective commentary. In a sense, the central story is a tragedy too – George Bush is a tragic figure. And, towards the end, he is conceived as a tragic hero, a Samson-like figure who pulls down the temple over his head to crush the Philistines. 2007.The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson: an introduction
By Anne Newlands. 1995
The great railway bazaar
By Paul Theroux. 1983
The Halifax explosion: Canada's worst disaster
By Ken Cuthbertson. 2017
On December 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc and the Norwegian war-relief vessel Imo collided in the harbour…
at Halifax, Nova Scotia. That accident sparked a fire and an apocalyptic explosion that was the largest man-made blast prior to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Together with the killer tsunami that followed, the explosion devastated the entire city in the wink of an eye and instantly killed more than two thousand people. While much has been written about the disaster, there is still more to the story, including the investigation of the key figures involved, the histories of the ships that collided and the confluence of circumstances that brought these two vessels together to touch off one of the most tragic man-made disasters of the twentieth century. Bestseller. 2017.The great Nadar: the man behind the camera
By Adam Begley. 2017
The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover…
behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others - a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. 2017.The Habs (Brian McFarlane's original six. #Vol. 2)
By Brian McFarlane. 1996
Hockey writer Brian McFarlane tells the story of the Montreal Canadiens, the most successful sports team in North America. On…
the way to winning 24 league championships, the Habs featured some of the greatest players in hockey. McFarlane chronicles their stories as well as the franchise they turned into a hockey legend. 1996.The Gurkhas
By Byron Farwell. 1984
Gurkhas are soldiers from Nepal who serve in the British and Indian armies. Recruiting practices, military training, religion, and home…
and family are analyzed to obtain insight into the nature of Gurkha character. 1984.The education of Augie Merasty: a residential school memoir (The regina Collection)
By David Carpenter, Joseph Auguste Merasty. 2015
Joseph (Augie) Merasty was one of 150,000 children taken from their families and sent to residential schools. Merasty takes readers…
inside his time at residential school, where he was taught to be ashamed of his family and his culture and where he experienced emotional and physical abuse. But even as he looks back on this painful part of his childhood, Merasty’s sense of humour and warm voice shine through. 2015.