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Shake hands with the devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda
By Roméo A Dallaire, Brent Beardsley. 2003
As former head of the 1993 U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Canadian general Dallaire's initial proposal called for 5,000 soldiers,…
to permit orderly elections and the return of the refugees. Nothing like this number was supplied, and the result was an outright attempt at genocide against the Tutsis that nearly succeeded, with 800,000 dead over three months. Dallaire's argument that Rwanda-like situations are fires that can be put out with a small force if caught early enough will certainly draw debate, but the book documents in horrifying detail what happens when no serious effort is made. Explicit descriptions of violence. Winner of the 2004 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. Canada Reads 2012. 2003.Royal murder: the deadly intrigue of ten sovereigns
By Elizabeth MacLeod, Barbara Pulling, Heather Sangster. 2008
What would you do for absolute power? Step into the world of palatial intrigue, where holding the throne means evading…
death... or causing it. While Cleopatra of Egypt once rolled herself into a rug and was carried out past her enemies' noses, other royals were brutal when dealing with foes. Read the stories of ten sovereigns, including Vlad the Impaler, "Bloody Mary", and The Romanovs of Russia. Descriptions of violence. Grades 4-7. Winner of the 2009 Red Maple Non-fiction Award. 2008.Canada: a story of challenge
By J. M. S Careless. 1991
A brief history of Canada, covering the period from Cartier and Champlain to the arrival of Pierre Elliott Trudeau on…
the political scene. It covers the major historical events and the forces which have shaped our country. Originally written in 1953, this is the updated 1970 version. Winner of the 1953 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.A short history of nearly everything
By Bill Bryson. 2004
This book is Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization…
- how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? Some strong language. 2004.The man in the white sharkskin suit: my family's exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
By Lucette Lagnado. 2007
Lagnado's father, Leon, used to conduct business in his signature white sharkskin suit in Cairo in the years between World…
War II and Nasser's rise to power. But with the fall of King Farouk, Leon and his family, like other Egyptian Jews, lost everything and had to flee. With all of their belongings packed into 26 suitcases, the family departed for any land that would take them. 2007.The story of mankind
By Hendrik Willem Van Loon. 1951
Robert, Earl of Essex
By Robert Lacey. 1971
Biography of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Follows his triumphs and disasters in the wars…
against Spain, an unsuccessful campaign in Ireland, his imprisonment and subsequent execution. 1971.A stillness at Appomattox
By Bruce Catton. 1953
A description of the last year of the Civil War when General Grant rebuilt the Union Army into a fighting…
force and turned defeat into victory. 1954 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. Sequel to "Glory road". 1953.The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man
By Marshall McLuhan. 1962
Controversial when first published, this classic book theorizes that the invention of printing has shaped our lives. McLuhan looks at…
politics, economics, philosophy, literature and post-Newtonian physics. Winner of the 1962 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man
By Marshall McLuhan. 1977
Controversial when first published, this classic book theorizes that the invention of printing has shaped our lives. McLuhan looks at…
politics, economics, philosophy, literature and post-Newtonian physics. Winner of the 1962 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. c1962, 1977.The Post-Office Girl
By Joel Rotenberg, Stefan Zweig. 1982
2009 PEN Translation Prize FinalistThe logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human…
feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post-World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine's rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same.Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within.Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig's haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master's achievement.The Attempt
By Magdaléna Platzová, Alex Zucker. 2016
"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the…
intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present." -SIRI HUSTVEDT, author of The Blazing WorldWhen a Czech historian becomes convinced he's the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past-from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law.Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships-one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation.Magdaléna Platzová is the author of six books, including two novels published in English: Aaron's Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Washington, DC, and England, received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and has taught at New York University's Gallatin School. She is now a freelance journalist based in Lyon, France."America's preeminent writer of prehistoric history [writes] ... . a book of hearts and minds." Grace Cavalieri, award-winning author, host…
of The Poet and the Poem from the US Library of Congress.After years of abuse from his father, Wing leaves the only home he's ever known. As the male lion leaves its pride, he must find a new home or die. He is sixteen, frail, injured, and alone in the mountainous untamed and untouched wilderness of Mexico of 250,000 BC. Wing struggles to survive, proving himself against a bear, where he learns elementary freedom. Award-winning writer of prehistoric fiction Bonnye Matthews' novella, Freedom, 250,000 BC, brings to life primitive early Americans through Wing's growing understanding of what freedom is and its importance for life.Freedom, 250,000 BC is dedicated to the archaeological site south of Puebla, Mexico at the Valsequillo Reservoir. The site is an amazingly rich prehistoric view of the glory and infamy of human life in the Americas, specifically Mexico, in 250,000 BC. "The outstanding Winds of Change series is highly and enthusiastically recommended for personal reading lists, as well as both community and academic library historical fiction collections." Midwest Book ReviewSleep of Memory (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano. 2018
The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations Patrick…
Modiano’s first book since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This is classic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.The Book of Collateral Damage (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Sinan Antoon. 2016
Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s…
fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.The Lost Book of Adana Moreau: A Novel
By Michael Zapata. 2020
A Boston Globe Most Anticipated Book of 2020A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Millions“A stunner—equal parts epic and…
intimate, thrilling and elegiac.”—Laura Van den Berg, author of The Third HotelThe mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New OrleansIn 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript.Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau. With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers.What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds.The Punishment (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Tahar Ben Jelloun. 2020
An innocent man’s gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century…
despot In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the author’s traumatic experience, written with a memoirist’s immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began to secretly write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.The Orphanage: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Serhiy Zhadan. 2021
A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine&“A nightmarish, raw vision of…
contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet&’s sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country&’s devastation and its people&’s passionate determination to survive.&”—Publishers Weekly, starred review Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.The King's Fool
By Mahi Binebine. 2017
Sidi is dying.In the last days of this all-powerful tyrant, his faithful court fool takes stock of the decades he…
has spent in the king's service. For the many years have left certain indelible wounds.During his service, the fool has been the king's closest counsel, his most trusted companion and adviser, privy to the king's deepest secrets and most intimate thoughts. It is an honoured position for which many other courtiers would pay a hefty price. Something the fool understands only too well, for this closeness has indeed come at a terrible cost.What price the confidence of a great king? Is it stories, jokes, witty repartee? Or does the debt fall closer to home? Perhaps it must be paid far from the magnificent palaces, feasting and festivities of the royal court. Perhaps it must be paid in the death jails of a formidable prison fortress far out in the desert; a place so feared that few dare to speak its name . . .LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT HISTORICAL FICTION PRIZE 2021SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA GOLD CROWN AWARD 2020'A STRIKINGLY SHARP AND SUBTLE…
WRITER' Guardian'SUPERB...BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN...UNFORGETTABLE' FT Weekend'SKILFUL' Sunday Times 'RICH, INTRICATE, IMPRESSIVELY REALISED' Observer 'VIVIDLY REALISED' The Times'A VISION OF THE PAST AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE' Irish Times'A VIVID SLICE OF HISTORICAL FICTION' Sunday Express1815, Sumbawa Island, IndonesiaMount Tambora explodes in a cataclysmic eruption, killing thousands. Sent to investigate, ship surgeon Henry Hoggcan barely believe his eyes. Once a paradise, the island is now solid ash, the surrounding sea turned to stone. But worse is yet to come: as the ash cloud rises and covers the sun, the seasons will fail.1816In Switzerland, Mary Shelley finds dark inspiration. Confined inside by the unseasonable weather, thousands of famine refugees stream past her door. In Vermont, preacher Charles Whitlock begs his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells and their livestock starve.In Suffolk, the ambitious and lovesick painter John Constable struggles to reconcile the idyllic England he paints with the misery that surrounds him. In the Fens, farm labourer Sarah Hobbs has had enough of going hungry while the farmers flaunt their wealth. And Hope Peter, returned from the Napoleonic wars, finds his family home demolished and a fence gone up in its place. He flees to London, where he falls in with a group of revolutionaries who speak of a better life, whatever the cost. As desperation sets in, Britain becomes beset by riots - rebellion is in the air.The Year Without Summer is the story of the books written, the art made; of the journeys taken, of the love longed for and the lives lost during that fateful year. Six separate lives, connected only by an event many thousands of miles away. Few had heard of Tambora - but none could escape its effects.'VIVID, VIBRANT, HARD TO PUT DOWN' Hilary Spurling'THOUGHT-PROVOKING, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND VERY COMPELLING' Harriet Tyce'INGENIOUS AND ABSORBING' Kirsty Wark 'ASTONISHING, RIVETING, MASTERFUL, POETIC' Emily Rapp Black 'A WORLDWIDE CANVAS BROUGHT TO LIFE IN VIVID, HEARTBREAKING DETAIL' Marianne Kavanagh