Karen Bakker0.0 An amazing journey into the hidden realm of nature’s sounds
The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.
At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?
The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds, we will never see walks outdoors in the same way again.
Jordan Abel0.0 From Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel comes a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada's residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.
As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school--both of his grandparents attended the same residential school--his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.
NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, then his father's generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous.
Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.
Billy-Ray Belcourt0.0 The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
Alejandro Frid0.0 Change the story and change the future - merging science and Indigenous knowledge to steer us towards a more benign Anthropocene
In Changing Tides, Alejandro Frid tackles the big questions: who, or what, represents our essential selves, and what stories might allow us to shift the collective psyche of industrial civilization in time to avert the worst of the climate and biodiversity crises? Merging scientific perspectives with Indigenous knowledge might just help us change the story we tell ourselves about who we are and where we could go.
As humanity marches on, causing mass extinctions and destabilizing the climate, the future of Earth will very much reflect the stories that Homo sapiens decide to jettison or accept today into our collective identity. At this pivotal moment in history, the most important story we can be telling ourselves is that humans are not inherently destructive.
In seeking the answers, Frid draws from a deep well of personal experience and that of Indigenous colleagues, finding a glimmer of hope in Indigenous cultures that, despite the ravishes of colonialism, have for thousands of years developed intentional and socially complex practices for resource management that epitomize sustainability.
Changing Tides is for everyone concerned with the irrevocable changes we have unleashed upon our planet and how we might steer towards a more benign Anthropocene.
Lindsay Wong0.0 In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons when in fact they should have been on anti-psychotic meds.
Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the "woo-woo"--Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo's sinister effects; at the age of six, she found herself living in the food court of her suburban mall, which her mother saw as a safe haven because they could hide there from dead people, and on a camping trip, her mother tried to light Lindsay's foot on fire to rid her of the woo-woo.
The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, when her aunt, suffering from a psychotic breakdown, holds the city of Vancouver hostage for eight hours when she threatens to jump off a bridge. And when Lindsay herself starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family.
On one hand a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience, and on the other a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself.
Arthur Manuel0.0 In this book Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald Derrickson challenge virtually everything that non-Indigenous Canadians believe about their relationship with Indigenous Peoples and the steps that are needed to place this relationship on a healthy and honourable footing.
Manuel and Derrickson show how governments are attempting to reconcile with Indigenous Peoples without touching the basic colonial structures that dominate and distort the relationship. They review the current state of land claims. They tackle the persistence of racism among non-Indigenous people and institutions. They celebrate Indigenous Rights Movements while decrying the role of government-funded organizations like the Assembly of First Nations. They document the federal government's disregard for the substance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples while claiming to implement it. These circumstances amount to what they see as a false reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.
Instead, Manuel and Derrickson offer an illuminating vision of what Canada and Canadians need for true reconciliation.
In this book, which Arthur Manuel and Ron Derrickson completed in the months before Manuel's death in January 2017, readers will recognize their profound understanding of the country, of its past, present, and potential future.
Expressed with quiet but firm resolve, humour, and piercing intellect The Reconciliation Manifesto will appeal to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are open and willing to look at the real problems and find real solutions.
Deborah Campbell0.0 In the midst of an unfolding international crisis, the renowned journalist Deborah Campbell finds herself swept up in the mysterious disappearance of Ahlam, her guide and friend. Her frank, personal account of a journey through fear, and the triumph of friendship and courage, is as riveting as it is illuminating.
The story begins in 2007 when Deborah Campbell travels undercover to Damascus to report on the exodus of Iraqis into Syria following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. There she meets and hires Ahlam, a refugee working as a “fixer”—providing Western media with trustworthy information and contacts to help get the news out. Ahlam, who fled her home in Iraq after being kidnapped while running a humanitarian centre, not only supports her husband and two children through her work with foreign journalists but is setting up a makeshift school for displaced girls. She has become a charismatic, unofficial leader of the refugee community in Damascus, and Campbell is inspired by her determination to create something good amid so much suffering. Ahlam soon becomes her friend as well as her guide. But one morning Ahlam is seized from her home in front of Campbell’s eyes. Haunted by the prospect that their work together has led to her friend’s arrest, Campbell spends the months that follow desperately trying to find her—all the while fearing she could be next.
Through its compelling story of two women caught up in the shadowy politics behind today’s conflict, A Disappearance in Damascus reminds us of the courage of those who risk their lives to bring us the world’s news.
Брайан Бретт0.0 For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking such questions as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim as a pet, he gradually realizes the enormous obligation he has to the bird and learns that the parrot is a lot more complex than he thought. Simultaneously a biography of this singular bird and a history of bird/dinosaurs and the human relationship with birds, Tuco also explores how we “other” the world—abusing birds, landscapes, and each other—including Brett’s own experience with a rare genetic condition that turned his early years into an obstacle course of bullying and nurtured his affinity for winged creatures. The book also provides an in-depth examination of our ideas about knowledge, language, and intelligence (including commentary from Tuco himself) and how as we learn more about animal languages and intelligence we continually shift our definitions of them in order to retain our “superiority.” As Brett says, “Whaddya know? Not much. I don’t even know what knowledge is. I know only the magic … and the mysteries.” By turns provocative, profound, hilarious, and deeply moving, this fascinating memoir will remain with the reader long after the last page has been turned.
Eve Joseph0.0 A journey into the land of death and dying seen through the lens of art and the imagination
Part memoir, part meditation on death itself, In the Slender Margin is an exploration of death from an “insider’s” point of view. Using the threads of her brother’s early death and her twenty years of work at a hospice, Joseph utilizes history, religion, philosophy, literature, personal anecdote, mythology, poetry and pop culture to discern the unknowable and to illuminate her travels through the land of the dying. The book is neither an academic text nor a self-help manual; rather, it is a rumination on death, dying and the mystery that awaits us all.
Rather than relying solely on narrative, In the Slender Margin gains momentum from a buildup of thematic resonances. In the process of thinking deeply about death, Joseph finds the brother she lost as a young girl. She wrote this book as a way to understand what she had seen: the mysterious and the horrendous.
Replete with literary allusions and references ranging from Joan Didion and Susan Sontag to D.H. Lawrence and Voltaire, among many other literary voices, the result is an absorbing and inspired consideration of how we die and how we deal with death.
Дэвид Стоук0.0 Arthur Erickson, Canada's pre-eminent philosopher architect, was renowned internationally for his innovative approach to landscape, his genius for spatial composition, and his epic vision of architecture for people. Among his most celebrated large-scale works are three that helped to define Vancouver's urban landscape: Simon Fraser University, on Burnaby Mountain; the Robson Square complex at the heart of the city; and the exquisite Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Travel was key to Erickson's creative process; floating high above the clouds on extended airline flights, he made preliminary drawings on vellum with his fine-point black felt-tip pen, designing influential works not only for other parts of Canada-including Toronto's widely admired Roy Thomson Hall--but for sites in the U.S., Britain, and the Middle and Far East. Erickson worked chiefly in concrete, which he called the marble of our times, and wherever they appear, his buildings move the spirit with their poetic freshness and their mission to inspire. But he was also a controversial figure, more than once attracting the ire of his fellow architects, and his professional achievements were tarnished by the excesses of a complicated personal life that resulted in a series of tawdry bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that recalls a Greek tragedy, Canada's great architect-a handsome, elegant man who lived like a millionaire and counted among his close friends Pierre Trudeau and Elizabeth Taylor-eventually became homeless and penniless.
This first full biography of Erickson, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-four, traces the architect's life from its modest origins to his emergence on the world stage. Author David Stouck, acclaimed for his earlier biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross, demonstrates here once again why his work has been praised as imaginative, incisive and compelling. Grounded in interviews with Erickson and his family, friends and clients, as well as the resources of extensive public archives, TITLE is both an intimate portrait of the man and a stirring account of how Erickson made his buildings work. Beautifully written and superbly researched, it is also a provocative look at the phenomenon of cultural heroes and the nature of what we call genius.
Geoff Meggs0.0 At his first cabinet meeting Premier Dave Barrett takes off his shoes, leaps onto the leather-inlaid cabinet table and skids the length of the room. "Are we here for a good time or a long time?" he roars. His answer: a good time, a time of change, action, doing what was needed and right, not what was easy and conventional.
He set the tone for a government that changed the face of the province. During the next three years, he and his team passed more legislation in a shorter time than any government before or since. A university or college student graduating today in BC may have been born years after Barrett's defeat, but could attend a Barrett daycare, live on a farm in Barrett's Agricultural Land Reserve, be rushed to hospital in a provincial ambulance created by Barrett's government and attend college in a community institution founded by his government. The continuing polarization of BC politics also dates back to Barrett--the Fraser Institute and the right-wing economic policies it preaches are as much a legacy of the Barrett years as the ALR.
Dave Barrett remains a unique and important figure in BC's history, a symbol of how much can be achieved in government and a reminder of how quickly those achievements can be forgotten. This lively and well-researched book is the first in-depth study of this most memorable of BC premiers.
Шарлотт Гилл0.0 A tree planter's vivid story of a unique subculture and the magical life of the forest.
Charlotte Gill spent twenty years working as a tree planter in the forests of Canada. During her million-tree career, she encountered hundreds of clearcuts, each one a collision site between human civilization and the natural world, a complicated landscape presenting geographic evidence of our appetites. Charged with sowing the new forest in these clearcuts, tree planters are a tribe caught between the stumps and the virgin timber, between environmentalists and loggers.
In Eating Dirt, Gill offers up a slice of tree planting life in all of its soggy, gritty exuberance, while questioning the ability of conifer plantations to replace original forests that evolved over millennia into complex ecosystems. She looks at logging's environmental impact and its boom-and-bust history, and touches on the versatility of wood, from which we have devised countless creations as diverse as textiles and airplane parts.
Eating Dirt also eloquently evokes the wonder of trees, which grow from tiny seeds into one of the world's largest organisms, our slowest-growing ""renewable"" resource. Most of all, the book joyously celebrates the priceless value of forests and the ancient, ever-changing relationship between humans and trees. Also available in hardcover.
Джон Вайллант0.0 It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.
As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.
This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.
Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.
Lorna Crozier0.0 A volume of poignant recollections by one of Canada's most celebrated poets, Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family and a place.
Lorna Crozier vividly depicts her hometown of Swift Current, with its one main street, two high schools, and three beer parlors-where her father spent most of his evenings. She writes unflinchingly about the grief and shame caused by poverty and alcoholism. At the heart of the book is Crozier's fierce love for her mother, Peggy. The narratives of daily life-sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking-are interspersed with prose poems. Lorna Crozier approaches the past with a tactile sense of discovery, tracing her beginnings with a poet's precision and an open heart.
Gabor Mate3.8 In this timely and profoundly original book, writer and physician Gabor Maté looks at the epidemic of various addictions in our society, tells us why we are so prone to them and outlines what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold. Starting with a dramatically close view of Maté's drug addicted patients, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts weaves in stories of real people while providing a bold synthesis of clinical experience, insight and cutting-edge scientific findings. A haunting, compassionate and deeply personal examination of the nature of addiction.
Хизер Прингл0.0 A groundbreaking history of the Nazi research institute whose work helped lead to the extermination of millions
In 1935, Heinrich Himmler established a Nazi research institute called The Ahnenerbe, whose mission was to send teams of scholars around the world to search for proof of Ancient Aryan conquests. But history was not their most important focus. Rather, the Ahnenerbe was an essential part of Himmler's master plan for the Final Solution. The findings of the institute were used to convince armies of SS men that they were entitled to slaughter Jews and other groups. And Himmler also hoped to use the research as a blueprint for the breeding of a new Europe in a racially purer mold.
The Master Plan is a groundbreaking expose of the work of German scientists and scholars who allowed their research to be warped to justify extermination, and who directly participated in the slaughter -- many of whom resumed their academic positions at war's end. It is based on Heather Pringle's extensive original research, including previously ignored archival material and unpublished photographs, and interviews with living members of the institute and their survivors.
A sweeping history told with the drama of fiction, The Master Plan is at once horrifying, transfixing, and monumentally important to our comprehension of how something as unimaginable as the Holocaust could have progressed from fantasy to reality.
Stan Persky0.0 Literary Nonfiction. Stan Persky's appropriation of the alphabetical list results in a seductive mix of autobiography, essay, travel memoir, and philosophy. Alphabetically arranged essays that ask: where are we individually and collectively, historically and geographically? And replies: at home, in the world. He evokes the blues beat of having been "Born in Chicago in 1941" and wanders the back alleys of Bangkok, Berlin, and Bucharest. And that's just a sampling from the Bs."
Чарльз Монтгомери0.0 When Charles Montgomery was ten years old, he stumbled upon the memoirs of his great-grandfather, a seafaring missionary in the South Pacific. Poring over the faint text and faded pictures, he was entranced by the world of black magic and savagery the bishop described, and couldn't help but wonder what drove the Victorian to risk his life among people who had shot, drowned, or clubbed to death so many of his predecessors.
Twenty years later and a century after that journey, Montgomery sets out for the reefs and atolls of Melanesia in search of the very spirits and myths the missionaries had sought to destroy. He retraces his ancestor's path through the far-flung islands, exploring the bond between faith and magic, the eerie persistence of the spirit world, and the heavy footprints of Empire.
What he discovers is a world of sorcery and shark worship, where the lines between Christian and pagan rituals are as blurred as the frontiers of fact, fantasy, and faith. After confrontations with a bizarre cast of cult leaders, militants, and mystics, the author, in his quest for ancient magic, is led to an island in crisis -- and to a new myth with the power to destroy or to save its people forever.
Alternately terrifying, moving, and hilarious, with overtones of Melville and Conrad, The Shark God is Montgomery's extraordinary and piercingly intelligent account of both Melanesia's transformation and his own. This defiantly original blend of history and memoir, anthropology and travel writing, marks the debut of a singular new talent.
Мария Типпетт0.0 Part biography, part art history -- a thoroughly engaging look at one man’s life and his phenomenal influence on the world of contemporary art.
Bill Reid was at the forefront of the modern-day renaissance of Northwest Coast Native art; but his art, and his life, was not without controversy. Like the raven -- the trickster and principal figure in countless Haida myths -- Bill Reid reinvented himself several times over. Born to a partly Haida mother and a father of German and Scottish descent, his public persona as a Haida Indian seems to have been as much a product of journalists, art patrons, museum curators and others in the non-Native establishment as of Bill Reid himself. It is clear that Reid’s art arose from the tension that existed between his Native and white artistic perceptions.
Award-winning biographer and cultural historian Maria Tippett became intrigued by this enigmatic figure who referred to his own early works as “artefakes,” yet to this day continues to inspire new generations of Northwest Coast artists, including Robert Davidson and Jim Hart. But she questions whether Reid’s status as the architect of contemporary Native art is fair and accurate, given that artists such as Mungo Martin had been keeping the tradition alive since the beginning of the twentieth century. Most controversially, she explores how Reid brought a sensibility formed through his white heritage to the reinvention of Native art.
By asking difficult questions about Reid’s life and work, and by analyzing the works of other Native artists since the beginning of the twentieth century, Tippet gives the reader the defining portrait of Bill Reid -- one of Canada’s most enigmatic and beloved artists.
Bill Reid’s work can be found in private and public art galleries and museums all over the world. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia houses the famous The Raven and The First Men and many smaller masterworks. The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, a monumental bronze sculpture over four metres high, is on display at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. The British Museum, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa also hold impressive examples of the work of this extraordinary and imaginative artist.
Sandra Shields0.0 On the wild river that divides Namibia from Angola, members of the Himba tribe herd cattle as they have done for hundreds of years.
But the world of the Himba sits in the shadow of third-world development and the inevitability of change that threatens their way of life; now, they are more likely to attend evangelical church services, congregate around the liquor trader’s truck, and pose for tourists’ photographs.
Sandra Shields and David Campion spent two months living with the Himba, and this book, a provocative melding of photography and narrative, tells of the profound changes in the lives of the Himba—both gradual and immediate—which echo those effecting indigenous people around the world.
Includes more than one hundred black and white -photographs.
David Campion and Sandra Shields met in South Africa, married a year later, and have collaborated for over a decade. Sandra has written for publications including Geist and The Globe and Mail, and David’s photographs have appeared in publications and exhibitions in Canada, Europe, and Africa.
PHOTOGRAPHY + TEXT = PARALLAX
Parallax, a new series of books from Arsenal Pulp Press, explore the far reaches of the modern world, proposing new perspectives on how we see ourselves through the eyes and the words of our most intriguing photographers and writers.
Susan Crean0.0 Through research, fictionalized accounts of key events in Emily Carr’s life, and the author’s own forays into Carr territory, Crean makes startling connections between Carr’s nineteenth-century sensibility and our present concerns with the environment, assimilation, and destruction of native culture, spirituality, and identity.
Terry Glavin0.0 Winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
The maritime history of the north pacific is rife with apocryphal voyages, legendary armadas, lost colonies and fabled portals through continents. Today the ocean itself is in chaos, and the reasons are mysterious. Gigantic phytoplankton blooms erupt throughout the North Pacific; ocean sunfish and albacore swim up the inlets, while the sockeye stop coming home. Is the world coming to an end? Glavin skillfully sifts through the evidence to show that nothing is as it appears. Such alarming events have occurred before and are part of what scientists call regime shifts. The world is not coming to an end.
Thoroughly researched, beautifully written and powerfully argued, The Last Great Sea by Terry Glavin, sheds light on the various mysteries of this last great sea and reveals one of the world's most mysterious places in all of its richness and complexity.
Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.
Peter C. Newman0.0 Peter C. Newman's series on The Canadian Establishment has made publishing history, its two previous volumes having sold more than half a million copies. In this new book, Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power, Newman takes a daring look at Canada's mega-wealthy, all powerful gunslingers, who will define the way we live and work in the 21st century. For the first time we get an intimate look into the lives and careers of these men and women who are true inhabitants of the global village, creatures more of their time than their place. They dictate the agenda of Canada's politicians, and gain legitimacy by donating surprisingly large gobs of cash to anyone willing to name buildings after them-what they call "f_ _ k-you money with a social conscience."
As well as tackling the great Titans whose greed and influence straddles the nation, Newman details regional and local establishments that rule the roost in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver.
Like all of Newman's books, Titans is an explosive mixture of good humour ("New Money regards waiters as their buddies; Old Money treats them as self-propelled furniture") and tough comments (The Titans have reduced the idea of Canada to a flag of convenience-or occasionally, inconvenience-to be used or discarded, like a moth-eaten T-shirt.")
Titans is sure to be the most cussed and discussed book of the year.
