Johnson’s greatness to Bono’s gratingness, from doubts about Obama to utter belief in Don Cherry, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s outstanding oeuvre to — well, Pamela Anderson.The topics are as eclectic and wide ranging as the intelligence that put them together. The perspective is thoroughly Canadian, and so are many of the recurring topics and themes: of our domestic politics and our military involvements abroad, of our national identity, of human rights and human decency. You’ll find assessments of the reputations of Paul Martin, Conrad Black, Adrienne Clarkson, and Tim Hortons; tough but affectionate views of Newfoundland — of course — but also from Rex Murphy’s constant travels across Canada.But all the world is here, in all its glory and folly. The hard-hitting attacks on politicians, celebrities, those who would ban smoking, and anyone who uses the expression “global warming denial” will have you cheering or tearing your hair out, depending. You will be informed, infuriated perhaps, but always fascinated.

    The magnificent and long-awaited biography of the beloved writer who gave us the Manawaka novels, including The Diviners and The Stone Angel.

    Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush warned her countrymen from taking the bait and emigrating to Canada; Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada and Life in the Clearings celebrated her new-found freedom in Canada's classless society, and the spirit of industry. Both women had great influence on England's understanding of colonial Canada, as well as on Canada's own vision of its young self. Their writings have become central to all Canadian studies courses and are considered classic examples of pioneer memoirs.

    He was also a key architect of Layton’s overnight success that was ten years in the making. In Building the Orange Wave, Lavigne recounts the dramatic story of how Layton and his inner circle developed and executed a plan that turned a struggling political party into a major contender for government, defying the odds and the critics every step of the way. The ultimate insider’s account of one of the greatest political accomplishments in modern Canadian history, Building the Orange Wave takes readers behind the scenes, letting them eavesdrop on strategy sessions, crisis-management meetings, private chats with political opponents, and internal battles, revealing new details of some of the most important political events of the last decade.

    Bob Joseph’s book comes at a key time in the reconciliation process, when awareness from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is at a crescendo. Joseph explains how Indigenous Peoples can step out from under the Indian Act and return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance—and why doing so would result in a better country for every Canadian. He dissects the complex issues around truth and reconciliation, and clearly demonstrates why learning about the Indian Act’s cruel, enduring legacy is essential for the country to move toward true reconciliation.

    James Raffan is that rare author, proving with Deep Waters that he is a masterful storyteller who has not only penned a story that is by turns harrowing and poignant, but is also a powerful investigative work that sensitively explores the nature of courage, risk and loss. On the morning of June 11, 1978, 27 boys and four leaders from St. John’s School in Ontario set out on a canoeing expedition on Lake Timiskaming. By the end of the day, 12 boys and one leader were dead, with all four canoes overturned and floating aimlessly in the wind. This tragedy, which was first deemed to be an “accident,” was actually, as James Raffan explains, a shocking tale of a school’s survival philosophy gone terribly wrong, unsafe canoes and equipment, and a total lack of emergency preparedness training. Deep Waters is a remarkable story of endurance, courage and unspeakable pain, a book that also explores the nature of risk-taking and the resilience of the human spirit.

    The quints were very much part of their era -- the era of the soap opera and the movie with the happy ending, where people were convinced that money could solve all problems.This book is about the miracle that first turned into a melodrama and later into a tragedy. It is a book about well-meaning people -- politicians, medical experts, civil servants, and ordinary men and women -- who did all the wrong things for all the right reasons. It is also a book about media exploitation -- the manufacture by press and radio of Villains and Heroes.The birth of five identical baby girls to a young farm-wife in the backwoods of nothern Ontario in May 1934 was a genuine miracle -- only the third such recorded birth in history. Despite the fertility drugs of a later era, none have been recorded since. For these five children came from a single egg; it was almost impossible to tell them apart. Until that time no quintuplets, fraternal or identical, had lived for more than a few days. But the five Dionne girls -- Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emilie, and Marie -- grew to adulthood. For the first nine years of their lives, they lived a goldfish-bowl existence, separated from their parents and siblings and on exhibit daily to millions who came from the far corners of the earth to see them. At their peak they represented a five -hundred-million-dollar asset to the province of Ontario.In this book Pierre Burton tells the story of the Dionnes against the background of their time, providing much new information from government archives and from eyewitness accounts. He chronicles the struggle between Olivia Dionne, the babies' father, and Allan Roy Dafoe, the man who attended at their birth and became the best-known doctor in the world. They story moves from the schists and gneisses of the Canadian Shield to the new nightclubs of New York, where Dafoe was given a Lindbergh-like treatment, and to Chicago, where the Dionne parents thrust onto a vaudeville stage. In a final chapter, the author describes the breach that occurred within the family and looks at the three surviving quintuplets as they are today, hidden from the glare of publicity -- two separated from their husbands with almost all the money from the million-dollar trust fund gone, and the third a semi-recluse.Like the Terraplane and the Hupmobile, the dime chain-letter and the double-dip ice cream cone, the National Barn Dance and the Fred Allen Show, the soup kitchen and the relief camps, the quints belong to another era -- an era that lives again in this book, which the author fitting subtitles A Thirties Melodrama.

    But as he says: "no description of me is truly complete without saying I'm a Canadian." He has often winked and nodded to Canada in his outrageously accomplished body of work, but now he turns the spotlight full-beam on his homeland.His hilarious and heartfelt new book is part memoir, part history and pure entertainment. It is Mike Myers' funny and thoughtful analysis of what makes Canada Canada, Canadians Canadians and what being Canadian has always meant to him. His relationship with his home and native land continues to deepen and grow, he says. In fact, American friends have actually accused him of "enjoying" being Canadian and he's happy to plead guilty as charged.A true patriot who happens to be an expatriate, Myers is in a unique position to explore Canada from within and without. With this, his first book, Mike brings his love for Canada to the fore at a time when the country is once again looking ahead with hope and national pride. "Canada" is a wholly subjective account of Mike's Canadian experience. Mike writes, "Some might say, 'Why didn't you include this or that?' I say there are 35 million stories waiting to be told in this country, and my book is only one of them."This beautifully designed book is illustrated in colour (and "not" color) throughout, and its visual treasures include personal photographs and Canadiana from the author's own collection. Published in the lead-up to the 2017 sesquicentennial, this is Mike Myers' birthday gift to his fellow Canadians. Or as he puts it: "In 1967, Canada turned one hundred.Canadians all across the country made Centennial projects.This book is my Centennial Project. I'm handing it in a little late.... Sorry."

    The longest-serving TV news anchor in Canadian history, first on CBC and then on CTV, Robertson remains one of the most accomplished journalists of our time. His career is truly the story of Canada over the past half century, as he told us about key events like the moon landing, JFK’ s assassination, Trudeaumania, Terry Fox’ s run, the Montreal Massacre, 9/11 and the royal weddings.In The Kind of Life It’ s Been, Robertson shares the inside story and the insights he has gained over his long career, from breaking into the business in his hometown of Stratford, Ontario, to joining the CBC, to his highly public departure for CTV to his career as senior editor of CTV News. Filled with fascinating and often hilarious anecdotes about Robertson’ s career, this book captures the essential tales of our time and is a must for any Canadian interested in the inner workings of a frenetic newsroom.

    . . then I might have a chance to live; I might have a chance to be something more than just a struggling crackhead.From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up.Abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Jesse Thistle briefly found himself in the foster-care system with his two brothers, cut off from all they had known. Eventually the children landed in the home of their paternal grandparents, but their tough-love attitudes meant conflicts became commonplace. And the ghost of Jesse’s drug-addicted father haunted the halls of the house and the memories of every family member. Struggling, Jesse succumbed to a self-destructive cycle of drug and alcohol addiction and petty crime, spending more than a decade on and off the streets, often homeless. One day, he finally realized he would die unless he turned his life around.In this heartwarming and heartbreaking memoir, Jesse Thistle writes honestly and fearlessly about his painful experiences with abuse, uncovering the truth about his parents, and how he found his way back into the circle of his Indigenous culture and family through education.An eloquent exploration of what it means to live in a world surrounded by prejudice and racism and to be cast adrift, From the Ashes is, in the end, about how love and support can help one find happiness despite the odds.

    This is the tale of "The Black Donnellys"—a notorious family of Irish settlers who were viciously attacked while they slept in their Lucan, Ontario farmhouse on February 4, 1880.Here, in this definitive account of this sordid episode in Canadian history, first published in 1962 and continuously in print since then, author Orlo Miller sets out to separate fact from fiction, and legend from reality, to bring us the truth behind the Donnelly murders. Combining exhaustive research based on contemporary newspaper accounts, court records and personal diaries, with personal insights and dramatic re-creations, Miller's chilling revelations shed new light on this infamous case in the annals of Canadian crime.You will be taken on a journey of terrible bloodlust, unbending loyalties, and fatal revenge in the re-telling of an event whose infamy still lives in popular culture today.

    In 1987, writer Merilyn Simonds found a cache of letters, albums, clippings and other memorabilia in the attic of her Kingston, Ontario, home, the bits and pieces of an unknown woman's life. Among the overflowing boxes and stuffed sugar sacks was a tin box that held one complete, brief collection of letters from the months immediately after the First World War in 1919, a one-way correspondence written in pencil on flimsy paper, undated and without postmarks. From this careless jumble of pages, remarkable individuals and events emerged: a convict, a penitentiary, a village girl, a life in small town Canada at the end of the Great War. Merilyn Simonds was drawn irresistibly to the lives of Joe "Daddy Long Legs," a thief and con artist incarcerated inside the stone fortress that was the country's most notorious prison, and of Phyllis Halliday, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl whose family home bordered the prison quarry and who fell under the spell of a man she could never meet or touch, except through their clandestine correspondence. Around them swirled a cast of equally compelling characters, chief among them William St. Pierre Hughes, superintendent of the nations' prisons, whose fate, like those of Joe and Phyllis, was bound to the conspiracies and intrigues inside Kingston Penitentiary. All three are caught in prisons of their own devising; only one truly escapes. In the year after its publication, families of all the major characters in the book contacted author Merilyn Sinonds to share their stories and find out more about these little known relations. As a result, she learned that Joseph Cleroux had been part of the Cleroux gang that burgled Ottawa Valley businesses in the first decades of the 1900s. The story of Josie Cleroux's early years and what is now known about where he ended up is told in the epilogue of the paperback edition of "The Convict Lover" "From the Hardcover edition."

    Many know that it was hockey legend Tim Horton who opened the first restaurant, but few know the inside story of Ron Joyce, who, after the death of Horton, grew the company into a colossal North American enterprise. Always Fresh is Joyce’s own story about the much-loved business that has become a cultural tradition, from 1964 and the first almost-failed Tim Hortons to Joyce’s decision to sell the company to Dave Thomas of Wendy’s.Along the way, Joyce provides an account of the strategy behind the chain’s phenomenal expansion, the Tim Hortons philosophy of freshness and quality, and the company’s successful launch of such products as Timbits. This is a candid look at the successes and failures of a business empire and the determined passion of a man who changed our morning routines forever.

    In addition, beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Tuberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours' drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life.The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph's Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic.Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's Mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hubert O'Connor, which took place during Sellars's student days, between 1962 and 1967, when O'Connor was the school principal. After the school's closure, those who had been forced to attend came from surrounding reserves and smashed windows, tore doors and cabinets from the wall, and broke anything that could be broken. Overnight their anger turned a site of shameful memory into a pile of rubble.In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution's lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.

    Brown coolly documents with dramatic subtlety the violent rebellion on the Canadian prairie led by Riel, who some regard a martyr who died in the name of freedom, while others consider him a treacherous murderer.