Indian Ernie: Perspectives on Policing and Leadership


Ernie Louttit - 2013
    Indian Ernie, as he came to be known on the streets, here details an era of challenge, prejudice, and also tremendous change in urban policing. Drawing from his childhood, army career, and service as a veteran patrol officer, Louttit shares stories of criminals and victims, the night shift, avoiding politics, but most of all, the realities of the marginalized and disenfranchised.Louttit spent his entire career (including as a Sergeant) patrolling the streets of Saskatoon's west side, an area until recently beset by poverty, and terrible social conditions. Here, he struggled to bring justice to communities where the lines between criminal and victim often blurred. Though Louttit's story is characterized by conflict, danger, and violence, he argues that empathy and love for the community you serve are the greatest tools in any officer's hands, especially when policing society's less fortunate.While his story is based on his experiences in Saskatoon, it is equally applicable to the challenges faced in any community where marginalized people live. It is an exciting, passionate, easy to read, and highly accessible story aimed at a broad audience.

Death is of Vital Importance: On Life, Death, and Life After Death


Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - 1995
    Including case histories and stories, the book recounts such events as her mother's death, and her own near-death experience and epiphany of cosmic consciousness.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher


Lewis Thomas - 1978
    

Hinduism and its culture wars


Vamsee Juluri - 2014
    Arguing from within the sensibility of devout liberal Hindus who do not believe in exclusive religious nationalism, Juluri argued that these writers had turned their crusade against Hindutva into an egregiously misplaced existential attack on popular Hinduism. Widely read and commented on by lay readers and academics, this important review essay is essential reading for who anyone who cares for both Hinduism and secularism today.

Shadows on the Road: Life at the Heart of the Peloton, from US Postal to Team Sky


Michael Barry - 2014
    Weeks later he testified against his former team mate Lance Armstrong, as part of the USADA investigation.In a stunning piece of writing, Barry explores the dreams and passion of a young, idealistic cycling fan from Toronto - what it was then like to ride as a teammate alongside such giants of the sport as Lance Armstrong, Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, and how those dreams were tainted early on in his career by a sport in crisis.But it's also the story of his eleven years riding clean, before and after his time in the notorious American Postal Team. What was it like to head for Europe at such a young age, and what was it like to escape the environment of doping, to try and start again, all the time aware that past actions may one day catch up with him?Offering a unique and elegiac insight into the life and mind of a professional sportsman - the pressures, sacrifices, fears, crashes, injuries and neuroses - Cycles of the Heart is a classic, must-read book for cycling and sports fans alike.

The Lives Our Mothers Leave Us: Prominent Women Discuss the Complex, Humorous, and Ultimately Loving Relationships They Have with Their Mothers


Patti Davis - 2009
    No matter what a woman achieves in her life, no matter how old she gets or whether or not she herself becomes a mother, she is always and forever a daughter. The Women Whose Stories Are Included . . .Patti Davis                    Anne RiceCarolyn See                  Marg HelgenbergerMelissa Gilbert              Carnie WilsonRosanna Arquette         Mariel HemingwayAnna Quindlen              Angelica HustonMary Kay Place            Ruby DeeFaye Wattleton              Julianne MarguliesLily Tomlin                    Diahann CarrollCandice Bergen             Marianne WilliamsonLorna Luft                    Whoopie GoldbergAlice Hoffman              Cokie RobertsKathy SmithLinda Bloodworth Thomason

Raising the Peaceable Kingdom: What Animals Can Teach Us about the Social Origins of Tolerance & Friendship


Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson - 2005
    After all, I was after nothing less than the secret of human harmony.” The challenge that bestselling author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson set for himself was formidable: to create a true interspecies peaceable kingdom within his own household. He hoped to learn if several different species–some, natural enemies–raised together from an early age could live peacefully side by side. So he took into his home seven young animals–a kitten, a rabbit, two rats, two chickens, and a puppy–and set about observing the whole process of socialization (or non-socialization) from the very beginning.The initial results were mixed. Tamaiti, the kitten, made herself instantly comfortable, but Hohepa, the Flemish giant rabbit, remained inscrutably reserved. Kia and Ora, the rats, slept all day and became active at night. Moa and Moana, the Polish frizzle chickens, bonded with each other but to no one else. Mika, the stray pup, barked much too much. But as the hours and days passed in this never-before-attempted environment, the animals began to change in startling ways, as Masson wondered which animals would bond, and which would recoil from one another? Can animals, including humans, truly change when direct experience tells them it’s safe to do so? Would the experiment end in triumph, or in tragedy?Raising the Peaceable Kingdom poses universal questions we’ve all had about relationships, social strife, and peaceful coexistence. In its intimations of the potential for planetary harmony, this elegantly written book is a work of major significance. As a unique account of life in an interspecies community, it offers unmitigated enchantment, joy, and delight.

Rough Likeness: Essays


Lia Purpura - 2011
    These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness—all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places


Andrew Blackwell - 2012
    It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth.From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as it is—not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere's most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us. Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer—and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.

Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food


B.K. Loren - 2013
    It comes from the Latin radix, radicis, meaning radish, a root vegetable.”—BK LorenWinner of the Colorado Book Award, these meditative essays range in subjects from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes ironically juxtaposed with her neighbor’s claim that nature “has gone out of vogue,” to Loren’s mother’s slow yet all-encompassing deterioration from Parkinson’s, and the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded her depression by offering the author a sense of her small place in a wild and worthwhile world.Loren has an empathetic and gentle approach to the world. In detailing the intricacies of human relationships and consciousness—fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, tradition’s beauty even when destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast-paced materialistic world—she peels back the film of popular thinking in order to expose herself to the secrets so few of us ever see.

Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature


David Quammen - 1985
    In an upbeat and original way of thinking Quammen writes about beetles, bats, crows, snakes and other interesting animals.

Desert Solitaire


Edward Abbey - 1968
    Written while Abbey was working as a ranger at Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, Desert Solitaire is a rare view of one man’s quest to experience nature in its purest form.Through prose that is by turns passionate and poetic, Abbey reflects on the condition of our remaining wilderness and the future of a civilization that cannot reconcile itself to living in the natural world as well as his own internal struggle with morality. As the world continues its rapid development, Abbey’s cry to maintain the natural beauty of the West remains just as relevant today as when this book was written.

I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter


David Chariandy - 2018
    A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.

Still Standing: The Story of SSG John Kriesel


John Kriesel - 2010
    He died three times on the operating table. Miracles, a lot of miracles, starting with a few grunts who refused to let him die in Iraq, ripped the young warrior from the grip of death and sent him on to four hospitals, thirty-five surgeries, and months of recovery and rehabilitation. Medical miracles put his body back together, but it was an incredible confluence of angels at every step along the way that breathed life into his shattered body. This is not just another war story. This is the story of an ordinary young man who overcame extraordinary challenges with a lot of help from others, including many strangers and he emerged stronger and more in love with his country, his wife, his children, and ultimately, his own life.

The Writing Life


Annie Dillard - 1989
    A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.