Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler


Bradford Matsen - 2008
    Titanic's Last Secrets peers into the lives of scientists, financiers, adventurers, and industrialists to bring readers a thrilling and revelatory work of history and contemporary adventure.

Toronto: Biography of a City


Allan Levine - 2014
    Hogtown is dead. A shining metropolis lives." -- Peter C. NewmanIn the last sixty years, Toronto has been transformed from a provincial town to significant urban heavyweight. Few cities have experienced such sustained growth, and the packed streets of North America’s fourth-largest city are a far cry from the origins of the city as "Little York," which was comprised of the lieutenant-governor’s muddy tent --which he shared with his wife and many children -- and some barracks. Between then and now, fervent Orangemen have imposed strict morals on the growing provincial town, and an influx of immigrants changed the face of the city.Allan Levine delves into the character of a city that strives to balance urban development with the preservation of its distinct neighbourhoods, to maintain its status without losing its individuality. Its inhabitants have fought tooth and nail to prevent an expressway being built to the downtown core, have called in the army to clear the city of snow after a blizzard and consistently pack the Maple Leafs' arena every game, win or lose, making the hockey team the most valuable franchise in the NHL. The city can also claim one of the first Canadian politicians to stand up for gay rights, a store owner who almost single-handedly preserved theatre in Toronto, and then there’s Mayor Rob Ford...With the same eye for character, anecdote and circumstance that made Peter Ackroyd's London and Colin Jones's Paris so successful, Levine's captivating prose integrates the sights, sounds and feel of Toronto with a broad historical perspective, linking the city's present with its past through themes such as politics, transportation, public health, ethnic diversity and sports. Toronto invites readers to discover the city’s lively spirit over four centuries and to wander purposefully through the city's many unique neighbourhoods, where they can encounter the striking and peculiar characters who have inhabited them: the powerful and powerless, the entrepreneurs and the entertainers, and the moral and the corrupt, all of whom have contributed to Toronto's collective identity.

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition


Paul Watson - 2017
    Paul Watson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was on the icebreaker that led one of the discovery expeditions, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story and reveals how a combination of faith in Inuit knowledge and the latest science yielded a discovery for the ages.

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs


Leonard Cohen - 1993
    Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including the legendary songs Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on a Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat, I'm Your Man, and The Future; selections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. This volume demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.

The Outport People


Claire Mowat - 1983
    There were no roads, no cars and no telephones. The tiny village that nestled among the rocky hills of Newfoundland's desolate southern coast had existed for generations with ancient customs and patterns of speech that still endured-while the modern world waited impatiently in the wings. Drawing on a wealth of first-hand experience-the Mowats lived in the outport community for five years-Claire Mowat has written a fictional memoir that beautifully recreates an almost vanished world. A world where life revolved tightly around the home and neighbours watched over one another. A world where one's kitchen was open to anyone who might drop in, day or night. A world that Claire Mowat grew to love.

On a Sea So Cold & Still: The Titanic-A Centennial Reader


Daniel E. Harmon - 2012
    Coincidences and continuing postscripts abound, and countless questions linger:* Why were the lookouts not equipped with binoculars?* Was there a smoldering fire in one of the coal bunkers, and if so, did it have an impact on events after the iceberg collision?* What if, instead of ordering a veer to port, First Officer William Murdoch had responded to the alarm by letting the ship hit the iceberg head-on? Would the damage have been lessened?* Just how culpable were J. Bruce Ismay, director of the shipping company, who managed to find a place aboard a lifeboat; Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon, who not only took places in a third-full lifeboat but may have discouraged the boat crew from returning to the scene to save others; or Capt. Stanley Lord of the nearby steamship Californian, accused of failing to respond to the Titanic's summonses for help?* What were Capt. Smith's final moments?* Was there a "third ship" besides the Californian in the area, capable of executing an early rescue operation?* What was on the mind of wireless operator Jack Phillips when, during the last minutes at his post, he transmitted the enigmatic signal "V"—and repeated it?

King John of Canada


Scott Gardiner - 2007
    A series of minority governments, and endless Quebec referendums (designed to lose narrowly, to keep the money coming) have left Canada almost ungovernable. When the Governor General resigns in disgrace and the House of Windsor implodes in London, a media baron launches the idea of a Canadian king or queen elected by lottery.It starts as a joke — except that the lucky winner, King John, a bright and charismatic guy from Toronto, knows exactly what people want. Soon Quebec is gone, while Toronto’s surprise bid to leave Canada is averted by shifting his official residence, the new seat of power, to the Toronto waterfront. Many good things happen, and the politicians go along for the ride. And the blockades of Native lands are ended for good, after John is heroically wounded keeping the peace at risk to his life.His popularity soars and Canadian morale soars with it. Soon the rest of the world is taking notice of this model leader. In the United States, the blue states look enviously northward. Then Canada’s king, ignoring assassination threats, goes on a formal visit to Washington. . .From the Hardcover edition.

The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie


Grant Lawrence - 2013
    Grant, his parents, Bobby Orr and the rest of the Canadian hockey team were ontheir way to Game Three of the famous Summit Series -- seven games played between Russia and Canada in 1972, during the height of the Cold War. It was at this point -- at the age of one -- that Grant's life-long entanglement with hockey began.In this deeply personal, yet incredibly witty memoir about Grant's relationship with hockey, the narrative passes back and forth between tales of Grant's life and a fascinating history of hockey, complete with lively anecdotes about the many colourful characters of the NHL. Through Grant's early life, he struggled with the idea of hockey. He was an undersized child who wore thick glasses and knee-braces, and he understood, first-hand, what it was like to be in the attack zone of the hockey-obsessed jocks at his school. For Grant, bullying and the violent game of hockey seemed to go hand-in-hand. Yet he was also enamoured with the sport, and eventually learned that playing goalie on a hockey team isn’t all that different from playing in a band and that artistically-minded wimps find just as much joy in the game as their meathead counterparts.In The Lonely End of the Rink , Grant Lawrence brings the allure of hockey into a zone where it can impress upon the nerds and geeks as well as the jocks. Grant is a highly original writer, and with this book, he tells a quintessentially Canadian story about the nation’s favourite sport.

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali


Gil Courtemanche - 2000
    Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi. As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people. Valcourt’s efforts to spirit Gentille to safety end in their separation. It will be months before he learns of his lover’s shocking fate.

Don't Eat the Puffin: Tales From a Travel Writer's Life


Jules Brown - 2018
    Get paid to travel and write about it.Only no one told Jules that it would mean eating oily seabirds, repeatedly falling off a husky sled, getting stranded on a Mediterranean island, and crash-landing in Iran.The exotic destinations come thick and fast – Hong Kong, Hawaii, Huddersfield – as Jules navigates what it means to be a travel writer in a world with endless surprises up its sleeve.Add in a cast of larger-than-life characters – Elvis, Captain Cook, his own travel-mad Dad – and an eye for the ridiculous, and this journey with Jules is one you won’t want to miss.

Remembrance


Alistair MacLeod - 2013
    As he waits for the arrival of his son and grandson, he remembers his decision to go to war in desperation to support his young family. He remembers the horrors of life at the frontlines in Ortona, Italy, and then what happened in Holland when the Canadians arrived as liberators. He remembers how the war devastated his own family, but gave him other reasons to live. As the story unfolds, other generations enter the scene. What emerges is an elegant, life-affirming meditation on the bond between fathers and sons, "how the present always comes out of the past," and how even in the midst of tragedy and misfortune there exists the possibility for salvation.     His first new short story in over a decade, Remembrance is a powerful reminder of why Alistair MacLeod is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

Black Water


David Alexander Robertson - 2020
    Robertson was raised with virtually no knowledge or understanding of his family’s Indigenous roots. His father, Don, spent his early childhood on a  trapline in the bush northeast of Norway House, Manitoba, where his first teach was the land. When his family was moved permanently to a nearby reserve, Don was not permitted to speak Cree at school unless in secret with his friends and lost the knowledge he had been gifted while living on his trapline. His mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town with not a single Indigenous family in it. Then Don arrived, the new United Church minister, and they fell in love. Structured around a father-son journey to the northern trapline where Robertson and his father will reclaim their connection to the land, Black Water is the story of another journey: a young man seeking to understand his father's story, to come to terms with his lifelong experience with anxiety, and to finally piece together his own blood memory, the parts of his identity that are woven into the fabric of his DNA.

A Bird in the House


Margaret Laurence - 1974
    The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact.In this fourth book of the five-volume Manawaka series, Vanessa MacLeod takes her rightful place alongside the other unforgettable heroines of Manawaka: Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, Rachel Cameron in A Jest of God, Stacey MacAindra in The Fire-Dwellers, and Morag Gunn in The Diviners.

The In-Between World of Vikram Lall


M.G. Vassanji - 2003
    Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren of an Indian railroad worker, search for their place in a world sharply divided between Kenyans and the British. We follow Vic from a changing Africa in the fifties, to the hope of the sixties, and through the corruption and fear of the seventies and eighties. Hauntingly told in the voice of the now exiled Vic, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is an acute and bittersweet novel of identity and family, of lost love and abiding friendship, and of the insidious legacy of the British Empire.--back cover

MxT


Sina Queyras - 2014
    These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.'Like the central conceptual apparatus, Queyras is smart and insightful in her work to expand and challenge the nature of language and poetry . . . Lend Queyras your ears, your minds, your hearts, your Time. She will reward you, repeatedly.' – The Rumpus'A collection of gorgeous and cantankerous poems that ask testy questions of all contemporary poets, and for this, the book is a must-read.' – The Globe and Mail'This year's most devastating and enlightening Canadian poetry collection.' – Telegraph-Journal