Book picks similar to
Canada: A Portrait in Letters, 1800-2000 by Charlotte Gray
non-fiction
history
canadian
canadian-history
Harperland: The Politics Of Control
Lawrence Martin - 2010
Focusing on the growth of executive power under Harper and drawing on interviews with prominent insiders, Martin probes the smearing of opponents, the silencing of the public and diplomatic service, the secrecy, the prorogations, the unprecedented centralizing of power, and the attempted muzzling of the media. He examines controversies such as the existence of a secret dirty-tricks handbook, the Chuck Cadman affair, campaign financing, the dismissal of nuclear power head Linda Keen, the Afghan detainees cover-up, the turning of access-to-information laws into barricades to information, and more—and lets readers draw their own conclusions. Tough but balanced, Harperland offers a clear picture of a skilled politician at a crucial point in Canadian politics.
Radicalized
Cory Doctorow - 2019
Radicalized is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system.The final story, The Masque of the Red Death, tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society.
Truth Be Told: My Journey Through Life and the Law
Beverley McLachlin - 2019
While her family was poor, their lives were rich in the ways that mattered most. Even at a young age, she had an innate sense of justice, which was reinforced by the lessons her parents taught her: Everyone deserves dignity. All people are equal. Those who work hard reap the rewards. Willful, spirited, and unusually intelligent, she discovered in Pincher Creek an extraordinary tapestry of people and perspectives that informed her worldview going forward. Still, life in the rural Prairies was lonely, and gaining access to education—especially for girls—wasn’t always easy. As a young woman, McLachlin moved to Edmonton to pursue a degree in philosophy. There, she discovered her passion lay not in academia, but in the real world, solving problems directly related to the lives of the people around her. And in the law, she found the tools to do exactly that. She soon realized, though, that the world was not always willing to accept her. In her early years as an articling student and lawyer, she encountered sexism, exclusion, and old boys’ clubs at every turn. And outside the courtroom, personal loss and tragedies struck close to home. Nonetheless, McLachlin was determined to prove her worth, and her love of the law and the pursuit of justice pulled her through the darkest moments. McLachlin’s meteoric rise through the courts soon found her serving on the highest court in the country, becoming the first woman to be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She rapidly distinguished herself as a judge of renown, one who was never afraid to take on morally complex or charged debates. Over the next eighteen years, McLachlin presided over the most prominent cases in the country—involving Charter challenges, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia. One judgment at a time, she laid down a legal legacy that proved that fairness and justice were not luxuries of the powerful but rather obligations owed to each and every one of us. With warmth, honesty, and deep wisdom, McLachlin invites us into her legal and personal life—into the hopes and doubts, the triumphs and losses on and off the bench. Through it all, her constant faith in justice remained her true north. In an age of division and uncertainty, McLachlin’s memoir is a reminder that justice and the rule of law remain our best hope for a progressive and bright future.
The Right To Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet
Sheila Watt-Cloutier - 2015
And it's not just the Arctic. The whole world is changing in dangerous, unpredictable ways. Sheila Watt-Cloutier has devoted her life to protecting what is threatened and nurturing what has been wounded. In this culmination of Watt-Cloutier's regional, national, and international work over the last twenty-five years, The Right to Be Cold explores the parallels between safeguarding the Arctic and the survival of Inuit culture, of which her own background is such an extraordinary example. This is a human story of resilience, commitment, and survival told from the unique vantage point of an Inuk woman who, in spite of many obstacles, rose from humble beginnings in the Arctic to become one of the most influential and decorated environmental, cultural, and human rights advocates in the world.
Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Kyo Maclear - 2017
Curious about what had prompted a young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature she decided to follow him for a year to find out.Observing two artists through seasonal shifts and migrations, Birds Art Life celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in a big city, and explores what happens when the principles of birdwatching are applied to other aspects of art and life. It looks at the ecology of urban spaces and the creative and liberating effects of keeping your eyes and ears wide open. Far from seeking the exotic, Kyo discovers joy in the birds she spots in city parks and harbours, along eaves and on wires. In a world that values big and fast, Kyo begins to look to the small, steady, slow accumulations of knowledge, and the lulls that give way to contemplation.Moving between the granular and the grand, peering into the inner landscape as much as the outer one, Birds Art Life asks how we are shaped and nurtured by our passions, and how we might come to love and protect not only the world’s natural places but also the challenging urban spaces where so many of us live.
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
Jessica McDiarmid - 2019
The highway is known as the 'Highway of Tears', and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist, Jessica McDiarmid, investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to 4,000--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing, and murdered, Indigenous women, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.
Stats Canada: Satire On A National Scale
Stats Canada - 2013
While outrageously false, these hilarious “facts” unearth deep truths about Canadians and their culture. For the over 200,000 people already following on Twitter, @stats_canada is a daily source of the funniest Canadian parody. Now, in their first book, Stats Canada satirizes everything from history, culture, and language to sports, entertainment, politics, weather, and much more. With all-new features, graphs, maps, and other illustrations, Stats Canada has all the laughter you’ve come to expect, with only 10% recycled content! 35% of advice given in any Home Hardware does not come from an actual employee 67% of Canadians own summer snow pants 32% of Canadians can’t spell “tuque” but own at least four 56% of Manitobans are convinced they’ve travelled to the future when visiting other provinces 79% of Canadian teens don’t want to wear their winter coat, it’s not even that cold out 100% of Canadian hockey players give it 110% every game 65% of Canadian Instagram accounts include an artsy photo of a Tim Hortons cup Disclaimer: The official Statistics Canada has taken no issue with the content of this book. They were too polite to object.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Madeleine Thien - 2016
The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old.”Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.
The Virgin Cure
Ami McKay - 2011
As a young child, Moth's father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from her forever. The summer she turned twelve, her mother sold her as a servant to a wealthy woman, with no intention of ever seeing her again. These betrayals lead Moth to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, filled with house-thieves, pickpockets, beggars, sideshow freaks and prostitutes, where eventually she meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as "The Infant School." Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are "willing and clean," and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth. Through the friendship of Dr. Sadie, a female physician, Moth learns to question and observe the world around her, where her new friends are falling prey to the myth of the "virgin cure" - that deflowering a "fresh maid" can heal the incurable and tainted. She knows the law will not protect her, that polite society ignores her, and still she dreams of answering to no one but herself. There's a high price for such independence, though, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.
The Innocents
Michael Crummey - 2019
A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family's boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them. Muddling though the severe round of the seasons, through years of meagre catches and storms and ravaging illness, it is their fierce loyalty to each other that motivates and sustains them. But as seasons pass and they wade deeper into the mystery of their own natures, even that loyalty will be tested. The Innocents is richly imagined and compulsively readable, a riveting story of hardship and survival, and an unflinching exploration of the bond between brother and sister. By turns electrifying and heartbreaking, it is a testament to the bounty and barbarity of the world, to the wonders and strangeness of our individual selves.
A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs & The Rise of Professional Hockey
Stephen J. Harper - 2013
This engaging new book is about the hockey heroes and hard-boiled businessmen who built the game, and the rise and fall of legendary teams pursuing the Stanley Cup. With a historian’s perspective and fan’s passion, Stephen Harper presents a riveting and often-surprising portrait, capturing everything from the physical contests on the rinks to the battles behind the scenes and the changing social conventions of the twentieth century.A Great Game shows that many things have stayed the same. Rough play, fervent hometown loyalties, owner-player contract disputes, dubious news coverage, and big money were issues from the get-go. Most important in these early years was the question: Was hockey to be a game of obsessed amateurs playing for the love of the sport, or was it a game for paid professionals who would give fans what they wanted? Who should be responsible for the sport – including its bouts of violence – both on and off the ice?A century ago, rinks could melt, and by half time the blades screwed to the players’ shoes could be sinking in mud. It was during this time that teams such as the Toronto Professionals of 1908 and the Toronto Blue Shirts of 1914 took turns battling for the city’s very first Stanley Cup. Against the fanatical opposition of amateur hockey leaders, these “forgotten Leafs” would lay the groundwork for the world’s most profitable hockey franchise.In paying tribute to these hockey pioneers and the contagious loyalty of their fans, Harper resurrects the history of hockey’s first decades. Lavishly illustrated with photographs of the game’s greatest arenas and earliest star players, this entertaining and original book will captivate you from start to finish.
What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past
James Fitzgerald - 2010
John Fitzgerald was a Canadian hero. He founded Connaught Labs, saved untold lives with his vaccines and transformed the idea of public health in Canada and the world. What so darkened his reputation that his memory has been all but erased?A sensitive, withdrawn boy is born into the gothic house of his long dead grandfather, a brilliant yet tormented pathologist of Irish blood and epic accomplishment whose memory has been mysteriously erased from public consciousness. As the boy watches his own father - also an eminent doctor - plunge into a suicidal psychosis, he intuits, as the psychiatrists do not, some unspeakable secret buried like a tumour deep in the multi-generational layers of the family unconscious. Growing into manhood, he knows in his bones that he must stalk an ancient curse before it stalks him. To set himself free, he must break the silence and put words to the page. His future lies in the past.
With Every Mistake
Gwynne Dyer - 2005
With Every Mistake is not only a collection of the very best of Dyer’s recent work, but an examination of how, time and again, the media skews fact and opinion, wielding formidable influence on how we all shape our own thoughts. And why is so much of the information wrong? Is it herd instinct, official manipulation, robber-baron owners with ideological obsessions — or just the conflict between the inherently bitty, short-term nature of news reporting and analysis and the longer perspectives needed to understand what is actually going on? How much misinformation stems from simple ignorance and laziness?
Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past
Jessica J. Lee - 2020
Lee embarks on a journey to discover her family's forgotten history and to connect with the island they once called home
Taiwan is an island of extremes: towering mountains, lush forests, and barren escarpment. Between shifting tectonic plates and a history rife with tension, the geographical and political landscape is forever evolving. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather's life, Jessica J. Lee seeks to piece together the fragments of her family's history as they moved from China to Taiwan, and then on to Canada. But as she navigates the tumultuous terrain of Taiwan, Lee finds herself having to traverse fissures in language, memory, and history, as she searches for the pieces of her family left behind.Interlacing a personal narrative with Taiwan's history and terrain, Two Trees Make a Forest is an intimate examination of the human relationship with geography and nature, and offers an exploration of one woman's search for history and belonging amidst an ever-shifting landscape.
Canadian History in 50 Events: From Early Settlement to the Present Day (History in 50 Events Series Book 12)
James Weber - 2015
This book will give you a comprehensive overview of the Canadian history. Author James Weber did the research and compiled this huge list of events that changed the course of this nation forever. Some of them include: - Prehistoric hunters cross over into North America from Asia (30,000 - 10,000 BC) - The Inuit people begin to move into what are now the Northwest Territories (2000 BC) - Leif Ericsson leads Viking expedition to the new World (C.1000 AD) - Martin Frobisher sails to the Hudson Bay (1576) - Samuel de Champlain establishes a French colony (1608) - Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returns Québec to France (1632) - Treaty of Utrecht (1713) - Great Britain founds Halifax (1749) - The USA invades British colonies (1812-14) - The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are created (1905) - World War II (1939-45) - The St Lawrence Seaway Opens (1959) - The Québec referendum on sovereignty is narrowly defeated (1995) - Canada declines to enter the War in Iraq (2003) and many many more The book includes pictures and explanations to every event, making this the perfect resource for students and anyone wanting to broaden their knowledge in histoy. Download your copy now! Tags: history, world history, history books, history of the world, human history, world history textbook, history books for kids, earth history, geographic history, earth history kindle, human history, history books for kids age 9 12, history of the world part 1, canadian history nonfiction, history books for kids age 7-9, history books for young readers, history books for children, canadian history books, history books for kindle, canadian history encyclopedia, canadian history, canadian history books, canadian history for dummies, canadian history textbook, canada history books, canada history, canada