By the 1880s, Germany had a polar station at Qingua, at the deepest point of Cumberland Sound, and the Germans were fascinated by all things Arctic.
By Katia Grubisic
Non-Fiction
Christian Nadeau is hardly the first person to criticize Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party for their efforts to steer Canada in a more right-wing direction, nor is he the first to claim that the Harper government has scorned this country’s democratic traditions.
By Jean Coléno
Constant Internet access has, for many, displaced an indispensable part of our thinking. As soon as a fact is in dispute, out comes the smartphone, and – ta-dah! Yet we remember nothing. Even worse, our interest in intellectual questions seems to have flagged.
By Eric Boodman
The author and her husband, and sometimes the kids and the in-laws, mostly went to Florida for a few weeks in wintertime. If that sounds thin, perhaps it is. But the “adventures” here are so fondly recalled, and related with such naturalness, that things are nicely thickened up and it’s hard not to cheer the little adventurers on.
By Dane Lanken
The original power couple, Georges and Pauline Vanier partook in – or were close observers of – many of the great events of the early twentieth century. “I ask only to serve,” was their personal as well as public maxim.
By Leila Marshy
There is something comical in journalist William Marsden’s description of the 2009 Copenhagen summit. In the opening chapters of Fools Rule, he unpacks the proceedings of the two-week conference and lays out an absurdist labyrinth of greed, mistrust, and simple bureaucratic idiocy.
By Sarah Fletcher
This is the kind of book I would love to be excited about. Casselman’s prose is full of righteous anger, directed at the numberless tentacles of patriarchy that have limited women’s social, economic, sexual, and personal freedom.
By Anna Leventhal
Readable and highly detailed, Phoenix is a comprehensive portrait of a singular Canadian whose life, even away from the battlefield, was of a dramatic and tempestuous nature.
By Michael Carbert
Crass Society is a brick of a book: 381 pages of text and 90 pages of notes, covering virtually every category of possession a rich person might covet: from gold and precious metals to jewels to fine art to antiquities to wine, ivory, exotic pets, even cigars. No indulgence of the privileged classes is safe from his scrutiny.
By T.P. Niedermann
Ever since its inception, the car has been admired as the pinnacle of modern progress, as well as independence and adulthood. In the United States alone, there are 246 million registered cars with 210 million licensed drivers behind their wheels.
By Rosel Kim
Linda Leith’s memoir, Writing in the Time of Nationalism, records her stellar career: she pioneered the teaching and researching of Anglo-Quebec writers, worked to establish QSPELL (Quebec Society for the Promotion of English-language Literature) – later the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) – served as editor of Matrix magazine and various collections, wrote three novels and a number of academic papers, and undertook the organization of the cross-linguistic literary event Write pour écrire which ultimately led to her crowning achievement, the mammoth and much celebrated Blue Metropolis Festival.
By Gregory J. Reid
Jewish mothers worry. This is a truth so universally acknowledged that it has not only become a cliché, it’s become a running gag. Even so, the joke behind the title of David Reich’s new autobiography – You Could Lose an Eye: My First 80 Years in Montreal – is not so much about his mother’s overbearing concern for Reich’s welfare, but how willing he has been to take her concerns to heart.
By Joel Yanofsky