A Number of Things: Stories of Canada Told Through Fifty Objects

By Jane Urquhart‚ Scott McKowen (ill.)

Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017 no doubt will prompt much soul-searching around the subject of how to define our country. Is it easier or harder, 150 years after Confederation, to explain who we are? And how ... Read More »

December 12, 2016 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reference

The Promise of Canada: 150 Years – People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country

By Charlotte Gray

Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017 no doubt will prompt much soul-searching around the subject of how to define our country. Is it easier or harder, 150 years after Confederation, to explain who we are? And how ... Read More »

December 8, 2016 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reference

Reluctant Readers

By Ron Jobe and Mary Dayton-Sakari

This book is for teachers of young students who scrupulously try to avoid books. The authors, teachers at the faculty of education at UBC, mention students with learning disabilities, but that’s not the focus of ... Read More »

October 1, 2013 | Filed under: Reference

A Nation Worth Ranting About

By Rick Mercer

In the latest issue of the recently reanimated magazine The Baffler, Steve Almond takes aim at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for, among other things, being “parasites of the dysfunction they mock” and “remaining careful ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Reference

America, but Better: The Canada Party Manifesto

By Chris Cannon and Brian Calvert

In the latest issue of the recently reanimated magazine The Baffler, Steve Almond takes aim at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for, among other things, being “parasites of the dysfunction they mock” and “remaining careful ... Read More »

December 10, 2012 | Filed under: Reference

Walking Backwards: Grand Tours, Minor Visitations, Miraculous Journeys, and a Few Good Meals

By Mark Frutkin

A rite of passage for many is to sling a backpack over one’s shoulder and tramp around Europe and Asia for months at a time, with only a few dollars and a phrase book. Friendships ... Read More »

August 22, 2011 | Filed under: Reference

Far and Away: A Prize Every Time

By Neil Peart

As the drummer and lyricist for seminal Canadian rock band Rush, Neil Peart has earned the respect and admiration of legions of musicians and fans. That he is also a successful author may come as ... Read More »

July 26, 2011 | Filed under: Reference

On the Outside Looking Indian: How My Second Childhood Changed My Life

By Rupinder Gill

Rupinder Gill is the daughter of immigrant Punjabi parents who were masters at saying no. No sleepovers. No tennis lessons. No fun. Instead, she and her four siblings had two options for after-school activities: clean ... Read More »

May 27, 2011 | Filed under: Reference

Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels Through America

By Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds

In December 2006, husband and wife Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds decided to take the long way home from Vancouver to Ontario. Anxious to avoid winter driving, and eager to experience America – a nation ... Read More »

November 16, 2010 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Reference

The Voyage of the Matthew: John Cabot and the Discovery of North America

By Peter Firstbrook

Would North America be the same without the lives of two boys, both born in the same walled city in 1451? Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Caboto left Genoa separately as young men, went on to ... Read More »

August 20, 2010 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Reference

Road Tripping: On the Move with the Buffalo Gals

By Conni Massing

Every summer for the past 10 years, Conni Massing and a gaggle of her theatre friends have embarked on raucous road trips throughout their home province of Alberta. Road Tripping: On the Move with the ... Read More »

April 26, 2010 | Filed under: Reference

The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

By Andrew Potter

In The Authenticity Hoax, Andrew Potter, Maclean’s columnist and co-author (with Joseph Heath) of The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed, rehashes all of the same resistance-is-futile thinking from that earlier book in ... Read More »

March 31, 2010 | Filed under: Reference

The Secret Lives of Litterbugs and Other (True) Stories

By M.A.C. Farrant

In her eighth book, the prolific humourist M.A.C. Farrant takes us back to the days when cleaning out the car meant throwing everything out the window, drinking and driving was simply the way things were ... Read More »

April 22, 2009 | Filed under: Reference

The Riverbones: Stumbling After Eden in the Jungles of Suriname

By Andrew Westoll

First as a primatologist, and then as a practitioner of literary non-fiction, Andrew Westoll has spent considerable time in Suriname, on the Atlantic coast of South America. He calls it one of “those economically poor, ... Read More »

December 11, 2008 | Filed under: Reference

The White Guy: A Field Guide

By Stephen Hunt

Let’s assume, for the moment, that you are an extraterrestrial, and that one morning you wake up transformed into a being from Earth. Unfortunately, you have not turned into something richly awesome, such as a ... Read More »

September 29, 2008 | Filed under: Reference

Bigfoot: I Not Dead

By Graham Roumieu

Like so many celebrities entering mid-career, Bigfoot is facing the agonizing prospect that his best years may already be behind him. At least that’s the conceit of Graham Roumieu’s Bigfoot: I Not Dead, the Toronto-based ... Read More »

September 26, 2008 | Filed under: Reference

★ Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Mark Richardson

With all due respect to the automotive section of the Toronto Star, who could have foreseen that its editor, Mark Richardson, would write a book so fine and strangely moving as Zen and Now? Like ... Read More »

September 8, 2008 | Filed under: Reference

Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City

By Mark Kingwell

There is a new urban game in town called parkour. An invention of French youth, parkour is the art of jumping, tumbling, and diving in public spaces, up and down steps, across roofs, through plazas ... Read More »

June 25, 2008 | Filed under: Reference

Rick Mercer Report: The Book

By Rick Mercer

Comedian Rick Mercer has won more than 30 Gemini awards and received numerous government honours for lampooning Canadian politics and its uninspiring players. Rick Mercer Report: The Book collects dozens of his hugely popular “rants,” ... Read More »

November 15, 2007 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Reference

Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life

By Heather Mallick

In her latest book, former Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick offers her characteristically outspoken and unapologetic opinions on this mess we call modern life.Her perspective, in these previously unpublished essays, is that the world ... Read More »

June 14, 2007 | Filed under: Reference

Wanderlust: A Social History of Travel

By Laura Byrne Paquet

“Why Leave Home?” is the title of the first chapter of Wanderlust by Ottawa-based writer Laura Byrne Paquet. Good question.This is Paquet’s second foray into the social history genre, following 2003’s The Urge to Splurge: ... Read More »

May 18, 2007 | Filed under: Reference

The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery

By Neil Boivin, Christopher Lombardo

Drinking stories can be fun. For many of us, they’re as close to an oral storytelling tradition as we’re ever likely to come. The problem is, they’re a bit like bubblegum: enjoyable for about two ... Read More »

March 28, 2007 | Filed under: Reference

The Ethical Imagination

By Margaret Somerville

In The Ethical Imagination, Margaret Somerville, who holds positions in the faculties of Law and Medicine at McGill University, speaks in a public voice as opposed to an academic one. This is the case not ... Read More »

February 27, 2007 | Filed under: Reference

The Geist Atlas of Canada: Meat Maps and Other Strange Cartographies

By Melissa Edwards

From the clever minds who brought you “Haiku Night in Canada” comes The Geist Atlas of Canada, a collection of 50 of Geist magazine’s comprehensive maps of nutty Canadian place names, each one tied together ... Read More »

November 20, 2006 | Filed under: Reference

Way Out There: The Best of explore

By James Little, ed.

The outdoor adventure community in Canada (if those who enjoy traipsing through our country’s solitudes can really be called a community) is small; the community of those who write about such adventures is even smaller. ... Read More »

July 5, 2006 | Filed under: Reference