Here’s a sample of the 98 titles added to the collection in the past seven days. Click on any title for more information
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
Climber’s paradise: making Canada’s mountain parks, 1906-1974 / PearlAnn Reichwein.
In Climber’s paradise, historian and mountain studies specialist Pearl Ann Reichwein presents a compelling case for understanding wild places and human activity within them as parts of a whole. This is a work of invaluable scholarship in the areas of environmental history, public policy, sport studies, recreation, and tourism that gains significantly from the author’s personal experience mountaineering and from has interest in mountain culture. This book speaks to mountaineers, environmentalists, travellers across. Canada and beyond, and all of us who embrace nature.
Ducks, geese, and swans of North America / Guy Baldassarre ; with assistance from Susan Sheaffer.
Ducks, Geese, and Swans of North America has been hailed as a classic since the first edition was published in 1942. A must-have for professional biologists, birders, waterfowl hunters, decoy collectors, and wildlife managers, this fully revised and updated edition provides definitive information on the continent’s forty-six species. Maps of both winter and breeding ranges are presented with stunning images by top waterfowl photographers and the acclaimed original artwork of Robert W. (Bob) Hines.
Forest prairie edge: place history in Saskatchewan / Merle Massie.
Forest Prairie Edgeis a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairies and boreal forest region of Saskatchewan. Using place history and edge theory, Massie considers the role and importance of the edge ecotone in building a diverse social and economic past that contradicts traditional “prairie” narratives around settlement, economic development, and culture. She offers a refreshing new perspective that overturns long-held assumptions of the prairies and the Canadian west.
Molt in North American birds / Steve N.G. Howell ; sponsored by the Roger Tory Peterson Institute and the National Wildlife Federation.
FIRST NATIONS STUDIES
Based on extensive documentation assembled from Freedom of Information requests, Angus establishes a dark, unbroken line that extends from the policies of John A. Macdonald to the government of today. He provides chilling insight into how Canada–through breaches of treaties, broken promises, and callous neglect–deliberately denied First Nations children their basic human rights.Culturally relevant Aboriginal education / Nicole Bell, Trent University, TerryLynn Brant, Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada.
provides teacher candidates and in-service teachers with relevant information to help them integrate Aboriginal, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit content, customs, and traditions into the classroom, providing students with a broader perspective of Canada and its population. The underlying purpose of this module is to extend the skills and knowledge of teachers in the teaching of Aboriginal children and the teaching about Aboriginal people.
Freedom and indigenous constitutionalism / John Borrows
Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism celebrates the emancipatory potential of Indigenous traditions, considers their value as the basis for good laws and good lives, and critiques the failure of Canadian constitutional traditions to recognize their significance. Demonstrating how Canada’s constitutional structures marginalize Indigenous peoples’ ability to exercise power in the real world, John Borrows uses Ojibwe law, stories, and principles to suggest alternative ways in which Indigenous peoples can work to enhance freedom.
Nilh izá sptákwlhkalh = These are our legends / narrated by Lillooet elders ; transcribed and translated by Jan van Eijk ; illustrated by Marie Abraham.
Like all First Nations languages, Lillooet (Líl’wat) is a repository for an abundantly rich oral literature. In These Are Our Legends, the fifth volume of the First Nations Language Readers series, the reader will discover seven traditional sptakwlh(variously translated into English as “legends,” “myths,” or “bed-time stories”). The texts are presented in a technical transcription that can be used by linguists, and also in a practical orthography that can be used by Lillooet speakers themselves. An English translation is also given. We are born with the songs inside us: lives and stories of First Nations people in British Columbia / Katherine Palmer Gordon.
GAMES
The art of videogames / Grant Tavinor.
The Art of Videogames explores how philosophy of the arts theories developed to address traditional art works can also be applied to videogames.
How games move us: emotion by design / Katherine Isbister.
Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples — drawn from popular, indie, and art games — that unpack the gamer’s experience.Values at play in digital games / Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum.
Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games.HISTORY
The Court rolls of Ramsey, Hepmangrove, and Bury, 1268-1600 [electronic resource] / edited and translated by Edwin Brezette DeWindt.
The court rolls of Ramsey, Hepmangrove and Bury constitute a distinctive collection of primary sources for examining and exploring the lives of ordinary people and the institutions of a rural community in the East Midlands of medieval England from the end of the 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century.Montcalm & Wolfe: two men who forever changed the course of Canadian history / Roch Carrier ; translated by Donald Winkler.
Montcalm and Wolfe, written by one of the finest writers this country has ever produced, is the epic story of this battle told through the lives of the two generals, Wolfe and Montcalm. The book is a dual biography of the men and their most famous battle written by a master storyteller.
Playing the blame game [electronic resource]: American Jews look back at the holocaust / Deborah E. Lipstadt.
After tracing both the scholarly and popular historiography of America and Holocaust, Lipstadt asks: When are we reading history and when is history being used as a metonym for what is really a conversation about contemporary political issues facing the Jewish community? When is this conversation about the 1930s and 1940s, and when is it really about what is happening in the 21st century?LITERATURE
Back of the turtle / Thomas King.
When Gabriel Quinn, a brilliant scientist, abandons his laboratory and returns to Smoke River Reserve, where his mother and sister lived, he finds that almost everyone in the community has disappeared. Even the sea turtles are gone, poisoned by an environmental disaster known as The Ruin. Showcasing King’s brilliant wit and trademark wordplay, The Back of the Turtle is a funny, smart, sometimes confounding, and altogether unforgettable tale of betrayal, salvation, and the resilience of life.Captive / Claudine Dumont ; translated by David Scott Hamilton.
Captive throws readers into the mind of a woman who wakes to find herself in a terrifying and surreal situation: she’s confined to a small grey room and she has no idea why she’s there. Captiveis a harrowing, suspenseful, and hypnotic debut about honesty and freedom and the importance of living meaningfully and truthfully.
Carried away on the crest of a wave / David Yee.
Winner of the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award For Drama. Two brothers in Malaysia trying to save their house from sinking; a Canadian radio-show host angered by disaster-relief efforts; a Japanese man who has been falling down a hole for years after learning of his daughter’s death; a lonely woman in Utah baking a pie when an FBI agent knocks on her front door.
Charles Williams: the third Inkling / Grevel Lindop.
This is the first full biography of Charles Williams (1886-1945), an extraordinary and controversial figure who was a central member of the Inklings – the group of Oxford writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This biography draws on a wealth of documents, letters and private papers, many never before opened to researchers, and on more than twenty interviews with people who knew Williams. It vividly recreates the bizarre and dramatic life of this strange, uneasy genius.
The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson [electronic resource]: a digital edition of the Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition / edited and with notes by Edward Waldo Emerson.
Presents the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, as digitized from the 12 volume 1903 Houghton, Mifflin Centenary Edition.
The complete poetry and prose of William Blake / edited by David V. Erdman ; commentary by Harold Bloom.
Crossover / M. Travis Lane.
Crossover, Lane’s fifteenth collection, is a continuation of one poet’s exploration of the world and of her inner world, shared with us in the conviction that the spaces we inhabit overlap and connect.
Daddy Lenin and other stories / Guy Vanderhaeghe.
Guy Vanderhaeghe’s new book of fiction is both timely and timeless and showcases his supreme talent as a storyteller and poignant observer of the human condition.
Forms of Devotion contains eleven stories, each one a brilliant interplay of words and images. The illustrations, selected by Schoemperlen and depicting almost every subject imaginable, are wood engravings and line drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Quite different in form, yet alike in their ability to entertain and provoke, the stories in Forms of Devotion show once again that Diane Schoemperlen’s voice is as intriguing, fresh and electric as ever.
The gravitational pull of Bernice Trimble / by Beth Graham.
Bernice, a lively, recently widowed 55-year-old breaks the news that she has early onset Alzheimer’s. A new play about family dynamics and mental illness.Just beneath my skin / Darren Greer.
“Just Beneath My Skin is not an easy read, but it acutely captures small-town inertia and desperation. The novel’s intimacy, honesty, and humanity make it impossible to resist. Readers will find themselves cheering for the unlikely father and son duo, and anxious about the circumstances standing between the violence, poverty, and pain of North River and the freedom of a new beginning in Halifax. Greer creates characters with the power to get beneath the reader’s skin and remain lodged in memory.” – Quill & Quire
Mahmoud / by Tara Grammy & Tom Arthur Davis.
Mahmoud is an exuberant, if overwhelmingly passionate, Iranian engineer-cum-taxi driver who relishes the chance to regale his passengers with his love of Persian culture. Emanuelos, a fabulously gay Spanish perfume salesman, can talk a mile-a-minute about his boyfriend, Behnam. And then there’s Tara, an awkwardly charming Iranian Canadian preteen who just wants to be “normal”, whatever that means. When the three strangers find themselves crossing paths in the busy streets of Toronto, their experiences with racism, sexism, homophobia, homesickness, and everything in between become intertwined in unexpected ways.
“CanLit’s crowned king of chuckles” (Telegraph-Journal) Terry Fallis’s sharp, funny wit takes readers into the world of identity, inheritance, and belonging, begging the question: What’s in a name? Wry, clever, and utterly engaging, No Relation is Terry Fallis at the top of his form.
Song of the shank: a novel / Jeffery Renard Allen.
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era
Swing in the House paints an utterly contemporary portrait of Canadian families. Anand pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racisms to damaged egos, hidden homosexuality to mental illness. Each of these stories offers a deftly constructed morality play. Throughout, Anand’s incisive intelligence, sharp prose, and sly wit breathe dark undercurrents into these 17 cautionary tales.
POLITICAL STUDIES
Party of one: Stephen Harper and Canada’s radical makeover / Michael Harris.
Party of One is a scathing look at the majority government of a prime minister determined to remake Canada. Investigative journalist Michael Harris closely examines the majority government of a prime minister essentially unchecked by the opposition and empowered by the general election victory of May 2011. Harris looks at Stephen Harper’s policies, instincts, and the often breathtaking gap between his stated political principles and his practices.
Revolutions: a very short introduction / Jack A. Goldstone.
This volume places recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan to Tunisia and Egypt in historical context. It provides a history of revolutions and insurgencies, an introduction to the way social scientists think about the causes and outcomes of revolutions, and an explanation of their significance in historical and political change. Jack A. Goldstone begins with a brief history of revolutions and insurgencies, from the revolutions that brought democracy to Greek city-states and led to the founding of Rome through the major peasant revolts of the Middle Ages in Europe and China, and the Independence revolts in the Americas. RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Canada’s Catholics: vitality and hope in a new era / Reginald W. Bibby and Angus Reid.
DeBoer’s Visual Arts in the Worshiping Church will focus and deepen the thinking of pastors, worship leaders, artists, students, and laypeople regarding what the arts might do in the midst of their congregations.
SCIENCES
Are genes Jewish? [electronic resource]: conceptual ambiguities in the new genetic age / Susan Martha Kahn.
Kahn seeks to illustrate why the notion of a biological basis for Jewishness may be regaining traction among contemporary Jews by parsing the logic and appeal of new genetic technologies in three discursive domains: population genetics, medical genetics and rabbinic discourse on reproductive technologies. It is not surprising that new genetic technologies have proven seductive to a community long preoccupied with its origins, boundaries and self-definition. For among their many possible applications, these technologies promise to trace descent scientifically, establish a community’s geographic origins, identify individual probabilities for disease based on genetic heritage, and isolate reproductive genetic material so that it can be designated as Jewish for purposes of Jewish procreation.
Homo deus: a history of tomorrow / Yuval Noah Harari.
Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century – from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.
Oxygen: the molecule that made the world / Nick Lane.
Oxygen offers fresh perspectives on our own lives and deaths, explaining modern killer diseases, why we age, and what we can do about it. Advancing revelatory new ideas, following chains of evidence, the book ranges through many disciplines, fromenvironmental sciences to molecular medicine. The result is a captivating vision of contemporary science and a humane synthesis of our place in nature. Physical chemistry: a very short introduction / Peter Atkins.
Sapiens: a brief history of humankind / Yuval Harari.
Destined to become a modern classic in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Sapiens is a lively, groundbreaking history of humankind told from a unique perspective. Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power…and our future.
SOCIAL STUDIES
The death of expertise: the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters / Tom Nichols.
Nichols is certainly not opposed to information democratization, but rather, to the enlightenment people believe they achieve after superficial internet research. He shows in vivid detail the ways in which this impulse is coursing through our culture and body politic, but the larger goal is to explain the benefits that expertise and rigorous learning regimes bestow upon all societies.
Passing through Shanghai: ethnographic insights into the mobile lives of expatriate youths / Marie Sander.Focusing on a specific yet diverse group of expatriate youths in contemporary Shanghai, the book investigates how children negotiate cultural identity when they are subject to the highly mobile and often privileged lifestyle associated with their parent’s international careers.
Religion and the exercise of public authority / edited by Benjamin L Berger and Richard Moon.
By examining the exercise of public authority by individuals who are religiously committed – or who, in the discharge of their public responsibilities, must account for those who are – this volume exposes the assumptions about legal and political life that underlie the concept of state neutrality and reveals its limits as a governing ideal.YOUNG READERS
Dead man’s switch / Sigmund Brouwer.
On a remote island in Washington’s Puget Sound that houses a federal prison where his father works, high school senior King sets out alone to unravel a dark conspiracy after receiving a “fail safe” email from his best friend who drowned in a boating accident two weeks earlier.
Sex is a funny word: a book about bodies, feelings, and YOU / by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth.
A comic book for kids, Sex Is a Funny Word is an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers. Much more than the “facts of life” or “the birds and the bees,” Sex Is a Funny Word opens up conversations between young people and their caregivers in a way that allows adults to convey their values and beliefs while providing information about boundaries, safety, and joy.
Discover more from Alloway Library News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.