Here is a selection  of print and e-books recently added to the collection.

 

 Alphabetical diaries  /Sheila Heti.  Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.

 At a loss for words: conversation in the age of rage /Carol Off.   Off digs deep into six words whose meanings have been distorted and weaponized in recent years—including democracy, freedom and truth—and asks whether we can reclaim their value.  At a Loss for Words is both an elegy and a call to arms.”

George Eliot’s grammar of being /Melissa Anne Rains   Building on the influence of Victorian psychological theory, this book explains how George Eliot consciously created subtle shocks within her grammar―reaching out to her readers beneath the levels of character and story―in her effort to inspire sympathetic response.

  Haggai and Malachi /Stacy Davis ; Carol J. Dempsey, OP, volume editor ; Barbara E. Reid, OP, general editor. This book reveals two communities in different degrees of crisis. The prophet Haggai successfully persuades a financially strapped people to rebuild the temple, but the speaker in Malachi faces sustained resistance to his arguments in favor of maintaining the priestly hierarchy. Both books describe conflicts among men based upon social class, and those who claim to speak for God find their claims and, with them, God’s presumably unquestionable authority as the ultimate male contested.

 Prophet against slavery /Benjamin Lay : a graphic novel /[David Lester with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle].  “Prophet against Slavery illustrates the life and times of an eighteenth-century dwarf abolitionist who performed guerrilla theater against slaveowners and became one of the first to demand immediate abolition”

The knowing /Tanya Talaga.  Talaga’s story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.

The young Jonathan Edwards : a reconstruction / William Sparkes Morris ; foreword by Kenneth Minkema ; preface by Jerald C. Brauer.  In his 1955 examination of Jonathan Edwards’ formative years, Morris undertook a corrective of the prevailing view of Edwards’ relation to John Locke. The result is an analysis of the intellectual milieu inhabited by Edwards during the years in which his philosophical vocabulary and his seminal theological concepts evolved.

 Wînipêk : visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre / Niigaan Sinclair.  Sinclair uses the story of Winnipeg to illuminate the reality of Indigenous life all over what is called Canada. This is a book that demands change and celebrates those fighting for it, that reminds us of what must be reconciled and holds accountable those who must do the work. It’s a book that reminds us of the power that comes from loving a place, even as that place is violently taken away from you, and the magic of fighting your way back to it.”