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Showing 5185–5200 of 9481 results
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On Oil
$21.95A Finalist for the 2026 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil’s enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
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On Opium
$24.95A groundbreaking meditation on pain, painkillers, and dependence from a prescription opioid user.
Her writing has been described as “measured,” “sensuous,” and “compelling.” In 2016, Carlyn Zwarenstein’s short narrative on pain made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books. Now, she returns with a seductive dive into opioids and the nature of dependence.
North Americans are the world’s most prolific users of opioid painkillers. In On Opium, Zwarenstein describes her own use of opioid-inspired medicines to cope with a painful disease. Evoking both Thomas De Quincey and Frida Kahlo, she travels from the decadence of recreational drug use in past eras to the misery and privation of the overdose crisis today.
Speaking with users of prescribed morphine, illicit fentanyl, and smoked opium, Zwarenstein investigates uncomfortable questions about why people use substances and when substance use becomes addiction. And she exposes causes of drug-related harms: the debilitating effects of poverty, isolation, and trauma; the role of race, class, and gender in addressing pain; and a system of prohibition that has converted age-old medicines into taboo substances.
Through all of this, Zwarenstein finds hope. Drawing on solidarity between illicit drug users and people in pain; in a wise understanding of what humans need to be well; and in radical drug policies like legalization and safe supply, she lays out a vision of a world where suffering is no longer lauded, and opioids are no longer demonized.
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On Performing
$17.95In his follow-up to On Songwriting (GP, 2005), acclaimed musician Bob Snider tackles the subject of performing. At turns self-deprecating and jokingly grandiose, Snider provides tips for effective performing and stories from the trenches. With thoughts on everything from stagefright, interruptions, timing and humour, to venues, bookings, organization and encores, Snider’s prose is itself a lesson on performance.
The book begins by placing the reader in a hypothetical boot camp. As drill sergeant, Snider then proceeds to run through the basics of preparing material for performance. The tone is dramatic, but the advice solid. With passages on stage etiquette, making the best of an unfavourable crowd, uniting an audience, mastering the delivery of a joke and organizing your time on stage, On Performing offers valuable insight gleaned from personal experience. Central to Snider’s theory is his belief in the relationship between audience and performer, in the sense of trust, control and generosity that fosters unity among audience members, and the importance of genuine connection between audience and performer.
With accompanying illustrations by the author, On Performing is an excellent source of inspiration and know-how for the seasoned performer and the tongue-tied alike.
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On Poppy’s Beach
$12.95On Poppy’s beach seashells I find. My bucket’s filled with every kind. I keep the ones I like the best. to hide home in my treasure chest.
Come spend a sweet summer’s day exploring and enjoying the curiosities and beauties of a rural Newfoundland beach, as seen through the eyes of a little child. Filled with beautiful illustrations and lyrical verse, here is a warm and happy adventure that is both uniquely Newfoundland – as well as universal in its celebration of nature, nostalgia and joyful childhood innocence.
Susan Pynn Taylor’s previous books include A Puppy Story, The Jelly Bean Row, and regional best-seller, The Colours of my Home.
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On Sports
$21.95What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?
As a child, David Macfarlane was an avid sports fan—and yet he almost never saw an athletic competition live. Despite the dusty collection of sports equipment in the basement, his parents had little interest in playing or watching sports, televised games were subject to local blackouts, and poor analog reception made hockey pucks disappear in electric snow. Instead, Macfarlane pored daily over the sports pages and brought box scores to school for Current Events, traded the rumours and predictions of sportswriters with his friends, collected trading cards and played sandlot versions of baseball, football and street hockey. Each of these endeavours took place primarily on the boundless fields of the imagination, the thing professional sport, Macfarlane argues, today sorely lacks—so much so that now he’ll as soon profess to loathe sports as to love them.
In On Sports, the latest in the Field Notes series, journalist David Macfarlane considers the origins of his love of sport against his discomfort with their commodification. From the pirates, gangsters, and extortionist hooligans of the International Olympic Committee, to the National Hockey League’s capitulation to online gambling, to the ballooning of salaries and dumbed-down spectacle that characterize professional competition, to his enduring affection for athletic competition and the athletes who continue to dazzle in spite of it all, Macfarlane asks what sports really are, what it is that we love about them, and what, exactly, they have become.
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On the Count of None
$18.00On the Count of None is the first full-length poetry collection by Kingston poet Allison Chisholm. The surprising poems in this audacious debut explore the relationship between the serious and the absurd, the formal and the illogical, whimsy and threat, and meaning and tone. Chisholms poems, whose content is often inspired by guidebooks, podcasts, birth notices, and other unlikely sources, are pretty sneaky: they seem to always be trying to get away with something. Sometimes they try to get away with sneaking in invented words and idioms and facts. These are poems whose language looks both ways before licking the envelope.
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On the Crow and Other Stories
$19.95Robert Poirier reveals an exceptional skill at bringing to life the people with whom he lives and the land he inhabits and loves. In five stories and one novella, readers escape the city, live in the wilds, and experience the challenges of nature, including human nature, in all its complexity. Be it love lost on a canoe trip; conflicting values and naked conflict between natives and newcomers; the dangers, excitement, and solitude of winter traveling and camping with dogsleds; or the barroom and prison enforcer straight out of a Johnny Cash song, Poirier writes brilliantly about what he knows best.
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On the Curve
$28.95Sybil Andrews was one of Canada’s most prominent artists working throughout the late twentieth century. From a cottage by the sea in Campbell River, Andrews created striking linocut prints steeped in feeling and full of movement. Inspired by the working-class community that she lived in, her art is known for its honest depiction of ordinary people at work and play on Canada’s West Coast. Although she was raised in Bury St Edmunds, England, On the Curve focuses on Andrews’ life after she immigrated to Canada in 1947. Settling in Campbell River, Andrews taught private art and music lessons and created artwork that gained her recognition across the globe. In the final years of her life, retrospective exhibitions of her prints in Canada and Britain skyrocketed her popularity. Prints of her artwork became even more valuable after her death in 1992. In this first fully illustrated biography, author Janet Nicol weaves together stories from Andrews’ letters, diaries and interviews from her former students and friends, creating a portrait of this determined, resilient and gifted British-Canadian artist. Andrews’ work is as popular today as it was in her lifetime and continues to celebrate the cultural, industrial, agricultural and natural world of Canada’s West Coast.
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On the Edge
$19.95On the Edge tells the story of Emerald Lake Visser, an unhappy fourteen-year-old who came to live on her aunt and uncle’s farm when she was orphaned at age five. A misfit in her community and at school, her only real friend is an elderly woman, Jess, who teaches her to sail. Emma’s a natural sailor, as if she’s been on a sailboat her whole life. When Jess dies, it’s revealed that she was Emma’s grandmother. After receiving a letter that her mother may be living in the Bahamas, Emma runs away on her grandmother’s boat, the Edge, to find her. Disguising herself as a boy, Emma sails the Edge through the Erie Canal, down the Hudson River, out onto the Atlantic Ocean and through the ICW to Miami, where she crosses the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. Navigational mistakes, near misses with the coast guard, a robbery, and storms put Emma in danger time and again. To add to her stress, by the time she reaches New York City she suspects she’s being followed. She notices small black pebbles appearing on her boat, along with dirty footprints in her cockpit. When a handwritten note is tucked into her porthole, she becomes very frightened. She has no passport and is underage. If she’s caught, she’ll be sent back to the farm. But Emma is determined to find her mother.
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On the Eighth Day
$19.99In On the Eighth Day, Antonine Maillet imagines a solution to the world’s problems: a wider and more exuberant world, with its right more left and its left more right, created on “the day when everything is dared and anything is possible.” She spins a tale of two brothers — a giant carved from an oak tree and a scamp shaped out of bread dough — born one remarkable night when magic made wishes come true. Thrilled to have a son to call their own, Mr. Goodman and Mrs. Goodwife play favourite and bicker over which creation is the better child, causing a rift in the family.
To ease the fighting, John-Bear and Big-as-a-Fist decide to set off to seek their fortunes. But first they must visit their godmother, Clara-Galante, to receive their inheritance. A witch who lives deep in the woods, she gives them three wishes and some kind words, before sending the heroes “out into the world to follow their curious destiny beyond the hills on the horizon,” left foot first for good luck.
Wending their way through unforgettable lands — the Timeless Village, the Upside-Down Town, the Path of the Vicious Circle — the lads make many strange friends, who, peculiar as they are, seem strangely familiar. But, wherever Life leads them, Death lurks close behind.
A wonderful picaresque akin to a cheerful Gulliver’s Travels, a comic Pilgrim’s Progress or an Acadian Wizard of Oz, On the Eighth Day is a fast-moving tale starring richly developed characters in a funny and poignant road story in which allegory gains power by taking a back seat to enchantment.
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On the Fly
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On the Material
$17.95Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book.
Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in 2008, “4 × 4” navigates issues of space and movement in the global age. As economies crumble, ecosystems fail and peak oil approaches, Collis records the production of a disarticulation of social discourse that our consumer society has generated: “After all we made money out of matter here / Now condos shield us from the computer hum / Of on-line trading and wars ?ash on ?at screens / As 4 × 4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages.”
In its bridging second section, “I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won,” the desire to express wins out over the desire to possess. Beauty, contemplation and human communication seem to have abandoned the world, and their absence from the everyday has re-engaged the poet’s struggle with language—has left a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations.
The third section, “Gail’s Books,” is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis’s sister, Gail Tulloch. A month after Gail’s death from cancer in 2002, a ?re destroyed her house, removing every material reminder of her from the earth. All that remained was one book recovered from a pool of water in the ruins after the ?re. Dried in the air, this book, and those Collis had previously borrowed from his sister, become a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and loss—the “material” of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.
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On The News that Sagittarius A* Grows Hungrier
$22.95In late 2019 astronomers discovered that Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy was getting hungrier, consuming nearby matter at a rate never before seen. We humans now dominate every inch of this planet, every ecological niche. We have enslaved every human and every species we find useful, exterminating those we do not—and yet we grow hungrier. We are our own Sagittarius A*.
Scientists and activists tell us we are reaching the tipping point, that if we don’t change our ways immediately, there will be no return. They are mistaken. That was long ago. We have written our tragedy, and we are playing out the final scene. On the News that Sagittarius A* Grows Hungrier is a celebration of what makes us human: love, laughter, desire, thought and sorrow, and it is a lament for this world we have consumed, a letter left from our “insignificant villages … in a barren land where locks are unknown, / because there’s nothing to steal,” so that after we are gone “If anyone should pass, … at least we’ll still have our names.”
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On The Road To Abandoned Manitoba
$35.00A top-ten 2023 Bestseller!
In this book, scientist-historian Gordon Goldsborough hits the road in search of adventure and little-known stories from Manitoba’s past. Among the places he visits are underground radiation monitoring posts from the Cold War, a remote hydroelectric generating station, cruise ships on the Red River, and the original route of the Trans-Canada Highway. -
On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light
$18.95From the acclaimed author of Lemon comes a clever and heartbreaking new novel of love and revelation
Harriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.
Determined, resourceful, and a little reckless, Harriet tries to navigate the clueless adults around her, dumpster dives for the flotsam and jetsam that fuels her art, and attempts to fathom her complicated feelings for Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus. On the other hand, Irwin’s love for Harriet is not conflicted at all. She’s his compass. But Irwin himself must untangle the web of the human heart.
Masterful and piercingly funny, Strube is at the top of her considerable form in this deliciously subversive story of love and revelation.
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On the Wing
$37.95On the Wing