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Showing 5313–5328 of 9489 results
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Our Friend Joe
$21.95When a young black man named Seraphim “Joe” Fortes arrived in Vancouver in 1885, with little to his name, no one could have possibly suspected that one hundred years later he would be voted “Citizen of the Century.” Our Friend Joe is the first biography of the West Indian sailor who became a local legend, saving dozens of lives and teaching three generations of Vancouver children how to swim. On a chance rowboat ride not far from the city, he would find his “perfect place” in English Bay, where the untold story truly begins. In 1900, after years of volunteering, Joe was officially hired by the City as lifeguard, swimming instructor and special constable of English Bay beach. Colourful, often poignant details chronicle Joe’s many adventures both on and off shore, his genuine rapport with citizens of all ages and his deeply personal relationship with one Vancouver family. On February 7, 1922, thousands of mourners lined Vancouver’s streets to bid farewell to “our friend Joe.” His legacy continues today, with one of Vancouver’s libraries named after him. Part of the proceeds from this biography are being donated to the Lifesaving Society/Société du Sauvetage, Canada’s national organization for lifeguarding and water safety expertise.
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Our Ghosts
$15.95What if a fighter jet vanishes in 1956 and, after a brief inquiry by the Royal Canadian Air Force, it is decided that the plane and its two pilots are at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and, thus, gone: case closed? What if the young wife of one of the pilots refuses to accept that her husband is dead? What if, years later, it becomes clear that the plane crashed in the wild Callaghan Lake country near Whistler Mountain and the pilots, or at least one of them, survived that crash and maybe, just maybe, could have made it out and home if the official response had been less hasty?
Inspired by the mysterious disappearance of the playwright’s pilot-father in a routine flight from the Comox Base on Vancouver Island, Our Ghosts is at once a taut investigative tale, a moving testament to the love and tenacity of a woman determined to uncover the truth, and a daughter’s journey toward learning to live with her ghosts.
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Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed
$18.95A first collection of poems from the winner of the Cuffer Prize for short fiction
Our Gleaming Bones Unrobed is a haunting debut, a poetry collection thematically focused on discovering the structure (the figurative bones) beneath the appearance (or skin) of a situation.
This poetry is at once memento mori — a reminder and celebration of our mortality — and a lyrical exploration of the spirituality of the mundane, the possibility for revelation found in the commonplace.
The universe’s heart is a ruined house.
Written on the door is this:
you cannot do a thing that has not already been done.— from “On the Occasion of a Book Burning”
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Our Kind of Work
$18.95Twenty-fifth Street Theatre Players was established in 1972 as an artists’ collective under the direction of the enigmatic Andreas Tahn. The company would proceed to incorporate in 1974 and become the first professional theatre company in Saskatoon and the legacy it would leave would be nationally acclaimed. But as Brenna details in this succinct genesis of the Theatre, how it managed its personality conflicts, confronted its obstacles of inadequate funding, and grappled with the shifting of its artistic vision makes this account of 25th Street Theatre a unique and original history
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Our Lady of Mile End
$20.00Our Lady of Mile End is a neighbourhood of stories where recurring characters face personal challenges and unexpected intimacies against a backdrop of renoviction threats and walking tours.
The overlapping lives (of girls and women, tenants and landlords, neighbours and strangers, the old generation and the next) chart the tensions and affections among people living in a community that has turned into a destination.
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Our Land
$24.95Our Land: The Maritimes examines the historical and legal background to Indigenous land claims in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia, tracing the patterns of land dealings that resulted in the setting up of reserves, the creation of Status and Non-Status Indians, and a government policy of assimilation.
A groundbreaking work published in 1980 by the Aboriginal Rights and Land Claims Commission of the Métis and Non-Status Indians, Our Land: The Maritimes was critical in challenging the political consensus that Indigenous land claims in the Maritimes had been “superseded by law.” This foundational book, now reissued with a new preface by co-editor G.P. Gould, draws upon historical documents including proclamations, treaties, and laws. Chronicling the large-scale land loss and assimilation as a result of the creation of the Indian Act, Our Land: The Maritimes delves into records from the 17th and 18th centuries to find evidence of early acknowledgment of Aboriginal Title and provides a legal analysis of why it still exists today.
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our place
$17.95our place by Kanika Ambrose is a new work set in a fictional Caribbean restaurant, Jerk Pork Castle in Scarborough, where newcomers Andrea and Niesha work in exchange for cash under the table. As the two women scrape out a life in Canada, leaving their children in their Caribbean homelands, they must also navigate their status as undocumented workers. This funny, keenly observant script unveils the lives of these undocumented Caribbean workers who go to desperate lengths to get Canadian citizenship for the betterment of their children–a moving, timely story of those rendered invisible in a “welcoming” Canada.
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Our Revels Now Are Ended
$24.95If Pan’s Labyrinth was set in 2000s Quebec.Zoey’s parents have recently separated, and it’s their first Christmas apart. Zoey is spending the first part of the holidays with his father in Lac-Saint-Jean. Amidst sparkling snowflakes and bitter cold, stretching from Christmas to New Year’s, with one family then the other, Zoey explores the hallucinatory paths of childhood with his favorite cousin, Émie-Anne, the bravest person he knows. The winding paths snake through the deep forest, populated by monsters and strange characters. A creature with a face covered by a frightening mask watches over them. Dangers are not uncommon on these paths that plunge even deeper into their minds. With the exception of his uncle’s new girlfriend, Josiane, the adults are of no help on their adventure.Sometimes unsettling, sometimes full of magic, these snowy paths lead Zoey and Émie-Anne closer to a terrible and wonderful discovery.
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Our Twelve Days Before Christmas
$25.95A hilarious and moving account of one family’s frantic countdown to Christmas Eve. Follow in the author’s footsteps as he wrestles with giant Christmas trees, scrambles to get to his children’s concerts, is swallowed up by the mobs in the mall, sings his choirs first tentative attempt at Handel’s Messiah and enters into a desperate nationwide search for goats for his church’s Christmas pageant. Christmas is a time of joy and memories, memories that are both sweet and tinged with sadness. In this book we share both the happiness and the grief that can accompany this season. Our Twelve Days of Christmas is a book that will resonate with every family, as it shares a story that is both unique and universal, a story of family and the genuine meaning of this holiday.
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Our Words, Our Revolutions
$17.95A variety of genres are represented here–from life-writing to poetry to short autofiction. Readers will enjoy this compelling collection, which represents the voices of women who who have not been visible in more ways than one.
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Out of Grief, Singing
$18.95Out of Grief, Singing is an achingly beautiful account of how a woman comes to terms with the loss of her newborn. After a bewildering series of rapid diagnoses and emergency interventions, Charlene?s daughter Chloe is born. But her too-brief life is spent in the neonatal intensive care unit, and her mother, leveled by an epidural anaesthetic procedure gone wrong, can barely make it to her daughter’s side. In the months following Chloe?s death, more medical crises make it nearly impossible to even begin the grieving process, let alone return to any semblance of a normal life. But return she does, along a path that is both arduous and rich. With a poet’s ear for language, Charlene Diehl shares her discovery of joy amidst a devastating loss.
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Out of Hiding
$24.95A thorough collection and examination of stories and perspectives from the Holocaust-related books of British Columbia authors, including nearly 100 black and white photographs.
Holocaust witnesses will soon cease to exist. As Tolstoy famously put it, what is to be done? One answer is Out of Hiding, a cross-section of stories collected from one region of the globe, British Columbia, Canada, examining 85 authors and 160 books.
Out of Hiding is both inspiring and chilling. The outstanding characters include the heroic whistleblower, Rudolf Vrba, credited by historian Sir Martin Gilbert with saving at least 100,000 lives, as well as Robbie Waisman, likely the only person ever to sneak his way into a concentration camp twice. This wide-ranging collection also features an afterword by Yosef Wosk and is dedicated to Dutch-born survivor Robert Krell, the MLK of Holocaust education in Canada.
Illustrated and profoundly educational, this patchwork quilt of memory and history belongs in every British Columbia household if the Holocaust is not to be forgotten, under-estimated or disregarded. -
Out of Line
$20.00Poet and scholar Tanis MacDonald has taught creative writing for twenty years all across Canada: in small community workshops, large university classes and everything in between. The question she’s heard the most is “How can I be a writer?” and she realized early on that this question had nothing to do with putting words on a page. Out of Line is her answer to this question. This book is about creativity and community, about what it is like to try and pick up a pen, or a paintbrush, and create art for the first time when you don’t come from a background with access to the arts. In this wide-ranging work, MacDonald looks at our societal preconceptions about the artist lifestyle and examines how real artists fit into the everyday world. Along the way she walks the reader through the steps that must be taken for an idea to make it from a concept to a finished piece and what happens once the work is out in the world. But Out of Line also tackles how issues such as class and the rural-urban divide can structure our interactions with the arts. MacDonald examines the experiences artists have, whether beginners or established, in finding a community to support them and celebrate their work outside of the major urban centres where the industry has traditionally been clustered. In the end, Out of Line works to open up the arts to everyone who might dream of creating.
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Out of Mind
$22.95Winner, McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
One of 49th Shelf‘s Books of the YearIn Out of Mind, David Bergen delves into the psyche of Lucille Black, mother, grandmother, lover, psychiatrist, and analyst of self, who first appeared in Bergen’s bestselling novel The Matter with Morris. Although adept at probing the lives of others, Lucille has become untethered, caught between duty and desire, between the demands of family and her own longing.
Her ex-husband Morris betrays her by publishing a memoir about the aftermath of their son Martin’s death in Afghanistan. She travels to Thailand to attempt to extricate her youngest daughter from the clutches of an apparent cult leader. And she is invited to the south of France to attend the marriage of a man whom she rejected a year earlier. Negotiating with herself about her altered role in the lives of her family and friends, Lucille circles the globe — and herself.
In this brilliant and subtle evocation of vulnerability and loss, Bergen traces one woman’s quest to reform her identity, reminding us that the unexpected is always lying in wait.
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Out of My Skin
$20.00Daphne Baird impulsively leaves behind her boyfriend, her family, her whole life, for a new start in Montreal. Losing herself in the rhythmic roar of a copy shop by day, and haunting the sweltering, vibrant streets of the city by night, she collects fragments of histories and reconstructs other peoples’ lives.
Her long-postponed search for her biological parents leads her to the diaries of her grandfather, opening a window on 1960 British Guiana. As Daphne descends into the paranoid yet lucid world of Gerald Eyre — which reveals more than Daphne could ever expect — she cannot avoid the tensions swirling around the city or her own desire for family and connection.
Out of My Skin explores the things that bind us to places and people. It is a powerful tale of voyeurism, crisis, race, and family secrets that in its layering of contemporary events and personal histories subtly explores the effects and aftershocks of colonialism in the New World.
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Out of the Blue
$21.99What happens when the place you’ve loved working at for twenty years asks for a divorce and breaks your heart?
“Tapping into her journalistic rigour, [Wong] gives a complete profile of the disease and its history.” — Now Magazine
“Jan Wong is a wonderful writer and as she tells her own story, she speaks for me and for many. Some say depression is a gift. Well, it’s not. But this book is.” — Shelagh Rogers
Self-published in 2012 because publishers were afraid of the backlash from the author’s criticism of the biggest newspaper in Canada, Jan Wong’s formidable memoir made the Globe and Mail‘s own bestseller list and exposed a much needed look at depression in the workplace. Now it’s back by popular demand.
For twenty years Jan Wong had been one of the Globe and Mail‘s best-known reporters. Edward Greenspon, her then editor-in-chief, described Wong’s writing as “intrusive, edgy, insightful, significant — and funny. Everything Jan touches becomes memorable.”
Then one day her world came crashing down. A story she wrote sparked a national firestorm, including death threats, a unanimous denunciation by Parliament, and a rebuke by her own newspaper. For the first time in her professional life, Wong fell into a clinical depression. She resisted the diagnosis, refusing to believe she had a mental illness, as did her employer and her insurer. Out of the Blue is the harrowing and sometimes surreal story of her struggle and her eventual emergence — out of the blue.