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The more one reads about Paul Martin’s business affairs, the more troubling they appear. In Paul Martin & Companies, Alain Deneault offers a piercing look at what it means when a Canadian prime minister puts his private interests outside the laws he has been elected to apply. Using Martin’s business dealings as an example, Deneault sheds light on the shadowy world of tax havens, offering insight into the functioning of these government-free fiscal zones and their relation to the growing world problems of capital flight, foreign debt, accountability for political power, endemic conflicts of interest in the public realm, media concentration, massacres, misery and even war.
These sixty short theses lay bare the contradictions embodied in Paul Martin, the businessman and the politician, and those inherent in the emerging forms of economic globalization and the Canadian political system and its laws. Deneault delves beyond the superficial, albeit alarming, aspects of the Martin case to get at the heart of what political and economic power really mean in the age of globalization. He presents the Martin case as a symptom of a worldwide crisis of public ethics that goes far beyond the simple question of Martin’s assets, and demonstrates that it is part of a lawless global culture that increasingly allows the world’s largest financial transactions to escape all forms of control, regulation and contribution to our national economies.
It has often been said that the appalling human misery endemic to third world countries is due not to their lack of natural resources, but to the self-interest and corruption of their leadership. Alain Deneault argues that this diversion of capital from the wealth of nations into the private bank accounts of their leaders is not particular to third world countries, and spells out what this means for all of us.
Diverse in subject, style and mood and rich in contrasts – from the lyrical to the rhetorical, from the public and collective to the personal and private – the poems in Pause for Breath are a meditation on the times and on time itself, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.
“Leaving aside the usual political covens and an inclination to despair, Di Cintio’s lucid account of present-day Palestine is the inspired portrait of a nation in dialog with its ghosts past and future affirming its right to be. This is a necessary book for our bewildered times.” — Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading
Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999. Like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative that he knew had been simplified by a seemingly unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again.
In Pay No Heed to the Rockets, he reveals a more complex story, the Palestinian experience as seen through the lens of authors, books, and literature. Using the form of a political-literary travelogue, he explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a rich imaginative life and the daily tedium and violence of survival.
Di Cintio begins his journey on the Allenby Bridge that links Jordan to Palestine. He visits the towns and villages of the West Bank, passes into Jerusalem, and then travels through Israel before crossing into Gaza. En route, he meets with poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers. He begins to see Palestine through their eyes, through their stories.
In the company of literary giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, and the contemporary authors whom they continue to inspire, Di Cintio travels through the rich cultural and literary heritage of Palestine. It’s there that he uncovers a humanity, and a beauty, often unnoticed by news media. At the seventieth anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, Pay No Heed to the Rockets tells a fresh story about Palestine, one that begins with art rather than war.
PB spends her summer on Fox Island with the other sheep and goats, but she’s more interested in stargazing than nibbling on the grass. She knows a famous astronomer once visited Toads Cove, and has set her sights on following in his path and finding a comet. Her determination irks a cantankerous old goat who plots to undermine her efforts.
This playful poetic tale about a sheep who won’t give up and an old goat who learns a thing or two is inspired by the author’s community, where sheep and goats really do graze on islands off the coast, and a famous astronomer really did once visit.
Award-winning artist Veselina Tomova’s illustrations offer a delightfully whimsical complement to this charming story.
Finalist, Dartmouth Book Award for Non-Fiction, and Taste Canada Awards (Culinary Narratives)
Nominated for 3 Gourmand Awards
An Atlantic Bestseller
A Hill Times Top 100 Selection
February 2016. Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
Tareq Hadhad was worried about his father: Isam did not know what to do with his life. Before the war began in Syria, Isam had run a chocolate company for over twenty years. But that life was gone now. The factory was destroyed, and he and his family had spent three years in limbo as refugees before coming to Canada. So, in an unfamiliar kitchen in a small town, Isam began to make chocolate again.
This remarkable book tells the extraordinary story of the Hadhad family — Isam, his wife Shahnaz, and their sons and daughters — and the founding of the chocolatier, Peace by Chocolate. From the devastation of the Syrian civil war, through their life as refugees in Lebanon, to their arrival in a small town in Atlantic Canada, Peace by Chocolate is the story of one family. It is also the story of the people of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and so many towns across Canada, who welcomed strangers and helped them face the challenges of settling in an unfamiliar land.
A new political party has swept into office, promising big changes to curb the impending climate crisis—changes that could put the nail in the coffin for a tiny carbon-economy town in the heart of Northern BC. When an elected representative who grew up in the town arrives to appease the residents, her urban idealism clashes with the hard-hitting realities faced by her family and childhood friends. How will pulling the plug on fossil-fuel dependency play out for this resilient northern community? And does it even matter when a forest fire is encroaching on the town’s borders?
Inspired by playwright Pedro Chamale’s own experiences growing up in Chetwynd, BC, Peace Country is a poignant plea for dialogue in a time marked by profound division. Teetering between progress and preservation, this very human drama invites readers to contemplate the fate of communities standing on the precipice of ruin.
Mohawk spoken-word artist Janet Marie Rogers’s newest collection pulses with the rhythms of the drum and the beat of the heart. Poems drawing on the language of the earth and inflected with the outspoken vocality of activism address the crises of modern “land wars”—environmental destruction, territorial disputes, and resource depletion.
A once blue-collar town, Peacefield has surrendered to the illusion of affluence. But for some, the newcomers and their wealth are not welcome. Tension and division are a way of life. One night, the otherwise bucolic town explodes with gunfire. Hostages are taken and the local police department, hampered by budget cuts, is caught flat-footed. Constables Grant Ambler and Arnold Strauss are both new to the department, and stuck in the orbit of their troubled personal lives as they walk, unaware, into the ensuing mayhem. In a single evening, Peacefield is transformed from a quaint tourist trap into a violent and unpredictable nightmare, where lives are shattered, faith is renewed, and long-concealed mysteries are solved.
Peacekeeper’s Daughter is the astonishing story of a French-Canadian military family stationed in Israel and Lebanon in 1982-1983. Told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl, Peacekeeper’s Daughter parchutes the reader into the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian crisis, and the wave of terrorism—including the bombing of the American Embassy—that ravaged Beirut at the height of the siege. This novelistic memoir moves from Jerusalem to Tiberius, from the disputed No-Man’s Land of the Golan Heights to Damascus, and on to Beirut by way of Tripoli, crossing borders that remain closed to this day.
It’s June, 1982. Twelve-year-old Tanya and her family are preparing to leave their home in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to move to Israel and Lebanon, where her father will serve a one-year posting with the United Nations. While they’re packing up, Israel invades Lebanon. The President-elect of Lebanon is assassinated. Thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children are murdered at the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in southern Beirut. The Middle East’s relative peace explodes into waves of violence.
It is in the midst of this maelstrom that the family arrives in Israel, and settles into an apartment. And one day Tanya and her brother walk to school; yet nothing is ordinary, nothing is familiar. The simple act of walking down the street is fraught with peril. Violence may come at them from any direction at any time.
Peacekeeper’s Daughter is a coming-of-age story, as well as an exploration of family dynamics, the shattering effects of violence and war—and the power of memory itself to reconcile us to our past selves, to the extraordinary places we have been and sights we have seen.
When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting.
Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume, Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls “Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990).
The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems, some of which have never been published before. It also includes brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, “Message Machine” (1990), “initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice … Against her anxiety that she is a passive ‘message machine’ for masculinist culture.” However, as Carr points out, “Webb posits another possibility – ‘cross-dressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a ‘masquerade’ or ‘street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.
When Phyllis Webb published Wilson’s Bowl in 1980, Northrop Frye hailed it as “a landmark in Canadian literature”: landmark, an event that marks a turning point in something (in this case, Canadian literature); and an instantly recognized feature of a landscape (in this case, the landscape of Canadian poetry). Wilson’s Bowl was Webb’s fifth volume of poetry. Three more followed and then she fell silent, turning from literature to abstract painting.
Peacock Blue compiles in a single volume all of Webb’s published, unpublished, and uncollected works from a writing career that spanned fifty years. It offers readers the opportunity to relish the arc of Webb’s entire poetic oeuvre, from the modernist lyricism of her early works, to the groundbreaking volume, Naked Poems (1965), in which Webb created for herself a new minimalist language; from Wilson’s Bowl to what Douglas Barbour calls “Webb’s loving and subversive engagement with the ghazal” in Water and Light (1984); and finally to the postmodernist prose poems of Hanging Fire (1990).
The concluding section of Peacock Blue contains almost fifty poems, some of which have never been published before. It also includes brilliant but forgotten poems and poetic surprises. Brenda Carr has suggested that one of Webb’s later essays, “Message Machine” (1990), “initiates a re-reading of her poetics and practice … Against her anxiety that she is a passive ‘message machine’ for masculinist culture.” However, as Carr points out, “Webb posits another possibility – ‘cross-dressing.’ She theorizes her mimicry of the male persona as analogous to a ‘masquerade’ or ‘street theatre’ and in so doing reconstructs even her earlier poems as a performative space in which agency is possible.” The truth of Carr’s insight becomes increasingly apparent to anyone who undertakes to read through Webb’s entire poetic output, gathered together, at last, in Peacock Blue.
Born to privilege and wed to her high school sweetheart Veer, a free spirited Maya feels trapped in a conventional upper class family with patriarchal expectations in India. Claustrophobic within the dark walls of the mansion she lives in with Veer, Maya starts living precariously through the threads of her curiosity. This curiosity leads Maya to unearth a dark family secret, a brutal ancestral murder which begins to haunt her and also affect her new marriage.
To escape the malicious spirits lingering in the house, Maya and her family fly to a new land and discover the rough corners, hardship, and the bounty that this adopted country offers. As Maya tries to rebuild her life amidst adventure and the struggles of settling in a new country, her relationship with Veer is tested beyond its limits. Not knowing that the ghosts of their past have followed them, in a race against time, Maya is put to a final test. Armed with conviction and hope, Maya sets out to face the dark forces that lie await.
Peacock in the Snow is a one-of-a kind genre-bending thriller about the power of an eternal love, which survives through three generations of heartbreak, across two continents, and speaks to the tireless capacity of the human spirit to love, hope, strive, and succeed despite impossible obstacles.
“Fun, original, and unreservedly recommended” – Midwest Book Review
On Goat Loops, in the realm of Niff, Sam learns a scary new truth about the Son of the Solstice prophecy, one his long-absent mother had neglected to tell him. Not only is he destined to fight an ancient sorcerer, but it will result in his certain death. As Sam’s powers grow, he and his half-giant friend chase mysterious no-magic pockets, battle annoying, bitey dokkas, and look for a way to save the worlds – and his own skin.
Peanut Butter and Pandemonium is Book 2 in The Mythic Adventures of Samuel Templeton!
The making of a poem is like the making of a pearl – you take something gritty and create a jewel. Pearl, George Bowering’s final book of poetry, layers itself around a promise he made to himself that he would write a poem about his mother, Pearl Bowering – a hillbilly, athlete, and champion bridge player. This promised poem anchors a book about the grit of life and what poetry can make from it, raucously sprawling, always in search of the next glimmering insight, tugging at different threads with multifarious big-heartedness. Touching, ribald, and cheeky, Pearl reflects on a life well-lived and well-written.
The elderly Gidley sisters lead unassuming and unexciting lives in Blyth, Ontario in 1971. Tart-tongued Pearl and the more romantically-minded Edith live frugally, renting a room to the occasional boarder to help make ends meet. But the sisters’ orderly life is turned upside-down when their neighbour George asks them to take in Charles, a young American Vietnam veteran.
The characters in this beautifully-written, bittersweet comedy gently draw out one another’s stories: and along the way must come to terms with loyalty and betrayal, long-ago heartbreak, the consequences of sacrifice, and the power of music.