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Showing 5745–5760 of 9489 results
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Radar, Hula Hoops and Playful Pigs
$16.95In his first collection of short essays, science educator Dr. Joe Schwarcz debunks the myths and serves up the raw facts of modern popular science
Dr. Joe Schwarcz tells it like it is. Whether he’s plumbing the mysteries of chicken soup or tracing the development of polyethylene, Dr. Joe takes a little history, adds a dash of chemistry, and produces a gem of an essay every time. Find out the latest about homeopathy and alternative medicine. Fill up on facts about soybeans, tomatoes, tea, ginseng, hot dogs, and the benefits of eating chalk. Explore the science behind Alice’s strange adventures in Wonderland, Rumpole’s deadly cheese soufflé, and Casanova’s experiments with “Spanish fly.” In 67 short, entertaining, and informative pieces about chemistry in everyday life, you will finally discover the amazing links between radar, hula hoops, and playful pigs!
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radiant danse uv being
$23.95a blewointment book”bill bissett is my astral twin.”–Margaret AtwoodMany of Canada’s most renowned poets salute a national treasure in this poetic tribute to bill bissett. bissett has been a landmark on the Canadian literary scene since the 1960s, renowned as much for his fascinating life as for his poetics. He is best known for his anti-conventional poetry, which makes use of phonetic spelling and visual elements, and for his performances of concrete sound, chanting, and dancing during poetry readings. bissett is also the founder of blewointment press (now Nightwood Editions).Throughout his life, bissett has attracted a host of admirers–and not just from the counterculture movement. Poets of all styles are fans of his work, including Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Di Brandt, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, bp Nichol, Steve McCaffery, Jay MillAr, PK Page, and Darren Wershler-Henry. No Canadian poet has gained a wider acceptance in the various poetic “schools” than bissett. His work transcends boundaries, appealing to those whose tastes run toward the traditional and to the more avant-garde. Now, for the first time, this diverse group of more than 80 poets comes together in one book to celebrate bissett’s life and work.radiant danse uv being is an essential text for anyone interested in the work of bill bissett–and in Canadian literature itself.
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Radiant Shards
$18.95This long, narrative poem, Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems, traces the sacrifice and suffering of devoted but destitute parents, Russian immigrants who are acutely affected by the Depression and struggle relentlessly to survive in Winnipeg. More importantly, with its focus on the life experience and inner world of their tenacious daughter – and as the first poetic project to give voice to a Jewish sex worker, a figure that has been all but erased from literary history – Radiant Shards is a compassionate and humanizing work. The poem invokes Adele Wiseman’s 1974 novel Crackpot, described by Jewish Studies scholars Ruth Wisse as a foundational twentieth-century literary text and by Josh Lambert as a radically feminist work. This book imagines the interior life of the novel’s protagonist, an obese Jewish sex worker named Hoda, who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the first half of the twentieth century. In Radiant Shards, Hoda reflects personally and knowingly on the experiences of her complicated life. Against the structural arc of novelistic events that shape her worldview, she plumbs the depths of her suffering and the triumph of her will from a poetically imagined position of maturity and self-awareness. This creative project also incorporates archival/historical photographs housed in the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and the Archives of Manitoba. These images ground the poet’s lyric presentation of Hoda and deepen the resonant voice of a character that originally was modelled on an actual North End resident.
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Radical Medicine
$28.00Winner!
Canadian Historical Association Clio PrizeFinalist!
CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize
Alexander Kennedy?Isbister?Award for Non-Fiction
McNally Robinson Book of the YearThe origins of medicare have long been told as a simple and satisfying story: a good idea, born in Saskatchewan, was championed by our Greatest Canadian, Tommy Douglas, embraced by Canadians, now stands as a cherished example of our nation?s unique values. Radical Medicine is a visionary and politicized new history of medicare. It traces medicare?s roots around the world?to the New Deal in the US, the October Revolution in Russia and the British Labour movement. From the 1930s to the early 1950s radical health advocates from around the Atlantic world debated how to achieve socialized medicine. Out of these debates there emerged on the medical left a specific model for health equality?the health centre.
Radical Medicine uses the personal histories of international health advocates, the history of ideas, policy debates, political insights as well as the role of emotion as a central force in social movements. Challenging dominant historical narratives that often depoliticize medicare?s origins by treating it a simple manifestation of primordial prairie politics, Radical Medicine shows that, although medicare was shaped fundamentally by local forces and cultures, we can only understand its history in a world-historical context. As universal public health insurance programs crumble around the world, Radical Medicine is the medicare book we need now.
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Radio & Other Miracles
$14.95In this book, the miracle of radio opens a boy’s ears to the music of the world around him. In poems that range in setting from Canada to Africa and the Middle East, Cox tells of “other miracles” as well—sailboats and spaceships, ice-skates and tropical jacaranda, hair-raising escapes from danger, and the eerie harmony of coincidence. Fans will be glad to see Cox’s tributes to Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and other jazz greats collected here.
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Radio Discord
$24.95Stephen Millburn’s chaotic last day at CIFU Radio in Victoria, BC, working as the host of the morning show isn’t just the end of Gregor Craigie’s first novel, Radio Jet Lag, it’s the beginning of his second, Radio Discord.
Told from the point of view of Malcolm McDonald, CIFU’s news director who’s just fired the radio station’s star morning host under duress from his politically and socially right-wing station owner, Radio Discord picks right up from what The Toronto Star called “a finely crafted denouement.” McDonald is wracked with guilt, wondering why he didn’t stand up for Stephen Millburn, whose only fault — if it can be called that — was to run with a story about a shady scheme to pay homeless people to leave Victoria. Colourful characters return, including bombastic station owner George Caulfeild and acerbic news reader Sheila Campbell.
Readers will enjoy behind-the-mic comedy as CIFU slides to new depths in the radio ratings and struggles through on-air disasters, such as a live radio broadcast at a shopping mall that is interrupted by chemtrail conspiracy theorists and a turkey vulture named Stanley.
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Radio Jet Lag
$24.95“A gem of a novel.” — Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour
Longlisted for the 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
Stephen Millburn moved halfway across the country, from Ottawa to Victoria, to fulfill his dream of being an early-morning radio host, but he’s barely holding it together. Trying to balance parental duties (he and his wife have a newborn son) with his work schedule leaves Stephen running on coffee fumes and falling asleep at the most inconvenient times, including mid-broadcast.
Stephen treads a narrow path at CIFU. When he arrived, the station ranked dead last in ratings. Months into his new hosting position, his show and the station are growing in popularity. He’s something of a golden boy — but he’s a golden boy with a passion for good journalism, which leads him to pursue a story about an encampment of unhoused people on the lawns of the city’s court house.
Bleeding heart liberalism is not the stuff that Mr. George Caulfeild, station owner, believes his new audience wants to hear at eight a.m. and Stephen finds himself in a seriously conflicted position. He needs this job to support his growing family and pay down his crippling mortgage, but he knows this exposé is ethically and politically important — and it’s a journalist’s dream story. Will he be able to pull it all together or is he heading for a downfall?
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Radioland
$22.00Dead bodies are being found in Toronto; bodies that have been altered in disturbing ways. There are whispers on the streets of a murderer stalking the bars and clubs. No one knows who the killer could be. Maybe it’s Kris, a troubled musician who has just reached a level of fame only to have his life collapse around him. Maybe it’s Jill, a young woman cursed with a dangerous magic that calls strangers to her.
As Kris struggles to deal with a childhood experience of sexual abuse he finds a strange advertisement pinned to a tree. By answering it he begins texting Jill, another lost soul reaching out for connection. In bits and pieces, they share their stories, discovering truths about themselves and the people surrounding them, until they must face the danger that is stalking them both.
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Radius Islamicus
$20.00Joseph, the tactician behind the Piccadilly Circus bombing and many other such events, finds himself in a nursing home in Pierrefonds, Quebec, where he is losing his mind but regaining his conscience. In Radius Islamicus we see minds that cannot be located by drones carrying Hellfire missiles. These non-state actors, led by Joseph, do not live in caves. They live in Moose Jaw, Toronto, Amsterdam, London, New York and the Isle of Jura. They take vacations in Thailand, have an understanding of science, are concerned ecologists, drive solar-powered cars, and plot to blow up the Western civilization that created them.
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Radius of Light
$16.95Radius of Light is a lively, profoundly intelligent exposè of our lives as lived in this World. very often at its environmental expense. Here are tales of Lovers intensely enchanted by the other, then deeply estranged. Here are vivid descriptions of natural scenes – Northern cottage-country and farther afield – wherein the speaker in his limberlost retreat, suddenly wakes under the shadow of carbon smog. As poet A.F. Moritz puts it, these poems “are remarkable for the discovery of depth and resonant mystery within realistic detail. Auerbach’s view is as unflinching as his lines are terse.. They make no compromise in delineating the difficulties of our natural existence, and the brutality and self-delusion we ourselves contribute.” But his hope is unfailing too: “again we gather dust,/fashion a house from frost.”
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Rafael Has Pretty Eyes
$22.95Winner, Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction
Long-Shortlisted, ReLit Award (Short Fiction)“You go through life convinced you’re going to get diabetes like your old man and one day you choke to death on chicken gristle, and the autopsy shows your blood sugars were perfect.”
The seventeen stories in Elaine McCluskey’s latest collection, Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, follow characters who have reached a four-way stop in life; some are deciding whether to follow the signs or defy them; others find a sinkhole forming beneath their feet.
A former fast-talking, big-bucks radio host now lives as a divorced payday loaner working in a strip mall; a football wide receiver at a small Canadian university works the night shift as a bouncer while recovering from his third concussion; a well-liked city councilor is arrested on a packed bus. As one character puts it, “life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.”
Set in the Maritimes but transcending regional boundaries, McCluskey’s stories are experimental, sometimes provocative, and often about those living on the margins. Smart, compassionate and unsparing, Rafael Has Pretty Eyes explores the absurdity and interconnectedness of a life adrift.
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Raft Baby
$20.00A sprawling historical novel set in the Peace River country in the early 1900’s, a period and a place that tested the mettle of all who came there. The novel is complex and layered, with multiple narrators, and interwoven stories. Its main story, though, is the mystical tale of a young girl straddling two worlds in ways she is not always aware of, with elements of love, sacrifice, greed, envy, heartbreaking sorrow, and unexpected twists in plot. The novel is set mostly in the past and chronicled through various voices that tell the Raft Baby’s amazing journey. We also hear directly from the Raft Baby herself, both at the beginning of the novel and at the end. Her voice is vital, true and clear and it validates the novel’s history and circumstances in the gentlest of ways.
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Rage
$18.95When our own darkness is mirrored in multi-faceted characters, do we look away in disgust or find the humanity within them and, by extension, ourselves? In his debut short fiction collection, John Mavin has slyly exposed hidden themes to the world with breathtaking potency, eloquence, and wit.
Rage follows a loosely interwoven group of people from the fictional town of Dolsens, Ontario. Archaeologists, mountain climbers, priests, musicians, psychics, soldiers, and teens all confront the rage and sorrow of lives based on lies and abuse as they struggle to gain their independence, their dignity, and in some cases, revenge. When such content becomes overpowering, Mavin’s lyrical and controlled writing keeps the reader so enmeshed that we cannot look away. These are the stories that hold us close with their suspenseful conflicts and a nagging uncertainty of what a desperate or angry person might do. They are often as dark as they are enlightening. -
Rage Letters, The
$19.95An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex — in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.
Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.
Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah’s The Rage Letters — set in Montreal and beyond — are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters’ desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.
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Rags to Riches
$27.00Richard “Ritchie” Nelson was born in Norway in 1899, the son of his adoptive mother’s sister and a Swedish Jew. He was raised alongside his three cousins and at age ten, he persuaded his parents to immigrate to Canada’s west coast to join two already established older brothers. By age thirteen, Ritchie was crafting gillnets from discards and fishing the Fraser River for salmon. Quickly mastering English and with money earned from fishing, he paid for a year of education at a Lutheran college. In 1929, he co-founded Nelson Bros. Fisheries with his brother Norman. The fishery operated from the west coast of Vancouver Island to Alaska.
With endless energy and boundless bravado, Ritchie grew Nelson Bros. into a highly successful enterprise complete with a huge fleet of gillnetters, packers, reduction plants and canneries. Nelson Bros. processed millions of pounds of salmon, herring, halibut, and crab in a year. In an industry that by the 1930s was conservative and corporate, Ritchie stayed extremely close to “his” fishermen and shore workers, working tirelessly for them—a stance that earned him their loyalty, admiration, and devotion. A champion of all fishermen and cannery workers, Ritchie Nelson was honoured by the Tlingit First Nation as “Big Fin,” which is an allusion to the killer whale or “the one that tells everybody else what to do.” In this unique story of grit, ambition, and kindness, Macdonald delves into the history of one of BC’s most successful fishing enterprises that is today thriving as a business consultancy in the seafood industry.
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Rahul
$21.95