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A young, long-haired rock guitarist finds the funk on stage with the Godfather of Soul
In this unvarnished account of toiling under one of popular music’s most notorious bosses, Damon Wood details his six years spent playing guitar for James Brown’s Soul Generals.
In a memoir certain to fascinate Mr. Dynamite’s millions of fans, as well as musicians and industry insiders, Wood recalls how a chance encounter with James Brown led him to embrace soul and funk music under the tutelage of its greatest progenitor. Numerous interviews with bandmates provide multiple perspectives on James Brown’s complex character, his leadership of his band, the nature of soul and funk, and insights and sometimes harsh lessons learned along the way.
This is a sideman’s story of the gritty reality of working close to the spotlight but rarely in it. Damon Wood describes life on the road — often on James Brown’s infamous tour bus — with one guitar, a change of clothes, and two dozen comrades-in-arms as they brought the funk to clubs, theaters, and the biggest music festivals on earth. Working for James Brown could be fear-inducing, inspiring, exhilarating, and exasperating — all in the space of a single performance.
Ranson skillfully recreates his northern experience in strong, crisp stories that are humorous, quirky, and unique. Working North makes it clear why Ranson was moved to "pity the southerner who has never seen an arctic sun skipping along the earth, gathering all the colours of the prism and turning the land a warm purple." Working North is an engaging and entertaining read for inexperienced southerners and northern travellers alike.
“[Mendelson Joe] paints with more emotion than almost any other painter in the country. It comes through blazingly in the colours of his ‘Working Women’ series.” — Toronto Star
In the words of Mendelson Joe: “My purpose in my work, any of it from song to essay to picture, is to tell the truth and it seems that most truth ain’t couth. Inequality bugs me. Prejudice bugs me. And, I’ve long believed that women are the only hope for this ever-degrading organism that mothered us all. So, in 1982, I began to paint portraits of women. The purpose was to document women in the context of their job descriptions, so the pictures showed them as working folks as opposed to sexual objects.” For years, Mendelson Joe has been painting portraits of women, some of them prominent (Anna Banana, Doris Anderson, Irshad Manji, June Callwood, Jane Siberry), and some less so. Along with faithful reproductions of the original paintings, Joe has added his own brand of particular comments about the subject and the sessions.
When their farm gets expropriated to make way for the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant, Alexander McNab and his family move to Saint John. Without the magic of the Bay of Fundy, without the bright companionship of his little sister, Alex grows up a lonely, insecure failure.
At 30, he’s had enough; to make a clean break, he moves to Halifax. There, he is hired as a counsellor at New Dawn, a rehabilitation workshop, even though he has no professional qualifications. Alex soon becomes part of the New Dawn family, and the distinction between the helper and the helped blurs. The key may be that Alex takes for granted the wholeness in each of these damaged adults. Blind Jeff, 17, knows everything about cars, so Alex takes him out to the parking lot and teaches him to drive. In turn, Alex is adopted by Cornwallis Itwaru, a descendent of Jamaican Maroons plagued by encroaching Alzheimer’s, who firmly adjusts Alex’s fuzzy thinking. Alex sees right away that Gloria Vincent, who suffers from schizophrenia, has adopted a sloppy dress and ugly glasses as camouflage for her intelligence and beauty, and his discovery does not wholly displease her. Unfortunately, New Dawn goes broke, but by the time the landlord padlocks the doors, Alex has learned that living life fully doesn’t depend on external circumstances.
Gabriel Kolko provides a panoramic overview of the problems facing the US and the world today. Each chapter covers a key topic, spanning a range of international issues including the current financial crisis, the limits of US foreign policy, the politicisation of intelligence, and why a war with Iran would be likely to culminate in disaster for the US. Kolko also outlines why changes in military technology make all wars, no matter who fights them, increasingly futile. At the heart of the book is the idea that the international system is in the grip of a great transition. Kolko shows how America is losing its dominance, and examines the profound changes we are experiencing as it is forced to accept the limits of its military power.
In an industry where nothing is real and no one actually wins or loses, the possibilities for manipulation are endless. World Wrestling Insanity sets out to expose the nepotism, backwards logic, and power plays that have made World Wrestling Entertainment go round. Alongside many well known names in wrestling, author James Guttman uses sarcasm, humour, and facts to break down the secrets of Vince McMahon’s company and analyze the reasoning behind many of the decisions made. Never before has WWE, the McMahon Family, Triple H, and others been held up to the light and examined so closely. Why are some of the shows written as they are? Who has the company’s best interests at heart? Who has their own best interests at heart? Could the WWE’s errors be nothing more than accidents or are they the product of cold and calculated manipulation?
In his trademark style, James Guttman analyzes the insanity and breaks down the McMahonifaction of pro wrestling. You better get your copy soon. Something tells us that there’s a family in Connecticut who would like to make sure that James’s first book is his last…
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In the latest offering from the best-selling author of World Wrestling Insanity, James Guttman tells the real story behind contacting, cajoling, convincing, interviewing, and learning from more than 100 of professional wrestling’s most beloved stars. From former World Champions to Playboy models, from grizzled veterans to slick promoters, Radio Free Insanity, Guttman’s popular and groundbreaking weekly web broadcast has featured an environment that fosters discussion and leads to countless memorable tales.
In Shoot First… Ask Questions Later you’ll journey with Guttman through the business of sports entertainment, making startling discoveries about the way the industry truly works. For the first time ever, Guttman offers keen insight into the true personalities of wrestling’s stars.
Who’s the nicest guest off-air? And who was the most abrasive? Who was the funniest? And who was the worst interview in the history of interviews? What’s the bizarre story behind speaking with Scott Steiner, and why was Guttman worried? Why was Corporal Kirschner answering JG’s phone? What’s the inside scoop on the now infamous Ole Anderson shoot? What were crazy pre-interview conversations with people like Jerry Lawler, Diamond Dallas Page, Juvi “The Juice” Guerrera, and others really like? Discover all this and more from James Guttman’s two years behind the curtain and inside the work/shoot world of professional wrestling.
Shoot First … Ask Questions Later, with over 100 names you’ve come to know and love and sometimes hate, comes from the outsider who makes it his mission to find out what makes them tick.
Through eight extended poem-sections, World?s End, sits beyond the city?s gates, from relocating to an Ottawa suburb after a quarter century in Centretown, to the birth of the author?s third child. World?s End, examines the lyric across and beyond barriers, propelled by language and fueled by the pitter-patter of tiny feet. World?s End, is an opening.
Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.
With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.
After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.
An old record player; an unposted letter; a pearl necklace never purchased; a badly written poem from the woman you love: tokens, gifts, and objects lost or left behind, desired or not wanted at all are the starting points for the stories in Worldly Goods, a new collection by Alice Petersen. The stories reveal that ownership is more than possession, for Petersen shows how small objects stand as markers of our attempts to communicate with each other.
Reading Julie Berry’s poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. “like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this,” Berry writes in “Touching Ground.””Like this” is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined “the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/ . . . clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast.” Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover’s ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.
“When you walk into the world with these poems in your head, the world has a new clarity, more light. The most startling and unforgettable book of poetry I’ve read in a long time.” –Susan Musgrave
Aïcha lives with her mother in Montreal’s Centre-Sud neighbourhood. She’s only thirteen but claims to be older. She has never known her father, and resents her mother for leaving Hakim, her stepfather. Her only friends are Mel and Jo, two local prostitutes, and Baz, a musician in his twenties, who comes to her rescue one day and with whom she proceeds to fall in love. Her impossible love for Baz, her precociousness and her rebellious streak come together into an explosive cocktail. Raw and heartrending, Worst Case, We Get Married is the statement Aïcha gives to a social worker.
From acclaimed Québécois writer Sophie Bienvenu, and translated by JC Sutcliffe, comes Worst Case, We Get Married, a powerful and moving coming-of-age novel. Originally published in French in 2011 as Et au pire, on se mariera, the novel was adapted into a film by Bienvenu and Léa Pool in 2017.
In Worth More Growing, youth, from kindergarten through grade twelve, share their love and respect for trees. Speaking to our changing climate, this new generation of old-growth defenders express their observations, anger, kinship, hope and sorrow. This unique anthology includes a wide range of voices—Indigenous, settler, immigrant, and even international youth. Worth More Growing is a necessary anthology highlighting the importance of nature to a generation that will experience the ongoing consequences of climate change.
In Worth More Standing: An Anthology of Tree Poems, celebrated poets and activists pay homage to the ghosts of lost forests and issue a rallying cry to protect our remaining ancient giants and restore wild spaces.
Themes of connection, ecology, grief, and protection are explored through poems about trees and forests written by an impressive number of influential poets, several of whom have attended the recent Fairy Creek blockades and still others who defended BC’s old growth trees in Clayoquot Sound nearly 30 years ago.
Contributors include ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, GG winner Arleen Paré, Canadian icon bill bissett, Griffin Poetry Prize winner Eve Joseph, her husband ReLit Award winner Patrick Friesen, decorated cultural redress giant Joy Kogawa, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Harold Rhenisch, Jay Ruzesky, John Barton, Kate Braid, Kim Trainor, Kim Goldberg, Pamela Porter, Patricia and Terence Young, Russell Thornton, Sonnet L’Abbé, Susan McCaslin, Susan Musgrave, Tom Wayman, Trevor Carolan, Yvonne Blomer, Zoe Dickinson and the late Pat Lowther.
Governor General Award-nominated poet Richard Harrisons latest collection is a meditation on fathers, fatherhood, God and war. Powerful images of aging and death are cut with bright slivers of childhood, all set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, and the questions war and death raise. Harrisons transparent verse and beautiful ability to capture the voices around him draw the reader into what may be his best collection yet.
After ten years of marriage, Sue and Jerry would say they know everything about each other. But each harbours a significant secret. When Jerry becomes ill and it’s apparent he’s dying, Sue visits a psychic, Hans, who tells her there is someone like a son in her life. She dismisses this, but at Jerry’s funeral his son turns up–a son Sue didn’t know existed. At first Sue feels betrayed by Jerry, but gradually she accepts her own complicity. And she regrets never telling him, or anyone else, about the baby girl she gave up for adoption when she herself was only sixteen. Encouraged by Hans and a relative of Jerry’s, Sue starts looking for her daughter and relying more on Hans, who is also struggling with troubles in his own marriage. The novel deals with family secrets, social issues, relationships, and psychic insight. It confronts what happened when pregnancies were kept secret many years ago, what happens when mother and birth child look for and either find, or do not find, each other. It also explores the reality of family secrets, huge issues that are kept quiet under the veneer of polite society and that affect the individuals and families involved for lifetimes, even generations. In some ways, the novel also raises the question of who is family and how do we create one.