National Network for Equitable Library Service

On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory taking advantage of the day off, drowned quietly in Dublin's Royal Canal.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire is engaged in a titanic war with Napoleonic France for global supremacy. The American Republic is quickly expanding its territory along the western frontier, while native peoples struggle to protect their lands from the relentless wave of new settlers.

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award. Part history, part biography, part true crime, Hanns and Rudolf chronicles the untold story of the Jewish investigator who pursued and captured one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious war criminals.May 1945. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew now serving in the British Army.

One autumn evening, shortly after ending a ten-year stint as a pop-music columnist for the Montreal Gazette, Eric Siblin attended a concert at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. There, something unlikely happened: he fell in love with a piece of classical music -- Bach's cello suites.

Award-winning journalist, author, and royal authority John Fraser explores the endurance and allure of the Crown in Canada. With his trademark wit and artful agility, Fraser looks at the Crown's evolution from the Age of Deference to the era of celebrity to the present popular revival. He examines the differences between tribal monarchy and constitutional monarchy, the key roles of the governor general and the lieutenant governor, and the media's insatiable appetite for the Royal Family.

Toronto's Rochdale College began as an educational ideal, an experiment in living and learning, a place where open classes and unstructured seminars could liberate higher education from its shackles. Rochdale ended after seven incredible years in drug raids, overdoses, and police surveillance, but it is remembered as Canadas most controversial symbol of the 1960s. The fascinating story of Rochdale's rise and fall is told in this well-researched, entertaining book.

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013. A fascinating work of history, biography, cartography, and literary mystery, Mr Selden’s Map of China unlocks the secrets behind a recently discovered map of China like no other of its time. In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP, and the city’s first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive reader.

Launched in 1945, the schooner Norma & Gladys illustrates the best qualities of Newfoundland and Labrador’s industries of shipbuilding, the Labrador fishery, the Grand Banks fishery, and coasting freight to remote seaside towns. Her story also illustrates the worst examples of the province’s favourite bloodsport: partisan politics. In 1973, she was purchased by the provincial government and refitted as a floating maritime museum; her political legacy soon included innumerable blunders and cover-ups, mutiny, a stowaway, and perhaps the ghost of a sealing captain.

St. Patrick's Hall Schools, the creation of the Benevolent Irish Society (BIS), was the first modern school in Newfoundland. No ordinary educational establishment, it played a primary part in raising the Catholic young men of St. John's from the degrading poverty that was their lot in the early 19th century to economic affluence and to positions of importance in society in the 20th century. In Newfoundland itself, St.