National Network for Equitable Library Service

J. B. (Jack) Taylor (1917-1970) was an important figure in the history of Banff and western Canada’s artistic community. Inspired by the locale, Taylor spent his career striving to depict the idea of the mountain, moving over time from traditional representations of nature to an intuitive perception of the essential elements of landscape - rock, water, and sky. Always, he sought to capture his ideas through the development of a new visual language. He applied this new vernacular to a range of studies encompassing portraiture through to other landscapes.

Marion Nicoll (1909-1985) is a widely acknowledged and important founder of Alberta art and certainly one of a dedicated few that brought abstraction into practice in the province. Her life and career is a story of determination, of dedication to her vision regardless of professional or personal challenges. Nicoll became the first woman instructor hired at the Provincial Institute of Art and Technology (now the Alberta College of Art and Design) - and although limited to teaching craft and design, she became a significant mentor for generations of artists.

Mentioned in BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24281727 Benjamin Leigh Smith discovered and named dozens of islands in the Arctic but published no account of his pioneering explorations. He refused public accolades and sent stand-ins to deliver the results of his work to scientific societies. Yet, the Royal Geographic Society's Sir Clements R. Markham referred to him as a polar explorer of the first rank.

The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977 is the first biography of one of Canada's most remarkable botanists. Alf Erling Porsild (1901-1977) grew up on the Arctic Station in West Greenland and later served as curator of botany at the National Museum of Canada. He collected thousands of specimens, greatly enlarging the National Herbarium and making it a superb research centre.

Micro Miracle is the moving account of a first-time mother whose expectations of childbirth and parenting are dramatically altered when she gives birth sixteen weeks prematurely to Madeline. Weighing just over a pound, with eyes fused shut, and thin, fragile skin, Madeline could fit in a hand, but she's too ill to be touched. Unflinchingly honest, Micro Miracle is a true story of a medical triumph.

Fleeing the increasing pressure to settle down, a restless young man heeds the call of the road and sets out on a meandering four-month bus trip from Dawson, Yukon, to Key West, Florida. Continental Drifter is the record of that journey.Although a journalist by training, Dave Cameron is reluctant to play the role. He hopes merely to observe quietly, to collect experience.

Out 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.

After her marriage of 25 years ended badly, Linda Kenyon was determined to never put herself in the way of a broken heart again. But then she met an extraordinary man, and in an act of great courage -- or foolishness -- decided to sell everything she owned and sail across the ocean with him. Sea Over Bow: Crossing the North Atlantic is the account of that journey. It takes readers to the middle of the ocean, a place most people have only imagined. It describes the trail of sparkling blue-green light that traces their path across the water at night.

What happens when a 56-year-old fiction writer decides to ditch it all and attend professional pastry chef school for a year? In writing that brings to mind the work of journalist/chef Michael Ruhlman, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School tells the story of eleven months of whipping, spreading and creaming in the pursuit of perfection. When Denise Roig set out to do this -- a lark, she thought -- she had no idea what it would cost and what it would give back. Butter Cream is the chronicle of an intense year of learning and tasting, dramas at the stove and in the locker room.

Some people claim they'd like to walk away from their lives -- Shelley A. Leedahl had the nerve to do it. Was it selfishness, or self-preservation? Drawing upon childhood memories, hikes, road trips, foreign travel, her self-imposed exile to a prairie village, fortuitous meetings with strangers, and her compulsion for starting over, again and again, Leedahl has crafted a provocative and candid collection of essays that explore the implicit complexities and contradictions when personal and professional lives both complement and clash.