National Network for Equitable Library Service

Everyone has a story. A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes one needs words as well. Ordinary People Extraordinary Lives does just that. I've combined a portrait with asking people four thought-provoking questions about themselves. The portrait and their answers are a compelling read about life, its challenges, and each individual's journey. At the end of each chapter, each person makes one final observation learned from their journey.

A riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II, The Art Spy uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the world's most treasured masterpieces. On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans' final line of defense.

The perfect antidote to the toxicity of the current productivity narrative, this collection of essays on creativity features 21 Canadian and international writers, providing warmth, support, camaraderie, and empathy. In a world that worships productivity, creating for art's sake is seen as romantic and nearly indefensible. For anyone who has ever struggled to honour their artistic impulses, Bad Artist offers an antidote to this toxic productivity narrative.

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy—the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world's most famous libraries and museums.

The vividly told, gloriously illustrated memoir of an artist born with disabilities who searches for freedom and connection in a society afraid of strange bodies. “Golem Girl is luminous; a profound portrait of the artist as a young—and mature—woman; an unflinching social history of disability over the last six decades; and a hymn to life, love, family, and spirit.” —David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas. In 1958, Riva Lehrer is born with spina bifida and expected not to survive.

From one of the most beloved authors of our time—more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone—a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home. “Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home.

A propulsive work of narrative nonfiction about how the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, how the robbery made the portrait the most famous artwork in the world—and how the painting by Leonardo da Vinci should never have existed at all. On a hot August day in Paris, just over a century ago, a desperate guard burst into the office of the director of the Louvre and shouted, "La Joconde, c’est partie!" The Mona Lisa, she’s gone! No one knew who was behind the heist. Was it an international gang of thieves? Was it an art-hungry American millionaire?

Finalist for Toronto Book Awards. The inside story of the grassroots fight to have a suicide barrier erected on Toronto's "bridge of death." Most Torontonians have no idea their city once hosted the second most popular suicide magnet in North America, behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Since its completion in 1918, more than four hundred people jumped to their death from the Bloor Viaduct, which spans the cavernous Don Valley.

Michael Higgins broadens our understanding of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by bringing science, engineering, and technology together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria) have been a source of fascination for more than two thousand years.

The Cave Painters is a vivid introduction to the spectacular cave paintings of France and Spain-the individuals who rediscovered them, theories about their origins, their splendor and mystery. Gregory Curtis makes us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings and tells us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people of some 40,000 years ago. He takes us through various theories-that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious purposes, or was clan mythology-examining the ways interpretations have changed over time.