National Network for Equitable Library Service

A journalistic memoir by a lapsed evangelical Christian that examines how the ecological crisis is shifting the ground of religious faith. Our species is leaving scars on the earth that will last for millennia. How has religious ideology helped bring humanity to the brink of catastrophe? What new expressions of faith might help us respond with grace, self-sacrifice, and love? What will spark our compassion, transcend our divisions, and spur us to action?

A wildfire of a debut memoir by internationally recognized French/Cree/Iroquois journalist Brandi Morin set to transform the narrative around Indigenous Peoples. Brandi Morin is known for her clear-eyed and empathetic reporting on Indigenous oppression in North America. She is also a survivor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis and uses her experience to tell the stories of those who did not survive the rampant violence.

It was February 2020 when Ed O’Loughlin unexpectedly heard that Charlotte, a friend from the old days, had just died young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family, and his career as a foreign correspondent and novelist in a colder new light. This search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O’Loughlin’s year of confinement.

Inspired by the African philosophy of Ubuntu — the importance of community over the individual — and outraged by injustice, Dora Akunyili took on fraudulent drug manufacturers whose products killed millions, including her sister. A woman in a man’s world, she was elected and became a cabinet minister, but she had to deal with political manoeuvrings, death threats, and an assassination attempt for defending the voiceless. She suffered for it, as did her marriage and six children.

A captivating and candid memoir from one of the most beloved and colorful figures in Toronto Blue Jays history. John Gibbons is one of the most beloved figures in Toronto Blue Jays history. Over 11 years and two separate managerial stints with the team, he endeared himself to fans with his folksy manner and his frequent battles with umpires: “Here comes Gibby!” Winning helped too. Under Gibbons’s management, the Jays made the American League Championship Series in 2015, ending a 22-year playoff drought; then they did it again in 2016.

Brigitte Gabriel lost her childhood to militant Islam. In 1975 she was ten years old and living in Southern Lebanon when militant Muslims from throughout the Middle East poured into her country and declared jihad against the Lebanese Christians. Lebanon was the only Christian influenced country in the Middle East, and the Lebanese Civil War was the first front in what has become the worldwide jihad of fundamentalist Islam against non-Muslim peoples. For seven years, Brigitte and her parents lived in an underground bomb shelter.

David Carpenter's collection of essays explores a city boy's love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us--or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world?

In The Sunday Book, Michael Trussler uses memoir to excavate and explore a range of inner lives, all lived at different speeds. With essays touching on the meaning of the Holocaust in the twenty-first century to confronting the complexities of being a parent in the Anthropocene, Trussler's interconnected essays are united by his lived experience with a rare learning disability. The Sunday Book freshly engages with fundamental existential problems such as free.

Through poetry, letters, essays, and interviews, The Life Sentences of Rik McWhinney relates the harrowing experiences of a man who spent nearly thirty-five years in the Canadian prison system. Rik McWhinney spent thirty-four years and four months in Canada's federal penitentiaries--sixteen of those in solitary confinement. His incarceration began in the 1970s, as a system-wide war was raging over the implementation of penal reforms.

A residential school survivor finds his way back to his language and culture through his family's traditional stories. When reflecting on forces that have shaped his life, Solomon Ratt says his education was interrupted by his schooling. Torn from his family at the age of six, Ratt was placed into the residential school system-a harsh, institutional world, operated in a language he could not yet understand, far from the love and comfort of home and family.