National Network for Equitable Library Service

Tony Robinson-Smith, his wife Nadya, and ten Bhutanese college students set out to run 578 kilometres (360 miles) across the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. Joined by a stray dog, they slogged over five mountain passes, bathed in ice-clogged streams, ate over log fires, and stopped at every store, restaurant, guesthouse, and dzong to raise money for the Tarayana Foundation. The “Tara-thon” was the first endeavour of its kind and gave 350 village children the chance to go to school.

Buttressed by a wealth of new, collaborative research methods and technologies, the contributors of this collection examine women's writing in Canada, past and present, with 11 essays in English and 5 in French. Regenerations was born out of the inaugural conference of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory held at the Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, and exemplifies the progress of radically interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and publishing efforts surrounding Canadian women's writing.

Trudeau appeared to enjoy the encounter. He stood his ground while escaping projectiles, including a tomato… In this insightful and lively history, Liberal insider Darryl Raymaker recalls the attempt to broker “a marriage from hell” between the federal Liberal Party and Alberta’s Social Credit government in the late 1960s. Raymaker uses his deep connections and backroom knowledge to trace the tangled political relationships that developed when charismatic statesman Pierre Trudeau confronted the forces of oil and agriculture in Canada’s west.

Bill 6, the government of Alberta’s contentious farm workers’ safety legislation, sparked public debate as no other legislation has done in recent years. The Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act provides a right to work safely and a compensation system for those killed or injured at work, similar to other provinces. In nine essays, contributors to Farm Workers in Western Canada place this legislation in context. They look at the origins, work conditions, and precarious lives of farm workers in terms of larger historical forces such as colonialism, land rights, and racism.

I broke all the rules that my dad gave me. It was he who had given me, in part, the confidence to think of my life as being worthy to mix with those of the geniuses. —Heather O’Neill With generosity and wry humour, novelist Heather O’Neill recalls several key lessons she learned in childhood from her father: memories and stories about how crime does pay, why one should never keep a diary, and that it is good to beware of clowns, among other things.

Mary Schäffer was a photographer, writer, botanical painter, and mapmaker from Philadelphia, well known for her travels in the Canadian Rockies and Jasper at the turn of the twentieth century. In Searching for Mary Schäffer, Colleen Skidmore takes up Schäffer’s own resonant themes—women and wilderness, travel and science—to ask new questions, tell new stories, and reassess the persona of Mary Schäffer imagined in more recent times.

Tar Wars offers a critical inside look at how leading image-makers negotiate escalating tensions between continuous economic growth mandated by a globalized economic system and its unsustainable environmental costs. As place branding assumes paramount importance in an increasingly global, visual, and ecologically conscious society, an international battle unfolds over Alberta’s bituminous sands. This battle pits independent documentary filmmakers against professional communicators employed by government and the oil industry.

“It was a different crow, but the same crow, you understand? Because there is only one Crow. God made them all black and identical-looking because there is no reason for them to be different birds. That’s why you can never kill a crow, because it lives forever. Crow never dies!” — James Itsi For over 50,000 years, the Great Hunt has shaped human existence, creating a vital spiritual reality where people, animals, and the land share intimate bonds. Author Larry Frolick takes the reader deep into one of the last refuges of hunting societies: Canada’s far north.

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound—the founders of vorticism—undertook an unprecedented analysis of the present, its technologies, communication, politics, and architecture. The essays in Counterblasting Canada trace the influence of vorticism on Marshall McLuhan and Canadian Modernism.

Rural communities, often the first indicators of economic downturns, play an important role in planning for development and sustainability. Increasingly, these communities are compelled to reimagine the paths that lead not only to economic success, but also to the cultural, social, environmental, and institutional pillars of sustainability. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, there are many examples of such innovation and creativity, and many communities that seek out new ways to build the collaboration, capacity, and autonomy necessary to survive and flourish.