National Network for Equitable Library Service

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.

Kathryn Willcock and her sisters grew up in logging camps on the coast of B.C. in the 1960s when children were set loose to play in the wilderness, women kept rifles next to the wood stove, and loggers risked their lives every single day. The author's tales of grizzly bears, American tourists, and a couple of terrified gangsters, along with the wisdom of Indigenous elders, pour off the page like warm syrup on a stack of cookhouse hotcakes.

"In 2019, the United Conservative Party, under the leadership of Jason Kenney, unseated the New Democratic Party to form the provincial government of Alberta. A restoration of conservative power in a province that had seen the Progressive Conservatives win every election from 1971-2015, UCP quickly began to make political waves. This is the first scholarly analysis of the 2019 election and the first years of the UCP government, with special focus on the path of Jason Kenney's rise to, and fall from, provincial political power.

The inspiring biography of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui whose handmade sculptures, created from discarded bottle tops, have received international acclaim and been showcased around the world. "If you touch something, you leave a charge on it and anybody else touching it connects with you, in a way." — El Anatsui El Anatsui has always written his own story. As an art student at the University of Ghana, El noticed that the artists and styles he was studying were grounded in European traditions.

Discover the stories behind 15 of the twentieth century's key inventions in this fun and informative treasury of trailblazing women, who each made a unique contribution to the history of science and technology. Car heaters...Monopoly...Disposable diapers...The dishwasher...Kevlar...Maritime flares... Anti-reflective glass...Wifi...Syringes...Submarine periscopes...Diagnostic tests...Lifeboats...Windshield wipers...Ebooks...What do each of these revolutionary inventions have in common? They were all pioneered by women !