National Network for Equitable Library Service

Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who traveled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and "embrothered the peoples" they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.

The Underground Railroad was the passage to freedom for many slaves, but it was rife with dangers. While there were dedicated conductors and safe houses, there were also arduous nights in the mountains and days in threatening towns. For those who made it to Midnight, the code name given to Detroit, the Detroit River became their Jordan. And Canada became their "land of Canaan," the Promised Land where they could live freely in various black settlements under the protection of British law. One of these settlements was known as Dawn.

Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes - as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag - has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the 20th century.

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic.

The greatest story never told, this formidable and gorgeous biography documents the amazing and controversial short life of Calixa Lavallée - the composer of O Canada - and the tumult of 19th-century North America. The story of O Canada is one of the great unknowns of our collective lives. No longer. This formidable and gorgeous tale documents the history of this song of a nation, from its origins in French Canada in the years just after Confederation to the surprisingly controversial story of its adoption as Canada's national anthem 100 years later.

There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter.

Shortlisted for the 2020 RBC Taylor Prize
From one of the world's most engaging science journalists, a groundbreaking and wonder-filled look at the hidden things that shape our lives in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways.
Our naked eyes see only a thin sliver of reality.
We are blind in comparison to the X-rays that peer through skin, the mass spectrometers that detect the dead inside the living, or the high-tech surveillance systems that see with artificial intelligence.

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. Yet the idea of of biology as destiny dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined.

This classic of contemporary science writing by a Nobel Prize–winning physicist explains what happened when the universe began, and how we know. According to the latest cosmological knowledge, Weinberg describes the universe as originating in fractions of a second. He divides the early universe into six frames, some lasting less than a second while others extend for more than a minute, and details the incredible energetic reactions that took place within each frame. This is an excellent primer for anyone interested in the beginning of the world by one of our best science writers.

Champion of a people or traitorous rabble-rouser? Political visionary or religious lunatic? Louis Riel is one of the most ambiguous figures in Canadian history, a man who stood and fell for the Métis nation. Read about the fascinating western icon in this well-paced biography. The doomed struggle of Louis Riel and his Métis people against the new Canadian government is a story rich in drama and cultural change.