National Network for Equitable Library Service

Here is one of the most unique and fascinating food histories in the world, exploring the diverse culinary history of Canada. Winner of the 2007 Canadian Culinary Book Award for Canadian Food Culture In Canadians at Table we learn about lessons of survival from the First Nations, the foods that fuelled fur traders, and the adaptability of early settlers to their new environment.

In the early 20th century the Canadian North was a mystery, but the Canadian military stepped in, and this book explores its historic activities in Canada’s Arctic. Is the Canadian North a state of mind or simply the lands and waters above the 60th parallel? In searching for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in the 19th century, Britain’s Royal Navy mapped and charted most of the Arctic Archipelago. In 1874 Canadian Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie agreed to take up sovereignty of all the Arctic, if only to keep the United States and Tsarist Russia out.

One of Canada’s best-known and most-honoured biographers turns to the raw material of his own life in Writing History. A university professor, prolific scholar, public intellectual, and frank critic of the world he has known, Michael Bliss draws on extensive personal diaries to describe a life that has taken him from small-town Ontario in the 1950s to international recognition for his books in Canadian and medical history.

The Arctic is ruled by ice. For Inuit, it is a highway, a hunting ground, and the platform on which life is lived. While the international community argues about sovereignty, security, and resource development at the top of the world, the Inuit remind us that they are the original inhabitants of this magnificent place - and that it is undergoing a dangerous transformation. The Arctic ice is melting at an alarming rate and Inuit have become the direct witnesses and messengers of climate change.

In the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire "the Beast" because it behaved in seemingly sinister and often unpredictable ways. Many of them hoped that they would never see anything like it again. Yet it's not a stretch to suggest that megafires like the Beast have become the new normal. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands- a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we have rarely seen before.

In Sister to Courage, Wanda takes us inside the world she shared with Viola and ten other brothers and sisters. Through touching and often hilarious stories, she traces the roots of courage and ambition, good fun and dignity, of the household that produced Viola Desmond. Tough and compassionate, Viola shines through beyond the moment she was carried out of Roseland movie theatre for refusing to sit I the blacks-only section. Viola emerges as a defender of family and a successful entrepreneur whose momentum was blocked by racism.

The intriguing criminal cases of pioneer forensics expert John Vance, "Canada's Sherlock Holmes." Heralded internationally as "Canada's Sherlock Holmes," John F.C.B. Vance (1884-1964) was Vancouver's, and British Columbia's, first forensic investigator. Despite his innocuous demeanour, during his forty-two-year career Vance helped police detectives to determine murder from suicide as well as solve hit-and-runs, safe-crackings, and some of the most sensational murder cases of the twentieth century.

Big, skilled, mean, and nearly indestructible, Howe dominated hockey for decades. Today any bruising forward hopes to be compared with the guy who wore number 9 for Detroit for so many years. His incredible twenty consecutive seasons among the top five scorers in the NHL. Scoring 100 points after the age of forty. Playing for Team Canada against the Russians while sharing the ice with his two sons. What seems even less likely is that another player will suit up as a professional hockey player in six different decades.

Index of shipwrecks. History from the time of the landing of the Spaniards and Captain Cook.

Felix Opatowski is only fifteen years old when he takes on the perilous job of smuggling goods out of the Lodz ghetto in exchange for food for his starving family. It is a skill that will serve him well as he tries to stay alive in Nazi-occupied Poland. With dogged determination, Felix endures months of harrowing conditions in the ghetto and slave labour camps until he is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the spring of 1943.