National Network for Equitable Library Service

Ann Hansen stood trial as one of the so-called "Squamish Five." Sentenced to life in prison, she served seven years. Now she tells her story for the first time. Direct Action captures the excitement and indignation of the counterculture of the early '80s. Missile tests were fuelling a new arms race. Reckless megaprojects threatened the global environment. Alienation, punk rock, and militancy were on the rise. Hansen and her fellow urban guerillas believed that sabotaging government and corporate property could help turn things around.

Toronto's Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people's resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a working-class historian and a poor people's activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance.

Lunch-Bucket Lives takes the reader on a bumpy ride through the history of Hamilton's working people from the 1890s to the 1930s. It ambles along city streets, peers through kitchen doors and factory windows, marches up the steps of churches and fraternal halls, slips into saloons and dance halls, pauses to hear political speeches, and, above all, listens for the stories of men, women, youths, and children from families where people relied mainly on wages to survive.

The generation to which Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged spanned more than the length of their lifetimes. That generation fought heroically in world wars and at the same time raised children under a paternalistic federal regime that denied both a culture and a heritage. The Crowshoes regained their heritage and shared it with the larger community, gaining respect from all the people with whom they were in contact and becoming articulate representatives and the holders of stories, legends, and customs.

Darwin's Moving introduces readers to the colourful characters who populate the furniture moving trade, a male-dominated world of labour with relatively high pay and no need for education of any sort. Movers have a unique window into the private spaces of the city as they perform their difficult and delicate job inside all manner of homes, from government-subsidized housing developments to multi-million dollar McMansions. Taylor Lambert intriguingly explores class and work in a city that would rather focus on the wealth and prosperity brought to it by the oil and gas industry.

Myrna Kostash's follow up to The Frog Lake Reader is an engaging and exciting overview of the rivalry between fur trading companies in Nineteenth Century Canada.

On a warm spring day in June of 1914, two hundred and thirty-five men went down into the depths of the Hillcrest mine found in Alberta?s Crowsnest Pass. Only forty-six would make it out alive. The largest coal-mining disaster in Canadian history, the fateful tale of the Hillcrest Mine is finally captured in startling detail by Stephen Hanon. A deft examination of the coal mining industry in an Alberta just on the cusp of the Great War, The Devil?s Breath is a startling recollection of heroism and human courage in the face of overwhelming calamity.

South Away is an adventure story of the author's bicycle trip with her sister from Terrace, BC along the West coast to (almost) the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Meaghan Marie Hackinen experiences apprehension and determination as she camps in the dense forests of northern Vancouver Island and in frigid Mexican deserts; encounters strange men, suicidal highways and monster trucks; strong winds and violent storms; flat ties and broken spokes. Her couch-surfacing adventures provide an insight into the "kindness of strangers" en route.

Nonfiction author Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a multi-layered perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interivews with historians, Kostash provides a panoramic view of a tragedy often overshadowed by Louis Riel's rebellion of the same year.

Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Canada is just over thirty years old, if one begins counting from the premier of Linda Griffiths and Maria Campbell's Jessica in Saskatoon and the establishment of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. Since those contemporaneous events in 1982, the Canadian community of Indigenous theatre artists has grown and inspired one another.