"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present, comfort and tyranny, atrocity and family, ...

Fast's fascinating biography of Joseph Broz, known to the world as Tito, including his rise to power and his remarkable stand against fascismThe world was mired in the Second World War when Howard Fast wrote The Incredible Tito. Upon the book's publication in 1944, there was still no united Yugoslavia, the Axis controlled most of Europe, and D-Day was only in the planning stages. In the Balkans, Tito was a beacon of hope against the advancing Nazis. He led...

These fresh, fire-bright poems are barbed blooms petalled with wise cautions and unexpected joy. Kevin ConnollyFlaunting a painterly attention to the seductive textures of menacehere are portraits, still lifes, fables and allegorical tableaux that enrapture the ear with the textures of language itself. Suzanne BuffamRichardson writes for the ear, eye and mouthyoull want to read these lush poems out loud. Matthea Harvey

The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman’s Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attrac...

A CANADIAN POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR, THE NATIONAL POSTWINNER OF THE PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARDAlexandra Oliver has many arrows in her quiver-all of them sharpened to a fine point. This is an excellent and entertaining collection.”-TIMOTHY STEELEIn Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, Alexandra Oliver zooms in on the inertias, anxieties, comedies, cruelties, and epiphanies of domestic life:They all had names like Jennifer or Ly...

The complete story of the pilots who 'made ace' while flying the original MiG fighters.The MiG-1/3 family of fighters was built to satisfy a Soviet Air Force requirement for an advanced, fast, high-altitude fighter. Entering service in the spring of 1941, the problematic MiG-1 had its handling issues rectified with the hasty production of the MiG-3. Many of these were destroyed on the ground when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa. Nevertheless, enough examp...

*Includes pictures of Peter and important people, places, and events.*Includes a Bibliography for further reading.*Includes a Table of Contents. “I have conquered an empire, but have not been able to conquer myself.” Peter the GreatA lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of historys most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors Russian Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of Russias most important men ...

Julie Hemment provides a fresh perspective on the controversial nationalist youth projects that have proliferated in Russia in the Putin era, examining them from the point of view of their participants and offering provocative insights into their origins and significance. The pro-Kremlin organization Nashi ("Ours") and other state-run initiatives to mobilize Russian youth have been widely reviled in the West, seen as Soviet throwbacks and evidence of Russia's authoritarian turn. By contras...

fur(l) parachute claims as its surrogate the Old English poem "Wulf and Eadwacer." Declining from a mutant echo of this nineteen-line fragment that appears in the tenth century Exeter manuscript as a text that might be a riddle, or an example of a woman's lament, or even a broken elegy, the language of fur(l) parachute is further disrupted by such texts as instructions on how to make a parachute lure for fly fishing or the misreading of mathematical knot diagrams. Wryly troubling origins, ...

Increasingly known as the “poet’s poet,” Governor General’s Award–winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Hall...

Drawing on a rich trove of focus group data, interviews, and textual sources, Elaine Weiner's Market Dreams powerfully captures the varied responses of female managers and factory workers in the Czech Republic to their country's transition from socialism to capitalism. Her work, rooted in sociology and comparative feminism, is an important advance for the literature on women in Eastern Europe."Market Dreams is a conceptually-sophisticated and empirically-rich acco...

From "Anna's Lovers"Our houses glow both from withinand on the outside: their night lightsand an almost perfectand wintry moon.The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherit...