The cult of eroticism is a pervasive force in modern society, affecting almost every aspect of our daily lives. In this book, Paul Rutherford argues that this phenomenon is a product of one of the major commercial and political enterprises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the creation of desire - for sex, for wealth, and for entertainment.A World Made Sexy examines museum exhibitions, art, books, magazines, films, and television to explore the popular rise of e...

The city below the hill is a detailed investigation of social conditions in a working class quarter of Montreal during the 1890s. Based on a house-to-house survey of the neighbourhood, this study catalogues and analyses the life of working people after the first years of rapid industrialization.Sir Herbert Brown Ames was one of the first to recognize that urbanization was inevitable and to set about improving the quality of city life. In this study, first published in book...

With nearly sixty percent of Americans initially against a pre-emptive war without sanction from the United Nations, and even higher anti-war numbers in most other nations of the world, the 2003 war against Iraq quickly became an enormous public relations challenge for the George W. Bush administration. The subject of Weapons of Mass Persuasion is a war in which American patriotism became so mired in commercial jingoism that the demarcations between entertainment and political con...

The Adman’s Dilemma is a cultural biography that explores the rise and fall of the advertising man as a figure who became effectively a licensed deceiver in the process of governing the lives of American consumers. Apparently this personage was caught up in a contradiction, both compelled to deceive yet supposed to tell the truth. It was this moral condition and its consequences that made the adman so interesting to critics, novelists, and eventually filmmakers.The biograp...

Capital. Critique of Political Economy (German: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie) by Karl Marx is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production, in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Marx did not live to publish the planned second and third parts, but the...

The first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister in half a century by one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.The first volume of Richard Gwyn’s definitive biography of John A. Macdonald follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-...

Roaming from America to Europe to Australia, Lights Out is a trenchant examination of the tensions between a resurgent Islam and a fainthearted west - and of the implications for liberty in the years ahead. In 2007, the Canadian Islamic Congress brought three suits against Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling newsweekly, for running an excerpt from Steyn's bestselling book America Alone, plus other flagrantly Islamophobic columns by the author. A y...

Canada has no better interpreter than prolific writer and thinker John Ralston Saul. Here he argues that Canada did not begin in 1867; indeed, its foundation was laid by two visionary men, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin. The two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada, respectively, worked together after the 1841 Union to lead a reformist movement for responsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor.But it was during the "Great Ministry" of 184...

Winner of the Writer's Trust of Canada / Samara's Best Canadian Political Book of the Last 25 YearsPart memoir, part investigative journalism, this is a shocking and controversial look at the corruption of Canada’s human rights commissions.“On January 11, 2008, I was summoned to a 90-minute government interrogation. My crime? As the publisher of Western Standard magazine, I had reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed to illustrate a news story. I...

There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism...

In a country this diverse, 'culture' has different meanings. Vance tells a story from the wind-swept Arctic where a stranded Innu woman, fighting to survive, took the time to decorate her clothing with rich designs. A British explorer was amazed at her efforts, but Vance reminds us of the inseparable connection between life and art in Inuit culture (the Innu word for 'breathe' also means 'to make poetry,' and both derive from the word for 'the soul'). No surprise that Aboriginal culture began...

This anthology takes the ever-controversial discussion of pornography out of solely academic circles; it expands the questions about porn that academics might tackle and opens the conversation to those who know it best—the creators and users of porn.Features essays on non-traditional issues in porn, including celebrity sex tapes, virtual sex, S&M, homosexual porn, and technology’s impact on the porn industryFeatures fascinating insights from psychologists, a lawyer,...