Playing Hard is a tribute to the power of play in all its forms — a searching personal account of how play, games, and sports sanctify life and give it meaning. In this moving and wide-ranging examination, Peter Unwin reflects on life and relationships through countless acts of play and the many unexpected places it is found.Through a shared love of games, the author reconnects with his terminally ill father and is exposed to the complexities of his father’s past, of his e...

This textbook provides a greater understanding of the lived effect that social policies have on service users and carers. While service user and carer involvement has become more and more prominent in social policy over recent years, it is rarely the case that the perspectives of service users and carers goes beyond consultation to truly meaningful involvement and co-production. This book is unique in that it has ten substantive co-produced chapters with service users and carers who have d...

Paul Prescot’s desire to catalogue and comprehend the aboriginal rock paintings of the Canadian Shield is told through the eyes of the woman he loves, and who, for her own reasons, accompanies him on his travels to the deep north. Her journeys with her husband, and then alone, returning to the north shore of Lake Superior to commend his ashes to the water, draw her deeper into a history that, while foreign to them both, seems to offer a meaningful alternative to a world that has gone wrong...

Social work with children and families is constantly in the headlines and social workers′ decisions are subject to ever increasing scrutiny at all levels. This aspirational book supports students and newly qualified social workers and suggests practical ways in which they might thrive, rather than just survive, in practiceWritten at a time when Social Work Reform Board and the Munro Enquiry are charged with looking at issues of effectiveness within children and families social work...

To mention the names Ernst Gombrich, Nikolaus Pevsner, Joseph Conrad, Nancy Astor, C.L.R. James and Lucian Freud is to give but a brief glimpse of the impact immigrants to this country have made on our national culture and character.Indeed, these people have been crucial to the development of recent British history and have been indispensable for the way we live now. By reproducing the Times obituaries of over one hundred of the most important of these, the reader ...

This essential new textbook meets the challenges faced by those who work with children in order to provide safe and effective practice. It identifies the ways in which social work and psychology need to work together to achieve this. Misca and Unwin reflect on the need for 'research mindedness' in social work education, and offer an invaluable critical analysis of current knowledge of child and adolescent psychology theory and research to help inform best social work practice.Wheth...

A quirky, comical and provocative novel… complete with robotic flying chickens. Following a dramatic break-up with his long-suffering wife, Jack Vesoovian retreats to a Hamilton rooming house, where he impulsively decides to take to the road to track down his life-long colleague, Petronius Totem. Petronius Totem has disappeared following the unlikely success of his memoir, Ten Thousand Busted Chunks, praised for its searing honesty. But when it is discovered to be a pack of lies, Petronius...

Successful social work practice is underpinned by knowledge, theories and research findings from a range of related disciplines, key among which is psychology. This timely book offers a grounded and engaging guide to psychology's vital role at the heart of contemporary social work practice.The book skilfully addresses some of the central theoretical developments in psychology from an applied perspective, and explains how these make essential contributions to the methods and theory ...

A joyous romp through the back pages of Canadian quirkiness, Canadian Folk provides a fresh look at the saints, sinners, oddballs, and outright nutbars who have populated the Canadian landscape.They were perpetually northbound or south; they were inveterate walkers, or world class runners, millionaires in ill-advised Citroen half-tracks. The restless characters who spanned those miles and who fill the pages of this book were fuelled by the ambitions, the doubts, and the ce...

Young Robert Pachal crosses Canada by train with his brotherinlaw’s coffin, bearing witness to a way of life that will never be seen again. When he arrives in Barry’s Bay, he unwittingly sets in motion one of the final and most tragic events in pioneer Canada.

Since its first publication in 1985, The Grey Islands has become a classic of Canadian wilderness writing to set beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Using a broad range of forms and styles - lyric, anecdote, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost story, tall tale - Steffler relates the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Often comic, and always deeply passionate and sensuous, The Grey Islands tells of t...

Inspired by postcards found in a 150-year-old house in Coley's Point. Triffie and Kit are closer than sisters. But for two girls growing up in a tiny Newfoundland outport at the dawn of the twentieth century, having the same dreams and ambitions doesn't mean life will hand you the same opportunities. A teacher's certificate offers Kit the chance to explore the wider world, while Triffie is left behind, living the life she never wanted with the man she swore she'd never marry. The letters s...