In the traditional Algonquian world, the windigo is the spirit of selfishness, which can transform a person into a murderous cannibal. Native peoples over a vast stretch of North America—from Virginia in the south to Labrador in the north, from Nova Scotia in the east to Minnesota in the west—believed in the windigo, not only as a myth told in the darkness of winter, but also as a real danger.Drawing on oral narratives, fur traders' journals, trial records, missionary accounts, and...

Of the more than 40 million people around the world currently living with HIV/AIDS, two million live in Latin America and the Caribbean. In an engaging chronicle illuminated by his travels in the region, Shawn Smallman shows how the varying histories and cultures of the nations of Latin America have influenced the course of the pandemic. He demonstrates that a disease spread in an intimate manner is profoundly shaped by impersonal forces.In Latin America, Smallman explains, the AID...

For more than half a century, the Brazilian army used fear and censorship to erase aspects of its history from public memory and to create its own political myths. Although the military had remarkable success in promoting its version of events, recent democratization has allowed scholars access to new materials with which to challenge the “official story.” Drawing on oral histories, secret police documents, memoirs of dissident officers, army records, and other sources only recently made a...

In a series of reflections focused on his hard-working Mennonite family and touching on childhood exploits from shoplifting and go-kart racing to the fear of dying (which arises during the rehearsal for a school Christmas concert), Lloyd Ratzlaff takes readers on a journey from youth to philosophical maturity. Combining elegy and joyful nostalgia in these poetic essays, Ratzlaff recounts his youthful struggles before going on to analyze his first marriage and his time in seminary and as a ...

Despite being neighbouring provinces with long ranching histories, British Columbia and Alberta saw their ranching techniques develop quite differently. As most ranching styles were based on one of the two dominant styles in use south of the border, BC ranchers tended to adopt the California style whereas Alberta took its lead from Texas. But the different practices actually go back much further. Cattle cultures in southwestern Spain, sub-Saharan Africa and the British highlands all shaped...

The Deaf House is Joanne Weber’s life story. It illustrates the work and passion of a woman who grew up deaf and became an advocate for the deaf. It is a story of pain, loss and defeat balanced with joy, gain, and victory. Joanne Weber’s creative memoir, shows how deafness can be a brutal oppression of the mind. Her torment of not knowing exactly where she belonged in Deaf culture is revealed with blunt honesty, and in facing it, she constructed in her imagination “a deaf house”, where dea...

Unlock the power of the songs in your pocketMaybe you blast the speakers when you need to get pumped up. If that's all you do, though, you're not taking full advantage of the way music can help you. Listen to a slower track first and the one-two punch of the playlist can push you even higher. Overflowing with easy-to-use tips like these, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life is the first book to offer scientifically proven methods for using your favorite music to enhance your...

Stephen Reid has grown old in prison and seen more than his share of its solitude, its vicious cycles, and its subculture relationships. He has participated in the economics of contraband, the incredible escapes, the intimacies of torture, the miscarriages of justice, and witnessed the innocent souls whose childhood destinies doomed them to prison life. He has learned that everything is bearable, that the painful separation of family, children, and friend is tolerable, and that sorrow must...

"The Executioner's Bible" tells the story of these working-class men who carried out this gruesome profession until its abolition in the late 1960's. Despite often being unassuming and quiet professionals, men like Albert Pierrepoint, William Billington and many other Chief and Assistant executioners made a name for themselves in a world hungry for salacious and gruesome news. Read about the bungling hangmen sacked for incompetence; drunken executioners dismissed for brawling; one hangman ...

Winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for FictionMontreal during the turbulent mid-1980s: Chernobyl has set Geiger counters thrumming across the globe, HIV/AIDS is cutting a deadly swath through the gay population worldwide, and locally, tempers are flaring over the recent codification of French as the official language of Quebec. Hiding out in a seedy apartment near campus, Alex Fratarcangeli (“Don’t worry. . . . I can’t even pronounce it myself”), an awkward, thirt...

From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth, the New York Times –bestselling biographical novel of the concubine who became China's last empress.In Imperial Woman, Pulitzer Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck brings to life the amazing story of Tzu Hsi, who rose from concubine status to become the working head of the Qing Dynasty.Born from a humble background,...

Masterful, ambitious, and groundbreaking, this is a major new history of our country by one of our most respected thinkers and historians -- a book every Canadian should own.From the acclaimed biographer and historian Conrad Black comes the definitive history of Canada -- a revealing, groundbreaking account of the people and events that shaped a nation.Spanning 874 to 2014, and beginning from Canada's first inhabitants and the early explorers, this masterful ...