Dewey Divas 2019

Dewey Divas 2019

Dewey Divas and Dudes Fall 2019

Four representatives from Ampersand Inc., Canadian Manda Group, Harper Collins Canada and Martin & Associates presented their recommended reads of titles to be released for fall 2019. This summary focuses on the non-fiction titles presented.

In My Own Moccasins by Helen Knott. Biography 2019. Canadian
https://whitby.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=in+my+own+moccasins&searchType=smart
Helen Knott has been a contributor to essay collections that address issues surrounding water rights for clean drinking water, and the demands of the resource development industry and Indigenous communities. She also wrote about the roots of violence and how it diminishes life from an Indigenous perspective.

As, a highly accomplished Indigenous woman, she seems to have it all. But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption. Her journey exposes the legacy of colonialism, while reclaiming her spirit.

Wild Game: A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity by Adrienne Brodeur. Biography/Personal Memoir, 2019

It was suggested that this personal memoir reads like a novel. When Adrienne was fourteen, her mother woke her at midnight to tell about her blossoming affair with their neighbour. Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.

Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.

A Victory Garden for Trying Times: A woman’s journey through a year of love, loss, and despair by Debi Goodwin. Canadian
https://whitby.bibliocommons.com/item/show/654072061

The author is a former CBC journalist, with one other non-fiction book published. This memoir is recommended for those touched by cancer.
Since her childhood on a Niagara farm, Debi has dug in the dirt to find resilience. But when her husband, Peter, was diagnosed with cancer in November, it was too late in the season to seek solace in her garden. With idle hands and a fearful mind, she sought something to sustain her through the months ahead. She soon came across Victory Gardens — the vegetable gardens cultivated during the world wars.

During an anxious winter, she researched, drew plans, and ordered seeds. In spring, with Peter in remission, her garden thrived and life got back on track. But when Peter’s cancer returned like a killing frost and he died suddenly of a heart attack, the garden was a reminder that everything ends. For weeks she hated the garden, until she allowed her grief to crack open while preparing it for another year of growth.

Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food: A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods by Lenore Newman. Environment 2019. Canadian

From the author of Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey https://whitby.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=Newman,%20Lenore&searchType=author

Dr. Lenore Newman is a writer and urban geographer. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment, and is an Associate Professor of Geography and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Written with humour and funny footnotes, this book looks at food we have loved to death. When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods, whether it's chasing down the butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialized agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman's bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humor at every turn.

Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore creates a series of "extinction dinners" designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today. You will never look at what's on your plate in quite the same way again.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays by Leslie Jamison

A new collection of essays about obsession and longing from Leslie Jamison, the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering
https://whitby.bibliocommons.com/item/show/637285061 and The Empathy Exams. A combination of memoir, criticism, and journalism, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is Leslie Jamison's profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Jamison is frequently compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag.

Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie specter of reincarnated children; devotees of an online existence called Second Life, to the exclusion of their real lives; Civil War photography; and an entire museum dedicated to relationship breakups. Through these essays and through forays into her own obsessions and longings, Jamison delves into the nature of storytelling itself. We wonder alongside her whether it is ever really possible to hear someone else's story without somehow making it our own, without seeing it through the cracked windows of our private selves.

All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard-Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy
by Phil Keith, (with)Tom Clavin . History 2019
https://whitby.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=all+blood+runs+red&searchType=smart
The incredible story of the first African American military pilot, who went on to become a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the First World War’s French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer. Recommended for fans of Forest Gump and Twelve Years a Slave.

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history. The name of the book is the slogan that was painted on his plane.

After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun. The book highlights his brush with famous names of the time.

All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the twentieth century and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and luck forged a legendary life.

The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel's People, the Metis Nation
by Jean Teillet. History/Native American 2019. Canadian
2019 marks the 175th anniversary of Louis Riel’s birthday (October 22, 1844)

This is a topical title. There is a missing chapter in the narrative of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the story of the Métis Nation, a new Indigenous people descended from both First Nations and Europeans

Their story begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the Canadian North-West. Within twenty years the Métis proclaimed themselves a nation and won their first battle. Within forty years they were famous throughout North America for their military skills, their nomadic life and their buffalo hunts.

The Métis Nation didn’t just drift slowly into the Canadian consciousness in the early 1800s; it burst onto the scene fully formed. The Métis were flamboyant, defiant, loud and definitely not noble savages. They were nomads with a very different way of being in the world—always on the move, very much in the moment, passionate and fierce. They were romantics and visionaries with big dreams. They battled continuously—for recognition, for their lands and for their rights and freedoms. In 1870 and 1885, led by the iconic Louis Riel, they fought back when Canada took their lands. These acts of resistance became defining moments in Canadian history, with implications that reverberate to this day: Western alienation, Indigenous rights and the French/English divide.

After being defeated at the Battle of Batoche in 1885, the Métis lived in hiding for twenty years. But early in the twentieth century, they determined to hide no more and began a long, successful fight back into the Canadian consciousness. The Métis people are now recognized in Canada as a distinct Indigenous nation. Written by the great-grandniece of Louis Riel, this popular and engaging history of “forgotten people” tells the story up to the present era of national reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Classical Yoga Ãsana: A teacher training manual and practice guide for classical yoga postures in the tradition of T. Krishnamacharya and T.K.V. Desikachar by Ante Pavlovic
Health & Fitness/ Yoga/ Exercise. Canadian. 2019
This illustrated encyclopedia is the first to show the classical approach of moving in and out of posture sequences, with the proper breathing instructions and teaching guidelines. It provides a series of line drawings for each of the 1000 poses in the book to help yoga teachers and serious students see how to move through a pose safely and effectively. It suggests the most efficient words that yoga teachers can use to guide students through the poses, and it includes detailed information on each posture, name, meaning, form, and function, as well as numerous modifications and variations to suit the unique needs and capabilities of each individual.

The book starts with an 80-page introduction that provides the foundation and principles of yoga philosophy and practice. It's an essential reference for yoga teachers and serious students everywhere.

Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
How to speak of the searing, riveting power that the past—ours, our family’s, our culture’s—wields in the present?

In five sections, Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic tells true and intimate stories of a community dealing with the extended aftermath of a suicide, a grandmother’s quest to kidnap her grandson to keep him safe, one community lawyer’s battle inside and against the justice system, the effects of multigenerational trauma, and the history of the author’s longest friendship. In writing that is inventive, bold, and generous, Axiomatic introduces an unforgettable voice.

“Nobody can write like Maria Tumarkin: she charges headlong into the worst and best of us, with an iron refusal to soften or decorate; sentences bare of artifice, stripped back to the bone, to the nerve; fired by raging grief and love.”

Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. Her most recent book, AXIOMATIC, will be published by Transit Books in the US in September 2019. She is the author of three previous books of ideas Traumascapes, Courage, and Otherland, all of which received critical acclaim in Australia, where she lives.

In Australia, Axiomatic, won the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award.

Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of a Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky 2020?

In what he says is the most important piece of environmental writing in his long and award-winning career, Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster, 1968, and Milk, among many other microhistories, employs his signature multi-century storytelling and compelling attention to detail to chronicle the harrowing yet awe-inspiring life cycle of salmon.

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