Diane Crocker

Despite living in an era of decreasing crime rates, Canadians express concern over crime and push politicians to respond in increasingly punitive ways. Canadians also express little confidence in our justice system. The result is that our response to crime can be both disproportionate and ineffective. (Read more)

Paul Marshall and Nina Shea

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the 2005 Danish cartoon fracas awakened many people to the potency of blasphemy accusations in the Muslim world. Accusations and charges such as "blasphemy," "apostasy," "insulting Islam," or "hurting Muslims' religious feelings" pose a far greater danger than censorship of irreverent caricatures of Mohammad: they are increasingly used as key tools by authoritarian governments and extremist forces in the Muslim world to acquire and consolidate power. These charges, which draw on disputed interpretations of Islamic law and carry a traditional punishment of death, have proved effective in crushing or intimidating not only converts and heterodox groups, but also political and religious reformers. In fact, one reason for the recent growth of more repressive forms of Islam is their use of accusations of blasphemy, apostasy, and related charges to intimidate and silence their religious opponents and make any criticism of their own actions and ideas religiously suspect. The effect of such laws thus goes far beyond what might narrowly be called religious matters. (Read more)

Martin Kemp

Christ to Coke is the first book to look at all the main types of visual icons. It does so via eleven supreme and mega-famous examples, both historical and contemporary, to see how they arose and how they continue to function. Along the way, we encounter the often weird and wonderful ways that they become transformed in an astonishing variety of ways and contexts. How, for example, has the communist revolutionary Che become a romantic hero for middle-class teenagers?(Read more)

Peter Longerich

As head of the SS, chief of police, "Reichskommissar for the Consolidation of Germanness", and Reich Interior Minister, Heinrich Himmler enjoyed a position of almost unparalleled power and responsibility in Nazi Germany. Perhaps more than any other single Nazi leader aside from Hitler, his name has become a byword for the terror, persecution, and destruction that characterized the Third Reich. His wide-ranging powers meant that he bore equal responsibility for the repression of the German people on the home front and the atrocities perpetrated by the SS in the East. Yet, in spite of his central role in the crimes of the Nazi regime, until now Himmler has remained a colourless and elusive figure in the history of the period." (Read more)

Paul Woodruff

We live in a world where CEOs give themselves million dollar bonuses even as their companies go bankrupt and ordinary workers are laid off; where athletes make millions while teachers struggle to survive; a world, in short, where rewards are often unfairly meted out. " (Read more)

Eviatar Zerubavel

Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention through television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us where we came from." (Read more)

Gene Sharp

Foreword by Adam Roberts

From the 494 B.C. plebeians' march out of Rome to gain improved status, to Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns in India, to the liberation of Poland and the Baltic nations, and the revolutions in North Africa, nonviolent struggles have played pivotal roles in world events for centuries. Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking reference work on this topic by the "godfather of nonviolent resistance." In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it has occurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion." (Read more)

Elijah Wald

Overthrowing the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history, Elijah Wald traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies - including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television - to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. " (Read more)

Allen Buchanan

Is it right to use biomedical technologies to make us better than well or even perhaps better than human? Should we view our biology as fixed or should we try to improve on it? College students are already taking cognitive enhancement drugs. The U.S. army is already working to develop drugs and technologies to produce "super soldiers." Scientists already know how to use genetic engineering techniques to enhance the strength and memories of mice and the application of such technologies to humans is on the horizon. (Read more)

Jonathan F. Vance

The ineffable character of "Britishness" has been used, often enigmatically, to describe Canada's distinct cultural flavour within North America. This mysterious quality, writes award-winning writer Jonathan F. Vance, goes back to the early days of Canadian history, and consists of far more than the sum of early migration patterns. It emerges from a long-standing respect for British liberal ideals and an identification with the British Empire. Canada's own unique brand of Britishness evolved over a history of shared military endeavour, as Canadians fought alongside others to defend the ideals that the British Empire was deemed to represent.(Read more)

Allen Buchanan

Is it right to use biomedical technologies to make us better than well or even perhaps better than human? Should we view our biology as fixed or should we try to improve on it? College students are already taking cognitive enhancement drugs. The U.S. army is already working to develop drugs and technologies to produce "super soldiers." Scientists already know how to use genetic engineering techniques to enhance the strength and memories of mice and the application of such technologies to humans is on the horizon. (Read more)

Bruce Hutchison
Introduction by Vaughn Palmer

The boundary between Canada and the United States is famously described as the longest undefended border in the world. But it was not always so. In The Struggle for the Border, renowned journalist and popular historian Bruce Hutchison tells the little-known story of how that border was established. It is a story of frontier war, explorers' expeditions, Fenian raids, the burning of Washington, and of political threats and counterthreats. Hutchison carries the amazing chronicle up to the days just after the Second World War and the continental military and economic unification that laid the foundations of contemporary Canada. (Read more)

Cecil Rosner

Canadian investigative journalism has brought down governments, held powerful interests to account, infiltrated criminal networks, and exonerated the wrongly accused. Behind the Headlines presents the exciting history of investigative journalism in Canada in an account spanning from the nation's earliest newspapers through to the present day. Drawing on numerous case studies and examples, Cecil Rosner, a journalist with more than 30 years of experience, analyzes the evolution of investigative journalism in Canada and explores the development of specific practices within the context of changing social and historical forces. Rather than working through a straightforward chronology, Rosner uses a topic-based approach exploring wide-ranging and thought-provoking issues such as public broadcasting, commercialization of the press, alternative media, ethics, and the impact of technology. Highlighting key players and stories such as the sponsorship scandal and the Mulroney "Airbus Affair," Behind the Headlines provides fresh insight into this previously undocumented history. (Read more)

Edith Sheffer

he building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War. (Read more)

Rodric Braithwaite

The story of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is well known: the expansionist Communists overwhelmed a poor country as a means of reaching a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Afghan mujahideen upset their plans, holding on with little more than natural fighting skills, until CIA agents came to the rescue with American arms. Humiliated in battle, the Soviets hastily retreated. (Read more)

Christine Sismondo

When George Washington bade farewell to his officers, he did so in New York's Fraunces Tavern. When Andrew Jackson planned his defense of New Orleans against the British in 1815, he met Jean Lafitte in a grog shop. And when John Wilkes Booth plotted with his accomplices to carry out a certain assassination, they gathered in Surratt Tavern. (Read more)

David M. Malone

India today looms large globally, where it hardly loomed at all twenty years ago. It is likely to be a key global actor throughout the twenty-first century and could well emerge soon as one of the top five global powers. (Read more)

L. W. Conolly

On a warm, humid night in June of 1962, four amateur actors sat on stools in the Court House of Niagara-on-the-Lake for their first performance of Don Juan in Hell from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. It was a modest first performance. (Read more)

Dr. Gerald Steinacher

This is the fascinating story of how Nazi war criminals escaped from justice at the end of the Second World War by fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports, and the role played by the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Secret Services of the major powers in smuggling them away from prosecution in Europe to a new life in South America. (Read more)

Daniel Byman

In the sixty-plus years of the Jewish state's existence, Israeli governments have exhausted almost every option in defending their country against terror attacks. Israel has survived and even thrived - but both its citizens and its Arab neighbors have paid dearly. (Read more)

Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky

For millennia, people have used the Bible as a touchstone on important social and political questions, and rightly so. But many use the Bible simply as a weapon to wield against opponents in a variety of debates - without knowing what the Bible actually says about the issue in question. (Read more)

Christopher Reed

Lavishly illustrated with over 175 black-and-white and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Christopher Reed's arresting book reveals the deep linkages between art and homosexuality as we understand those terms.(Read more)

Dr. Zara Steiner

In this magisterial narrative, Zara Steiner traces the twisted road to war that began with Hitler's assumption of power in Germany. Covering a wide geographical canvas, from America to the Far East, Steiner provides an indispensable reassessment of the most disputed events of these tumultuous years. (Read more)

Jonathan Steinberg

This is the life story of one of the most interesting human beings who ever lived. A political genius who remade Europe and united Germany between 1862 and 1890 by the sheer power of his great personality.(Read more)

Arnold H. Taylor

How can the tiny plankton in the sea just off Western Europe be affected by changes 6000 km away on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean? How can a slight rise in the temperature of the surface of the Pacific Ocean have a devastating impact on amphibian life in Costa Rica?(Read more)

Margery Fee and Janice McAlpine

The complexities of the English language can be daunting for even the most fluent speakers, and for Canadians this is doubly so with the mixture of British and American traditions. Almost anyone engaged in formal writing will sometimes need to consult a usage guide for advice, but Canadians have always been forced to choose between a British or an American source.(Read more)

Simon Winchester

In the summer of 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church in Oxford, Charles Dodgson - better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll - dressed the six-year-old Alice Liddell in ragamuffin's clothes, draped the folds of cloth low enough to expose her bare chest, asked her to look deep into his eyes - and then snapped the camera's shutter. (Read more)

John McMillian

How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people - many of them affluent and college educated - to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled? (Read more)

Rosemary Sutcliff

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
The Ninth Legion marched into the mists of northern Britain-and they were never seen again.
Four thousand men disappeared and their eagle standard was lost. It's a mystery that's never been solved, until now . . .
Marcus has to find out what happened to his father, who led the legion. So he sets out into the unknown, on a quest so dangerous that nobody expects him to return. (Read more)

C. B. Macpherson

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property (Read more)

Dorothy Kauffman and Gary Apple

The Oxford Picture Dictionary for the Content Areas, Canadian Edition is a theme-based dictionary for second language learners and literacy students. It is divided by school content areas (curriculum based). It presents the essential words in topics that students are studying in their core class and makes these new concepts accessible through full-colour, contextualized illustrations. (Read more)

Christopher Wills

In this magnificently illustrated book, Christopher Wills takes us on a series of adventures. From the underwater life of Indonesia's Lambeh Strait to a little valley in northern Israel, to an earthquake in the coral reef off the island of Yap and the dry valleys of western Mongolia, Wills demonstrates how ecology and evolution have interacted to yield the world we live in. (Read more)