There is a field guide to almost anything, and microbiologist Jonathan Eisen’s enormous collection contains classic, beautiful and very strange examples including guides to birds, birders and road kill.

Shaking things up at the Sugar Shack

David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global CapitalismBrill, Leiden and Boston, 2011Reviewed by Mark WorrellMarx and Philosophy29 February 2012 The Guardian recently reported that “By 2007, the international financial sy…

Toronto’s pioneering female bookseller supplied collectors and libraries with Canadian treasures.

“It was by chance rather than design that I became a bookseller,” Dora Hood wrote in the opening line of her autobiography, The Side Door. Forced to support herself and her two children after being widowed, Hood applied skill and luck to build one of the largest mail-order book businesses in Canada. After she retired [...]

By Maria Bustillos The AwlFebruary 14, 2012Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we’re not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive,…

Tree planting is so much more than just a profession. It is an identity, a lifestyle and a responsibility. A select few people are built for tree planting life, which requires the physical and mental stamina to endure the elements, work long hours of m…

PM PressPurchase book HERE.Click image above to enlarge

Edited by Stephanie Ross, Larry SavageFernwood Books Paperback Price: $29.95 CADPublication Date: Apr 2012Though the Canadian labour movement’s postwar political, economic and social achievements may have seemed like irrevocable contributions to…

Almost a decade in the works, PM’s labour of love is a failsafe best-seller

I saw this book around for a while before I picked it up.  From what I’d heard, it seemed almost too much to bear – a child forced to live in one room for his whole life, unable to go…

In his new book, Yves Engler sets to demolish the near saintly status of Lester Bowles (“Mike”) Pearson in the public sphere, Canadian foreign policy circles and even on the social democratic left. And in the process, he takes on the much repeated slog…

A bloggie award has been going around lately (gosh that sounds like a flu bug you might catch) and over the past month I’ve been nominated four times for the Versatile Blogger award! (thank goodness this is much nicer than the flu)  A big thank yo…

From Audubon’s The Birds of America, a first edition of which sold last month at auction for $7.9 million, to Copernicus’ heliocentric sketch that changed the world, we’ve selected the most remarkable science tomes from this year’s San Francisco Antiquarian Book, Print and Paper Fair.

Made new art work made from felt   (now if only I could figure out how to not write an exhibition submission) Carefully scoured down my old plum coloured metal glasses into foxy silver specs.  And the lovely Kenny Fries gave me one of his books, whic…

BY LABARRE BLACKMANPeople’s WorldFebruary 21 2012Book Review: ”Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right”, By Thomas Frank, 2012, Metropolitan Books, hardcover, 240 pages, $25.00Thomas Frank, ex-…

By Richard K. BarryJean ShepherdA lot of people know who Jean Shepherd was or at least know about his best known work, A Christmas Story, which is by now a seasonal classic. The film features the exploits of a little boy in the Midwest, Ralph Park…

I honestly don’t know how I missed it. I mean, I’ve always *meant* to read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, but I just never got around to it. So when I read a reference to it in the Ottawa Citizen earlier this week, it was top-of-mind when I was at the library yesterday and [...]

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The Academy of the Impossible wants to combine education and community engagement.

Rabin Ramah saunters into the Academy of the Impossible as if he owns the place. In a way, he does, having curated its vibrant art, helped build the book shelves, and painted and assembled the stage. His hands-on approach echos the DIY ethos of the Academy, a new knowledge hub that encourages peer-to-peer learning, whether [...]