Our Fall 2014 Preview continues with non-fiction books, which includes cookbooks, biographies, sports books, history texts, memoirs, books on politics and current events, and more. There is so much to look forward to. Don't miss our Fiction Preview from last week, and Kids' Books and Poetry previews still to come.
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With Showtime: One Team One Season One Step from NHL (September), Ed Arnold documents the 2012/13 season of OHL team The Peterborough Petes. Toronto Star food writer and bison rancher Jennifer Bain's Buffalo Girl Cooks Bison (October) is the first comprehensive contemporary bison cookbook for a general North American market. Curationism (September) by David Balzer is a new volume in Coach House Books' "Exploded Views" series, investigating the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture now that we "curate" even lunch.
The changes and challenges of Canada's new global role are laid out in Brave New Canada (August), by Derek H. Burney and Fen Osler Hampson. Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson delivers the 2014 Massey Lecture, Belonging: The Paradox of Citizenship (September), which chronicles the history of citizenship and supposes its future. Bruce Cockburn recounts his decades in the music business and reveals the man behind the songs in Rumours of Glory (November). Volume One of Tim Cook's The Necessary War (September) begins Cook's two-part exploration of Canada's role in World War Two.
A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice (September), edited by Stephen D'Arcy, Toban Black, Tony Weis, and Joshua Khan-Russell, offers a critical analysis of the impact of the tar sands and the challenges opponents face in their efforts to organize effective resistance to it. Comedian Darrell Dennis's Peace Pipe Dreams (October) untangles the myths and truths of First Nations Peoples and their history. Jeffrey Donaldson's poetry criticism is collected in Echo Soundings: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (October). Great Big Sea front man Alan Doyle documents his journey from a tiny Newfoundland fishing village to the international stage in Where I Belong (October). Bricolage is the creation of art from a wide range of pre-existing materials, and Stan Dragland writes about the creation of its literary form in The Bricoleur & His Sentences (September).
In Canada and the Great Power Game 1914–1918 (October), Gwynne Dyer outlines a century of Canada's roles in global conflict, illuminating the nation's place on the global stage. Arresting Hope (July) by Ruth Elwood Martin, Lynn Fels, and Mo Korchinski, tells the story of positive transformation taking place within a provincial woman's prison. Hall of Famer Grant Fuhr, the first black superstar in the NHL, tells his own story in Grant Fuhr: Story of a Hockey Legend (October). Coming Ashore (October) is the third and final volume in Catherine Gildiner's series of memoirs that began with her bestselling Too Close to the Falls.
The End of Absence (August), by Michael Harris, considers the space and silence we've lost by shifting so much of our attention to the online world. Mr. Hockey, by Gordie Howe (October), is a long-awaited biography by the man who dominated the hockey world for decades. Colville (August), by Andrew Hunter, honours the iconic Canadian artist; its release accompanies the special exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In Stars Between the Sun and Moon (October), award-winning journalist and author Susan McClelland helps Lucia Jang tell her story of surviving a brutal life in North Korea, human trafficking to China, and imprisonment in a labour camp. Celebrated chef Jamie Kennedy publishes JK: The Jamie Kennedy Cookbook (October). In her latest book, This Changes Everything (September), Naomi Klein argues that climate change is not an "issue" but a civilizational wake-up call. Former Mountie Deanna Lennox tells her story of occupational stress and struggle during her years with the RCMP in Damage Done (September).
Supernatural chronicler Mark Leslie turns his attention to haunted libraries and bookshops in Tomes of Terror (September). The Next Big Thing: The Dalton Camp Lectures in Journalism (October) compiles addresses by writers including June Callwood, Nalah Ayed, Naomi Klein, Roy MacGregor, Stephanie Nolen and Ken Whyte, delivered since 2002 at St. Thomas University. Born Out of This (October) follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest.
Fans of Joni Mitchell are going to love Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words (September), a series of conversations over four decades between Mitchell and her friend, writer Malka Maron. Great Power and Great Responsibility: The Philosophical Politics of Comics (November) collects Phillip Mann's essays on the philosophy of comics. Don Marks tells the stories of Native American athletes who dominated the NFL, CFL, PGA, Olympic Games, NHL and professional wrestling in Playing the White Man’s Game (September). Long-time Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion tells her own story in Hurricane Hazel: A Life With Purpose (October). And funny man Bruce McCulloch and former Kid in the Hall gets his with Let’s Start a Riot (October).
Super science guy Bob McDonald's new book is Canadian Spacewalkers (October), in which Canadian astronauts (including Chris Hadfield) remember their far-out adventures. The Last Hockey Game (September), by Bruce McDougall, recounts the last time Toronto and Montreal met in the Stanley Cup finals, a game that was a turning point in sports history. In Detachment: An Adoption Memoir (September), Maurice Mierau shows that the road to fatherhood never did run smooth. Christopher J.A. Morry used the words and experiences of his grandfather to tell the story of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in the Battle of the Somme in When the Great Red Dawn is Shining (October).
In Kinds of Winter (November), Dave Olesen recounts adventures steering his team of sled-dogs on four epic adventures away from his homestead in the Northwest Territories, setting out each time toward each of the compass points. With Sex Work: Rethinking the Job, Respecting the Workers (July), five academics and activists convey their vision of prostitution as work, reclaiming the place of sex workers themselves in the discussion of their lives and their work.
Food blogger Barry Parsons brings together the best of his recipes for Rock Recipes: The Best Food from My Newfoundland Kitchen (October). Alison Pick, whose previous book, the novel, Far to Go, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, has written a memoir, Between Gods (September), about how exploring her Jewish heritage would alter the course of her life. Award-winning author and psychologist Susan Pinker writes about the importance of face-to-face contact in a world obsessed with screens in The Village Effect (August). Leanne Prain, the Canadian Queen of Cool DIY, follows up Hoopla with Strange Material: Storytelling Through Textiles (October), conceding functional objects that also bear messages proudly, from personal memoir and cultural fables to pictorial histories and wearable fictions.
In Circling the Midnight Sun (September), writer and adventurer James Raffan shares what he learned from three years of circumnavigating the Arctic Circle, attempting to put a human face on climate change. Rick Ranson collects stories from one of Canada's most talked-about locations in Bittersweet Sands: 24 Hours in Fort McMurray (October), whose characters are a group of engaging roughnecks, including a husband and wife welding crew, a petty fascist safety inspector, and the tough-as-nails secretary that keeps them all in line. Every picture tells a story in Hockey Card Stories (October), by Ken Reid; Reid tells the tales behind the collectable cards, some of them in players' own words. In Welcome to Resisterville (November), Kathleen Rodgers chronicles the egalitarian society established by US war resisters in the West Kootenay region of BC during the 1960s and '70s.
Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird (September), by Armand Ruffo, is a rich biography of one of Canada's best-known painters. Moira Sanders, co-author of The Harrow Fair Cookbook, returns with The Kitchen Table Cookbook: Easy Family Recipes from a Country Fair Ribbon Winner (September). John Ralston Saul documents the remarkable rise of Canada's Aboriginal peoples to positions of power, influence, and creativity in recent years in his new book, The Comeback (November).
Food and sustainability blogger Randy Shore shares what he's learned as The Green Man in Grow What You Eat. Eat What You Grow (October): part cookbook, part gardening book, and also personal journal, and passionate treatise on the art of eating and living sustainably. Chef Michael Smith's latest book, Family Meals (September), offers recipes for cooking and eating together. In Hot Wet and Shaking: How I Learned to Talk About Sex (Augut), Kaleigh Trace—(dis)abled, feminist, sex expert, and friend—chronicles her journey from ignorance to bliss as she shamelessly discusses her sexual exploits, bodily negotiations and attempts at adulthood, sparing none of the details and assuming you are not polite company.
Celebrated food bloggers Julie van Rosendaal and Jan Scott collect great recipes for dinner parties of all kinds in Gatherings: Bringing People Together With Food (October). Award-winning novelist MG Vassanji's love letter to his birth place and homeland is the East African memoir, And Home Was Kariakoo (October). And I just really love the title of the memoir, That Went By Fast: My First Hundred Years (September), the second memoir by ex-logger and truck driver Frank White.
In Young Neil: The Sugar Mountain Years (October), Sherry Wilson provides a detailed chronological narrative of Neil Young's first 20 years. Kathleen Winter tells the story of her 2010 journey through the Northwest Passage in Boundless (September), an homage to the ever-evolving and magnetic power of the North. In Into the Blizzard (November), Michael Winter writes a history of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at the Battle of the Somme that is "urgently alive, affecting and relevant." And Shelley Wright's Our Ice is Vanishing/ Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq examines Inuit history and culture, alongside the experiences of newcomers to the Arctic seeking land, wealth, adventure, and power, to describe the legacies of exploration, intervention, and resilience in Canada's North.