It's not too late to find that perfect gift for the avid readers on your list. Scroll down for a nonfiction extravaganza!
*****
For Your Favourite Band Geek
Wired for Music, by Adriana Barton
About the book: "Beautifully written...a riveting account of how melodies and rhythms connect us, and help us deal with alienation and anxiety."—Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score
In this captivating blend of science and memoir, a health journalist and former cellist explores music as a source of health, resilience, connection, and joy.
Music isn't just background noise or a series of torturous exercises we remember from piano lessons. In the right doses, it can double as a mild antidepressant, painkiller, sleeping pill, memory aid— and enhance athletic performance while supporting healthy aging. Though music has been used as a healing strategy since ancient times, neuroscientists have only recently discovered how melody and rhythm stimulate core memory, motor, and emotion centers in the brain. But here's the catch: We can tune into music every day and still miss out on some of its potent effects.
Adriana Barton learned the hard way. Starting at age five, she studied the cello for nearly two decades, a pursuit that left her with physical injuries and emotional scars. In Wired for Music, she sets out to discover what music is really for, combing through medical studies, discoveries by pioneering neuroscientists, and research from biology and anthropology. Traveling from state-of-the-art science labs to a remote village in Zimbabwe, her investigation gets to the heart of music's profound effects on the human body and brain. Blending science and story, Wired for Music shows how our species' age-old connection to melody and rhythm is wired inside us.
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For Your Favourite Shop-o-Holic
Shopomania, by Paul Berton
About the book: A thought-provoking and provocative challenge to consumerism (with plenty of name-dropping and celebrity antics).
Sassy and satirical, Shopomania is an economic, environmental and social study. This light-hearted, dark-souled dictionary of coined words, or “shoponyms,” takes readers on a roller-coaster ride of avaricious antics and outrageous profligacy.
Shopping in one form or another has existed for millennia but, aside from a few slumps, each generation has outdone the previous one. In the past fifty years, shopping—and its associated carbon footprint—has grown exponentially.
Berton argues that if we invented today’s consumer culture, then we can invent something to replace it. We can do a better job of making the cycle of stuff truly circular rather than linear. We can be more environmentally, socially and politically conscious of what we buy and how it comes to us—and where it will go after we are finished with it. A species that has made shopping ubiquitous can figure all these things out with little more than co-operation and creativity, and by asking if it is really necessary to “own it now” as we have been told—endlessly—since childhood. Must we possess a thing to enjoy it? Do we really need all that stuff?
*
For Your Favourite Coven
The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada, by Mairi Cowan
About the book: When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed.
Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position.
The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.
*
For Your Favourite Adventurer
Chasing Rivers: A Whitewater Life, by Tamar Glouberman
About the book: The thrilling story of a female whitewater guide working on some of the most challenging and remote rafting rivers in North America, from Northern British Columbia to the Grand Canyon and beyond.
When Tamar Glouberman was in her twenties and thirties, rivers were flowing through every aspect of her life. Whitewater and the paddling community bring excitement, friendships, lovers and a connection to the natural world as she traverses the map in search of her next adventure. As a short woman who nearly failed high-school gym, Glouberman does not fit the stereotype of a kayaker or raft guide and must prove herself time and again. Yet she feels more at home on water than land.
Driven to guide increasingly dangerous rivers, Tamar overcomes her self doubts and challenges both on and off the water, using a combination of grit and wit. But when a rafting trip ends in a fatal accident, she is consumed by guilt and exiles herself from the rivers she loves, convinced she can never return. Tamar must eventually decide if being unable to save her passenger’s life means she also must sacrifice her own.
A raw and honest work from a talented new voice in adventure writing, Tamar’s memoir is a page-turner, transporting readers through wild rapids and breathtaking canyons, navigating eddies and currents, as she learns from the river that finding self-forgiveness might be the most hard-to-reach destination of all.
*
For Your Favourite Weirdo
Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda, by Michael Hingston
About the book: On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming.
Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves, Michael Hingston details the friendships, feuds, and fantasies that fueled the creation of one of the oddest and most enduring micronations ever dreamt into being. Part literary history, part travelogue, part quest narrative, this cautionary tale about what happens when bibliomania escapes the shelves and stacks is as charming as it is peculiar—and blurs the line between reality and fantasy so thoroughly that it may never be entirely restored.
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For Your Favourite History Buff
10 Days That Shaped Modern Canada, by Aaron Hughes
About the book: Revisiting ten notable days from recent history, Aaron W. Hughes invites readers to think about the tensions, events, and personalities that make Canada distinct. These indelible dates interweave to offer an account of the political, social, cultural, and demographic forces that have shaped the modern nation. The diverse episodes include the enactment of the War Measures Act, hockey’s Summit Series, the patriation of the Constitution, the Multiculturalism Act, the École Polytechnique Massacre, victories for gay rights, Quebec’s second referendum on secession, The Tragically Hip’s farewell concert, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and ongoing Black equality struggles. Each day represents a window on contemporary Canada, jumpstarting reflection and conversation about who we are as a nation and how we got here. Ten Days That Shaped Modern Canada is the perfect guide for all those curious about the forces that shape our country and about how we understand our place in the world.
*
For Your Favourite Prairie Feminist
Modern Fables, by Mikka Jacobsen
About the book: Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place.
In this darkly funny book about love in the digital age, Mikka Jacobsen challenges the notion that a single woman in her thirties writing about love is simply desperate. Instead, in an unflinching collage of coming-of-age narratives, she both elevates singledom and upholds the value of finding profound love. A work of feminist thinking, these interlinked essays blend memoir with cultural and literary criticism, exploring first loves and teenage drug-slingers, sports culture and blowjobs, catfishing and the problematic advice of self-help gurus.
At the same time, Modern Fables considers how we are shaped as much by the places we are from as by the times in which we live. Growing up and living in the deeply conservative Canadian prairies, what does it mean when you're not at home at home? Whether she's writing about a settler mother's forays into shamanism in "The Indian Act" or considering the favourite writer of every Calgary man's online-dating profile in "Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder," Mikka Jacobsen pulls no punches, delivering a fiery manifesto on love and place for our times.
*
For Your Favourite Armchair Traveller
Touch Anywhere to Begin, by Mark Anthony Jarman
About the book: From acclaimed author Mark Anthony Jarman comes Touch Anywhere to Begin, his first book of travel writing since the publication of the critically acclaimed Ireland’s Eye in 2002.
In 18 unusual, head-spinning essays, Jarman can drift through Venice amid the revelry of carnival and the arrival of the impending pandemic or visit a private club along Shanghai’s Huangpu River to be serenaded by a band of retired People’s Liberation Army singers. In “Panthers and Gods Prowl a Palace of Sin,” an invitation to the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai forges a connection with a jetlagged pair of Arctic throat singers and a doctor fascinated by Canada. In “Jesus on the Mainline,” an extended hospitalization beside the intubated victim of a drunk-driving accident reveals a difficult family drama.
And this, of course, is only the beginning. Masterfully written, Touch Anywhere to Begin penetrates the impressionistic moments and intimacies of travel to reveal character and place like none other.
*
For Your Favourite Fighter for a Better World
Abolitionist Intimacies, by El Jones
About the book: In Abolitionist Intimacies, El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity. Understanding the history of prisons in Canada in their relationship to settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, Jones observes how practices of intimacy become imbued with state violence at carceral sites including prisons, policing and borders, as well as through purported care institutions such as hospitals and social work. The state also polices intimacy through mechanisms such as prison visits, strip searches and managing community contact with incarcerated people. Despite this, Jones argues, intimacy is integral to the ongoing struggles of prisoners for justice and liberation through the care work of building relationships and organizing with the people inside. Through characteristically fierce and personal prose and poetry, and motivated by a decade of prison justice work, Jones observes that abolition is not only a political movement to end prisons; it is also an intimate one deeply motivated by commitment and love.
*
For Your Favourite Urbanite
Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, by Lesley Kern
About the book: From the author of the best-selling Feminist City, this urbanite’s guide to gentrification knocks down the myths and exposes the forces behind the most urgent housing crisis of our time.
Gentrification is no longer a phenomenon to be debated by geographers or downplayed by urban planners—it’s an experience lived and felt by working-class people everywhere. Leslie Kern travels to Toronto, Vancouver, New York, London, and Paris to look beyond the familiar and false stories we tell ourselves about class, money, and taste. What she brings back is an accessible, radical guide on the often-invisible forces that shape urban neighbourhoods: settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and more.
Gentrification is not inevitable if city lovers work together to turn the tide. Kern examines resistance strategies from around the world and calls for everyday actions that empower everyone, from displaced peoples to long-time settlers. We can mobilize, demand reparations, and rewrite the story from the ground up.
*
For Your Favourite Ancestral History Fiend
Ghosts in a Photograph: A Chronicle, by Myrna Kostash
About the book: In Ghosts in a Photograph, award-winning nonfiction writer Myrna Kostash delves into the lives of her grandparents, all of whom moved from Galicia, now present-day Ukraine, to Alberta at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering a packet of family mementos, Kostash begins questioning what she knows about her extended families' pasts and whose narrative is allowed to prevail in Canada.
This memoir, however, is not just a personal story, but a public one of immigration, partisan allegiance, and the stark differences in how two sets of families survive in a new country: one as homesteaders, the other as working-class Edmontonians. Working within the gaps in history—including the unsolved murder in Ukraine of her great uncle—Kostash uses her remarkable acumen as writer and researcher to interrogate the idea of straightforward and singular-voiced pasts and the stories we tell ourselves about where we come from.
Rich in detail and propelled by vital curiosity, Ghosts in a Photograph is a determined, compelling, and multifaceted family chronicle.
*
For Your Favourite Co-Pilot
A Gelato A Day, edited by Claudia Laroye
About the book: A Gelato A Day is a collection of travel tales that highlights the good, the bad and the not-really-that-ugly of the family travel experience. These stories go beyond holidays-gone-wrong to dive thoughtfully into the deeper parental and family connections that can occur when we take ourselves (or are taken out of) our daily routines and comfort zones. More often than not, entering unfamiliar places, spaces and situations encourages us to open up to one another or react in ways that may surprise, delight or frustrate those we hold most dear.
*
For Your Favourite Foodie
What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings, edited by John Lorinc
About the book: Nearly every culture has a variation on the dumpling: histories, treatises, family legends, and recipes about the world’s favourite lump of carbs
If the world's cuisines share one common food, it might be the dumpling, a dish that can be found on every continent and in every culinary tradition, from Asia to Central Europe to Latin America. Originally from China, they evolved into ravioli, samosas, momos, gyozas, tamales, pierogies, matzo balls, wontons, empanadas, potato chops, and many more.
In this unique anthology, food writers, journalists, culinary historians, and musicians share histories of their culture’s version of the dumpling, family dumpling lore, interesting encounters with these little delights, and even recipes to unwrap the magic of the world's favourite dish.
*
For Your Favourite Fan of Triumphant Memoirs
Our Voice of Fire: A Memoir of a Warrior Rising, by Brandi Morin
About the the book: A wildfire of a debut memoir by internationally recognized French/Cree/Iroquois journalist Brandi Morin set to transform the narrative around Indigenous Peoples.
Brandi Morin is known for her clear-eyed and empathetic reporting on Indigenous oppression in North America. She is also a survivor of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis and uses her experience to tell the stories of those who did not survive the rampant violence. From her time as a foster kid and runaway who fell victim to predatory men and an oppressive system to her career as an internationally acclaimed journalist, Our Voice of Fire chronicles Morin’s journey to overcome enormous adversity and find her purpose, and her power, through journalism. This compelling, honest book is full of self-compassion and the purifying fire of a pursuit for justice.
*
For Your Favourite Hep Cat
Black and Blue: Jazz Stories, by Stanley Péan, translated by David Homel
About the book: Author and radio personality Stanley Péan is a jazz scholar who takes us seamlessly and knowledgeably through the history of the music, stopping at a number of high points along the way. He gets behind the scenes with anecdotes that tell much about the misunderstandings that have surrounded the music. How could French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre have mixed up Afro-Canadian songwriter Shelton Brooks with the Jewish-American belter Sophie Tucker? What is the real story behind the searing classic "Strange Fruit" made immortal by Billie Holiday, who at first balked at performing it? Who knew that an Ohio housewife named Sadie Vimmerstedt was behind the revenge song "I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart?" And since this is jazz, there is no shortage of sad ends: Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, to name a few.
Jazz is liberation music, from Fats Waller to Duke Ellington to John Coltrane who walked side by side with Martin Luther King with his piece "Alabama." Péan shows how musicians like Miles Davis worked with the emerging voices of hip-hop to widen jazz's audience. The intricate crisscross between Black musical forms, from Marvin Gaye to the Last Poets is explored, as well as how the movies, Hollywood and European cinema alike, tried to use jazz, often whitening it in the process (with the exception of Spike Lee).
*
For Your Favourite Nature Lover
Earthkeeping: Love Notes for Tough Times, by Gary Saunders
About the book: The author of Alder Music, Gary Saunders returns with an evocative, lyrical, and immersive collection of personal essays on our relationship with nature and with each other.
In nine sections, Earthkeeping ruminates on the necessity of love and earthkeeping, on forage fish and robinsongs, and on the stewardship of our ecological landscape. Offering an antidote to the world’s anxiety about climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss, Saunders writes with a deep connection to the natural world and his signature humane zest for life. Lovingly illustrated with Saunders’s own drawings, the result is a joyful, personal, and deeply attentive stroll through an enchanted land of blue and green.
*
For Your Favourite Skeptic
Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience, by Joe Schwarcz
About the book: We are in a crisis. A tsunami of misinformation and disinformation is threatening to engulf evidence-based science. While quackery—loosely defined as the spread of false “knowledge,” often accompanied by various versions of “snake oil”—is not a novel phenomenon, it has never posed as great a threat to public health as today. COVID-19 has unleashed an unprecedented flurry of destructive information that has fueled vaccine hesitancy and has steered people toward unproven therapies. Conspiracy theorists have served up a distasteful menu of twisted facts that create distrust in science.
In Quack Quack, Dr. Joe Schwarcz, who has been battling flimflam for decades, focuses on the deluge of anecdotes, cherry-picked data, pseudoscientific nonsense, and seductive baseless health claims that undermine efforts to educate the public about evidence-based science. The wide scope of the topics drawn from past and present aims to cast a life preserver to people drowning in a sea of misinformation.
*
For Your Favourite Who's Gone to Look for America (and Canada too...)
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
About the book: From a leading scholar on the politics of race comes a work of family history, memoir, and insight gained from a unique journey across the continent, on what it is to be Black in North America.
When Debra Thompson moved to the United States in 2010, she felt like she was returning to the land of her ancestors, those who had escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. But her decade-long journey across Canada and the US transformed her relationship to both countries, and to the very idea of home.
In The Long Road Home, Thompson follows the roots of Black identities in North America and the routes taken by those who have crisscrossed the world’s longest undefended border in search of freedom and belonging. She begins in Shrewsbury, Ontario, one of the termini of the Underground Railroad and the place where members of her own family found freedom. More than a century later, Thompson still feels the echoes and intergenerational trauma of North American slavery. She was often the Only One—the only Black person in so many white spaces—in a country that perpetuates the national mythology of multiculturalism.
Then she revisits her four American homes, each of which reveals something peculiar about the relationship between American racism and democracy: Boston, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the American Revolution; Athens, Ohio, where the white working class and the white liberal meet; Chicago, Illinois, the great Black metropolis; and Eugene, Oregon, the western frontier. She then moves across the border and settles in Montreal, a unique city with a long history of transnational Black activism, but one that does not easily accept the unfamiliar and the foreign into the fold.
The Long Road Home is a moving personal story and a vital examination of the nuances of racism in the United States and Canada. Above all, it is about the power of freedom and the dreams that link and inspire Black people across borders from the perspective of one who has deep ties to, critiques of, and hope for both countries.
*
For Your Favourite Pixie Dreamgirl
Ordinary Wonder Tales, by Emily Urquhart
About the book: A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday.
“I’ve always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.
*
For Your Favourite Feminist
More Than a Footnote: Canadian Women You Should Know, by Karin Wells
About the book: There are women throughout Canada’s history who when faced with a locked door, have looked for a key—or a battering ram. Award-winning writer Karin Wells tells the stories of women like the fierce and iconoclastic Mina Benson Hubbard, who finished the mission to map northern Labrador that had killed her explorer husband, and Vera Peters, MD, who revolutionized treatments for Hodgkins lymphoma and breast cancer. Or the painter Paraskeva Clark, child of the Bolshevik Revolution, who rattled staid Toronto when she took Norman Bethune as a lover and spoke out for art as a tool of social change. And have you heard of Charlotte Small, a Métis woman who canoed and trekked 42,000 km—more than three times further than the American explorers Lewis and Clark—and had five babies along the way?
Some were outrageous, some were unassuming, most were not polite, but they all ignored the voices that said women could not paddle a canoe, program a computer, understand the universe, or cure a disease. They lived big lives—often at great cost—and they made a difference.
*
For Your Favourite Quixotist
Same Ground: Chasing Family Down the California Gold Rush Trail, by Russell Wangersky
About the book: An award-winning author goes looking for the meaning of family and belonging on a glorious wild-goose-chase road trip across middle America.
Wangersky’s great-great-grandfather crossed the continent in search of gold in 1849. William Castle Dodge was his name, and he was 22 years old. He wrote a diary of that eventful journey that comes into the author’s hands 160 years later. And typically, quixotically, Wangersky decides to follow Dodge’s westward trail across the great bulging middle of America, not in search of gold but something even less likely: that elusive thing called family.
What ensues becomes this story, by turns hilarious and profound, about a very long trip—by car, in Wangersky’s case, and on mule and foot in Dodge’s. Interweaving his experiences on the road with Dodge’s diary, the author contemplates the human need to hunt for roots and meaning as he—and Dodge — encounter immigrants who risk everything to be somewhere else, while only glimpsing those who are there already and who want to hold onto their claim in the stream of human migration.
Same Ground is a story about what time washes away and what persists—and what we might find, unexpectedly, if we go looking.
*****
For Your Favourite Person In the Rupture Between
Making Love with the Land, by Joshua Whitehead
About the book: In the last few years, following the publication of his debut novel Jonny Appleseed, Joshua Whitehead has emerged as one of the most exciting and important new voices on Turtle Island. Now, in this first non-fiction work, Whitehead brilliantly explores Indigeneity, queerness, and the relationships between body, language and land through a variety of genres (essay, memoir, notes, confession). Making Love with the Land is a startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person "in the rupture" between identities. In sharp, surprising, unique pieces—a number of which have already won awards—Whitehead illuminates this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating new (and old) ideas about "the land." He asks: What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies?
Here is an intellectually thrilling, emotionally captivating love song—a powerful revelation about the library of stories land and body hold together, waiting to be unearthed and summoned into word.
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