Extraordinary Canadians: Big Bear


Book Description

Big Bear (1825–1888) was a Plains Cree chief in Saskatchewan at a time when aboriginals were confronted with the disappearance of the buffalo and waves of European settlers that seemed destined to destroy the Indian way of life. In 1876 he refused to sign Treaty No. 6, until 1882, when his people were starving. Big Bear advocated negotiation over violence, but when the federal government refused to negotiate with aboriginal leaders, some of his followers killed 9 people at Frog Lake in 1885. Big Bear himself was arrested and imprisoned. Rudy Wiebe, author of a Governor General’s Award–winning novel about Big Bear, revisits the life of the eloquent statesman, one of Canada’s most important aboriginal leaders.




Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan


Book Description

Who better than Douglas Coupland, a true child of Marshall McLuhan, to interpret the life and work of the communications guru? As novelist, sculptor, visual artist, and theatre performer, Coupland has created a body of work that often embodies McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “The medium is the message.” While the importance of McLuhan’s theories cannot be overstated, his written works are more often cited than read. Nonetheless, his predictions have been borne out: in the early 1960s, McLuhan wrote that visual, individualistic print culture would be replaced by what he called “electronic interdependence,” creating a new “global village.” With his trademark humour and brilliance, Coupland reveals the prescience of McLuhan’s ideas, situating them in a startlingly current context.




Extraordinary Canadians Wilfrid Laurier


Book Description

Wilfrid Laurier is acknowledged as a great prime minister, a superb orator, and a survivor. But he has become more myth than man. André Pratte, chief editorial writer of Quebec’s La Presse, uncovers Laurier’s complexity amid the charged political circumstances of the early 20th century. Laurier tried to unite a newborn country that found itself grappling with the thorny questions of minority rights, regional tensions, and its role in the world. Pratte skilfully reveals a Laurier who did not have to create a special political strategy in order to deal with the realities of Canada. Growing up in French- and English-Canadian cultures, he himself was a mirror of that complexity. Pratte’s Laurier affirms our long and stable history, while recognizing that events are never predictable, and that dialogue, tolerance, and compromise are always necessary.




Miss Wyoming


Book Description

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves. Waking up in an LA hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life. Susan Colgate is an unbankable former TV star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear. John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.




Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye


Book Description

Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye are two of Canada’s central cultural figures, colleagues and rivals whose careers unfolded in curious harmony even as their intellectual engagement was antagonistic. Poet, novelist, essayist and philosopher B.W. Powe, who studied with both of these formidable and influential intellectuals, presents an exploration of their lives and work in Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy. Powe considers the existence of a unique visionary tradition of Canadian humanism and argues that McLuhan and Frye represent fraught but complementary approaches to the study of literature and to the broader engagement with culture. Examining their eloquent but often acid responses to each other, Powe exposes the scholarly controversies and personal conflicts that erupted between them, and notably the great commonalities in their writing and biographies. Using interviews, letters, notebooks, and their published texts, Powe offers a new alchemy of their thought, in which he combines the philosophical hallmarks of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” and Frye’s “the great code.”




The University of Toronto


Book Description

Anyone who attended the University or who is interested in the growth of Canada's intellectual heritage will enjoy this compelling and magisterial history.




Understanding Media


Book Description

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.




Souvenir of Canada


Book Description

Douglas Coupland's valentine to Canada looks at how it feels to be a Canadiannow and imagines what it might feel like to be a Canadian in the future.




Marshall McLuhan


Book Description

Surveys the life and career of the social theorist best known for the quotation, "The medium is the message, " who helped shape the culture of the 1960s and predicted the future of television and the rise of the Internet.




Extraordinary Canadians Pierre Elliott Trudeau


Book Description

Love him or hate him, Pierre Trudeau has marked us all. The man whose motto was "reason over passion" managed to arouse in Canadians the fiercest of passions of every hue, ones that even today cloud our view of him and of his place in history. Acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci takes as his starting point the crucial role Trudeau played in the formation of his own sense of identity to look at how Trudeau expanded us as a people, not in spite of his contradictions but because of them.