Between 15,000 and 20,000 underage youths, some as young as ten, signed up to fight in Canada's armed forces in the First World War. They served in the trenches alongside their elders, and fought in all the major battles: Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge, and the rest. Many were injured or suffered psychological wounds. Many died. This is the first book to tell their story.Some boys joined up to escape unhappy homes and workplaces. Others went with their parents' blessin...

HARRY LIVINGSTONE was a small town doctor from Listowel, Ontario when he felt the pull of patriotism that led him to volunteer in the First World War. In 1917, Livingstone found himself embarking on a strange journey that took him to China, where he would inspect,and ultimately travel back to Canada with, men who became known as the Chinese Labour Corps.Once in Canada, the Chinese under Livingstone's care travelled across Canada in secret trains bound for Halifax. All news about th...

John Boileau and Dan Black tell the stories of some of the 30,000 underage youths -- some as young as fourteen -- who joined the Canadian Armed Forces in the Second World War. This is the companion volume to the authors' popular 2013 book Old Enough to Fight about boy soldiers in the First World War. Like their predecessors a generation before, these boys managed to enlist despite their youth. Most went on to face action overseas in what would become the deadliest military conflic...

The remarkable story of how one ship — doomed by war — intersected lives and crossed into history.Completed in 1913 for Canadian Pacific, the Empress of Asia plied the oceans for nearly 30 years. Built for long-haul ocean travel during peace-time, she saw wartime service as an armed merchant cruiser and troopship before Japanese dive-bombers destroyed her in 1942.Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, she brought continents and peop...

"Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore" ( National Post).Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent's most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever...

Great Canadian War Heroes tells the amazing stories of the 16 Canadians who received the Victoria Cross during WWII. They came from all walks of life and from various ranks within the Canadian Forces, but they all had one thing in common: each displayed exceptional bravery in the face of the enemy.

This definitive, single-volume edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography delivers "a Lincoln whom no other man . . . could have given us" ( New York Herald Tribune Book Review).Celebrated for his vivid depictions of the nineteenth-century American Midwest, Carl Sandburg brings unique insight to the life of Abraham Lincoln in this distinguished biography. He captures both the man who grew up on the Indiana prairie and the president who held the countr...

A noted linguist examines extinct languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the mysteries of as-yet undeciphered writings, in this scholarly work.While certain ancient languages were passed down continuously through the ages, many others were ignored for centuries. When scholars began to decipher these extinct languages in the early nineteenth century, they uncovered previously inaccessible riches of knowledge and history. Yet much work remains to be done on undeciphe...

"A wealth of knowledge . . . For every incident, chasing Kornilov or dealing with Admiral Kolchak, the reader has a 360-degree view." — Roads to the Great WarThe Russian Civil War was one of the most fateful of the 20th century's military conflicts, a bloody three-year struggle whose outcome saw the establishment of a totalitarian communist regime within the former Russian Empire. As such, it commands the attention of the military specialist and layman alik...

"An ethical and accessible introduction to a historical period often implicated in racist narratives of nationalism and imperialism." —Sierra Lomuto, Assistant Professor of Global Medieval Literature, Rowan UniversityA collection of twenty-two essays, Whose Middle Ages? gives nonspecialists access to the richness of our historical knowledge while debunking damaging misconceptions about the medieval past. Myths about the medieval period are especially belove...

A Fields medalist recounts his lifelong effort to uncover the geometric shape—the Calabi-Yau manifold—that may store the hidden dimensions of our universe.Harvard geometer Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world's most distinguished mathematici...

Discover the rich cultures of non-human beings in Earth's remaining wild places, as revealed by bestselling author Carl Safina.In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Carl Safina, New York Times bestselling author, brings readers close to three non-human cultures—what they do, why they do it, and how life is for them. Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace is a revelatory account of how animals function beyond...