Meanwhile, back in the darkened alleys of a city near you… trouble is brewing. A fight breaks out. A mugger shakes down an innocent tourist. Inequality is on the rise.Enter our heroes. Dark Guardian chases off an angry drug dealer in Manhattan. Mr. Xtreme charges in and breaks up a San Diego bar brawl. T.O. Ronin hugs a homeless man on the snowy streets of Toronto. These aren’t the big-screen or comic-book heroes that have been increasingly dominating pop culture. They’re real-life...

Life for early humans wasn't easy. They may have been able to walk on two feet and create tools 4 million years ago, but they couldn't remember or communicate. Fortunately, people got smarter, and things got better. They remembered on-the-spot solutions and shared the valuable information of their experiences. Clubs became swords, caves became huts, and fires became ovens. Collectively these new tools became technology. As the 21st century unfolds, the pace of innovation is accelerating ex...

In this surprising history of technology, Peter Nowak argues that most of the innovations that make modern life modern can be directly traced to one of three questionable aspects of human activity—war, porn, and the fast food industry. Following developments in technology from the 1940s to the present, Nowak reveals the links between Barbie and U.S. missile systems, how the porn industry killed Betamax, and why Niue, Polynesia, is the phone-sex capital of the world. He exposes the unexpect...

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Health literacy addresses a range of social dimensions of health, including knowledge, navigation and communication, as well as individual and organizational skills for accessing, understanding, evaluating and using information. Particularly over the past decade, health literacy has globally become a major public health concern as an asset for promoting health, wellbeing and sustainable development.This comprehensive handbook provides a...

How War, Pornography, and Fast Food Have Shaped Modern TechnologyGuns, Germs, and Steel meets the age of technology in this rollicking history of how our pursuit of lust, gluttony, and rage has led to our greatest technological advancements. It is also a chronicle of popular culture, packed with surprising revelations. From the unexpected origins of aerosols, cold medicine, and Google to Saran Wrap, Tupperware, and video games, here is a fascinating look at modern...

Meanwhile, back in the darkened alleys of a city near you . . . trouble is brewing. A fight breaks out. A mugger shakes down an innocent tourist. Inequality is on the rise.Enter our heroes. Dark Guardian chases off an angry drug dealer in Manhattan. Mr. Xtreme charges in and breaks up a San Diego bar brawl. T. O. Ronin hugs a homeless man on the snowy streets of Toronto. These aren't the big-screen or comic-book heroes that have been increasingly dominating pop cul...

Under the covers of Where the Nights Are Twice as Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, David Eso and Jeanette Lynes collect letters and epistolary poems from more than 120 Canadian poets, including Pauline Johnson, Malcolm Lowry, Louis Riel, Alden Nowlan, Anne Szumigalski , Leonard Cohen, John Barton, and Di Brandt, and many others, encompassing the breadth of this country's English literary history.Presented in order not of the chronology of composition, but according to...

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean and Canadian Region)!Co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award!Hiromi Goto’s debut novel has become a Canadian classic. It is a powerful narrative of three generations of Japanese Canadian women on the Canadian prairies.Funny, scandalous, and melancholic, this superlative narrative is filled with echoes and retellings, memories and Japanese folk tales. From ...

Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis and missionary settlement of Lac St. Anne, Canada. A young woman of mixed-blood named Mahkesîs is carrying the child of the married Englishman who manages the Hudson Bay Company trading post. She is forced to reveal her devastating secret to her Cree grandmother. As an unmarried Catholic girl, Mahkesîs waits for a miracle in the very place others come for redemption.Set in a northern landscape, Pilgrimage is...

Shortlisted, Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the FantasticLonglisted, IMPAC Dublin International Literary AwardFrom the acclaimed author of Daniel O'Thunder comes a rollicking, bawdy, and haunting novel about love and redemption, death and resurrection.The great metropolis of London swaggers with Regency abandon as nineteen-year-old Will Starling returns from the Napoleonic Wars having spent five years assist...

More of Paul Carter's hugely entertaining stories of his seriously crazy, sometimes terrifying, always hilarious adventures.Attempting 300 kph on an untested experimental motorcycle could be considered a perfect way to kill yourself, but Paul Carter is still, well, Paul Carter and danger at high speed is his second name.Whether discovering that being dyslexic means delivering your lines to camera back to front in the midst of filming a TV series, or startin...

Sit down and strap yourself in for an exhilarating ride to the sound barrier and beyond with a real life Topgun!Mac Tucker, or 'Serge' to use his callsign name, is one of an elite group of men trained to fly F-18 jets. Now, for the first time, Serge takes you behind the scenes of the fighter pilot world to reveal what it's really like.Find out how it feels to be shot at by SAS snipers, to be lost in a 50 million jet over Northern Australia with nothing but ...