“With wit and a humbling sense of wonder, this is a book that can be shared and appreciated by a wide audience who now religiously check their phones for daily forecasts.” — Publishers Weekly Starred Review“This terrific, accessible, and exciting read helps us to better understand the aspects of weather and the atmosphere all around us.” —Library Journal Starred ReviewWe live at the bottom of an ocean of air — 5,200 million million tons, to...

A Governor General’s Award – nominated poetry collection from a prize-winning poet and essayist. Christopher Dewdney uses the vocabulary of paleontology, biology, and physics in poems that meditate on life in southwestern Ontario.

Christopher Dewdney’s love for the landscape and the flora and fauna of southwestern Ontario has provoked some of the most gorgeously erotic prose ever to appear in this country. From that love, augmented by ardent research in the field, emerges a marvellously compelling, futuristic vision of time and space collapsed into near-simultaneity. Books IV and V of The Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, presented in Signal Fires, are self-contained sections of a continuing prose po...

We prepare for it each evening, and spend half our lives in its embrace, yet night retains its mysteries. In ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT, author and poet Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm.Twelve chapters correspond to the twelve hours of an 'ideal' night, starting at 6pm and ending at 6am, and serve as points of departure for night's central themes; from sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, ...

Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night's central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical, intimate tone, and a...

A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney’s poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates...

An entertaining and digestible volume that demystifies science, from the author of over a dozen bestselling popular science booksCrave answers? Dr. Joe Schwarcz demystifies the chemistry of everyday life, serving up practical knowledge to both inform and entertain. Guaranteed to satiate your hunger for palatable and relevant scientific information, A Feast of Science explains that “chemical” is not synonymous with “toxic.” Are there fish genes in tomatoes?...

A biology professor's "funny, fascinating" tour of the physical imperfections—from faulty knees to junk DNA—that make us human (Discover).We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often—two hundred times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code poin...

An eye-opening and essential tour of the vanishing world in the age of climate change and rising tides.What if Atlantis wasn't a myth, but an early precursor to a new age of great flooding? Across the globe, scientists and civilians alike are noticing rapidly rising sea levels, and higher and higher tides pushing more water directly into the places we live, from our most vibrant, historic cities to our last remaining traditional coastal villages. With each crack in...

**An incredible true tale of espionage and engineering set at the height of the Cold War—a mix between The Hunt for Red October and Argo—about how the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and America’s most eccentric mogul spent six years and nearly a billion dollars to steal the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129 after it had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; all while the Russians were watching.In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submari...

“Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity.” —Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book ReviewFor centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portray...

A witty, irreverent tour of history's worst plagues—from the Antonine Plague, to leprosy, to polio—and a celebration of the heroes who fought themIn 1518, in a small town in Alsace, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn’t stop. She danced until she was carried away six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had been stricken by the mysterious dancing plague. In late-seventeenth-century England an eccentr...