Blessed is the man who can love all men equally. St. Maximus the Confessor In a colorful description of his experiences over the forty years he has lived in Canada after emigrating from his native England, John Milnes takes us on a journey through the many challenges he has faced. Over the decades, he has worked to make his community safer and better prepared. He served as a teacher, a farmer, a motocross promoter and referee, an equestrian show judge in Ontario and northern New Y...

From the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body comes a travel diary documenting a visit to Kenya. All royalties and profits go to CARE International.In the early fall of 2002, famed travel writer Bill Bryson journeyed to Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world. He arrived with a set of mental images of Africa gleaned from tele...

The case for getting back on our feetThe humble act of putting one foot in front of the other transcends age, geography, culture, and class, and is one of the most economical and environmentally responsible modes of transit. Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein travelled throughout the U.S., ...

A loving and hilarious—if occasionally spiky—valentine to Bill Bryson’s adopted country, Great Britain. Prepare for total joy and multiple episodes of unseemly laughter.Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and re...

A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is a hopeful antidote to the environmental concerns of today, set in an ecologically sound future society. Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as the “newest name after Wells, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell,” Callenbach offers a visionary blueprint for the survival of our planet . . . and our future.Ecotopia was founded when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the Union to create a...

Some of Western Canada’s most enduring legends involve wilderness fugitives like the Mad Trapper of Rat River or Gunanoot of the Skeena. This book is about one of the most mysterious and most recent fugitives, the Bushman of the Shuswap, who made national headlines while on the lam in the wilderness around Shuswap Lake during the turn of the millennium. For several years he played cat and mouse with the RCMP, raiding summer cottages for supplies and giving media interviews at the edge of t...

We spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations most often chosen by our inexperienced younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our jobs mean to us.The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully exploring what other people wake up to do each day—and night—to make our frenzied world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alai...

No matter where people live on the BC coast, says Howard White, they have certain shared experiences: frustration with rain and ferries, familiarity with gumboots, bumbershoots, seagull droppings and barnacles in the wrong places. But each little community clings to its own sense of uniqueness and considers itself the true West Coast. As a case in point, White offers fifty funny sketches of life as he has come to know it in sixty-odd years of living along that hundred-mile stretch of monso...

This is the first issue of the Bicycle Reader, a new collection of quality writing about cycling. Two thoughts inspired us to start this collection.The first is that there is a great deal of brilliant article and essay-length writing about cycling that remains inaccessible to most readers. Some of it languishes out of print. Other pieces appeared in publications read by only a tiny minority of cyclists.The second is that eBook readers are the natural companion of cyclists. ...

Diana McCaulay’s newspaper columns, collected in Writing Jamaica: People, Places, Struggles, deliver a fascinating look at Jamaica, far beyond the island’s image as a tourist paradise.  From the white sand beaches of Jamaica’s north coast – Negril, Montego Bay, Oracabessa, Portland – to the sprawling capital city of Kingston, McCaulay fearlessly tackles politics, the environment, relationships between Caribbean men and women and the complicated struggles of a developing country and i...

Whatever you call it, every Canadian summer home needs at least one copy of Charles Gordon's wry, affectionate, and very funny study of our national obsession with that special summer place.

Awakening in the Northwest Territories is an inspirational, humorous and absorbing account of one Boomer’s transformative life journey over a sixty year period. Follow Alastair’s story from his strict Catholic upbringing in England to Canada by himself at the age of 19 in search of love and adventure, where he quickly acquires a family, and over the next twenty years, climbs the corporate ladder and builds up a flourishing business, all of which subsequently go sour. He takes an early retirem...