Search results for ""douglas mcintyre""

Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery.Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin’s expeditions were monumental failures—the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discover the Northwest Passage.This book, McGoogan’s sixth about Arctic exploration, challenges that vision. It rejects old orthodoxies, incorporates the latest discoveries, and interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy’s Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Métis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to t

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In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swanton met a number of fine mythtellers during his year in the Haida country. Each had his own style and his own repertoire. Two of them—a blind man in his fifties by the name of Ghandl, and a septuagenarian named Skaay—were artists of extraordinary stature, revered in their own communities and admired ever since by the few specialists aware of their great legacy.Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes all the finest works of one of these master mythtellers. In November 1900, when Ghandl dictated these nine stories, the Haida world lay in near ruins. Wave upon wave of smallpox and other diseases, rapacious commercial ex

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A lively and satire-laced exposé of the rich, famous, and totally miserable that lays bare the dysfunctional cycles of celebrity and wasteful excesses of consumer culture.There is little argument that having enough money to meet your needs is important. But beyond that, what makes us happy? Is a lot of money the answer? Is a glamorous life actually glamorous? Must we have thousands of followers on social media, only to have the internet rabble criticize us at every turn? Amid all the fun and frivolity, there is inevitable misery and madness. A double-edged sword. A poisoned chalice. That’s what this book is about: In ten punchy chapters full of anecdotes about the miseries and misfortunes of the affluent, Paul Berton (Shopomania) offers readers ten reasons NOT to wish for fame or fortune.In his witty and knowing exploration of the most human of foibles, Paul Berton takes a wrecking-ball to the celebrity-

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Skid Dogs is a raw and riveting debut memoir about coming of age during the casual oppression of ‘90s rape culture and the passionate tumult of teenage friendships.“I can’t remember the last time I read a book so brave. Maybe never.” —Ani DiFrancoI fell hard for the scrappy, funny, honest, resilient young heroine of Skid Dogs, and the wise narrator who mediates her story—an essential tale of girlhood survival. —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award“Everyone knows, a girl has to be killed before she’s taken seriously; anything less is just called growing up.”In 1991, Emelia Symington-Fedy stumbled upon a tight-knit group of girls hanging out on the secluded railroad tracks intersecting her small rural town—and became “best friends&r

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Check back into London’s posh Savoy Hotel in the swinging sixties where dark forces and murder are uninvited guests—volume 3 in the cheeky series that is now a French bestseller. Everything at London’s Savoy Hotel appears to be the picture of perfection: two Italian princes are checking in and an amorous English lord is taking photographs on the rooftop. But in the Savoy Press Office, it’s a different picture entirely. There, Miss Priscilla Tempest is scrambling to avoid a boss who would like to be rid of her, a threatening American gangster, and the rather thrilling star of the Tarzan movies. And it isn’t long before a fascist plot, hatched in an English country estate, arrives to truly ruin her day—and threaten British democracy. In this third installment in Ron Base and Prudence Emery’s beloved series, reluctant crime-fighter Priscilla Tempest joins forces w

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Bestselling chronicler of village life Dan Needles (author of the Wingfield Farm stage plays) leads an insightful and laugh-out-loud tour through the quirks and customs of today’s Canadian small town.Modern literature has not been kind to village life. For almost two centuries, small towns have been portrayed as backward, insular places needing to be escaped. But anthropologists tell us that the human species has spent more than 100,00 years living in villages of 100 to 150 people. This is where the oldest part of our brain, the limbic system, grew and adapted to become a very sophisticated instrument for reading other people’s emotions and figuring out how we might cooperate to find food, shelter and protection. By comparison, the frontal cortex, which helps us do our taxes, drive a car and download cat videos, is a very recent aftermarket addition, like a sunroof. And it is the village where almost half the world’s population still

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