"Claire Campbell draws from recent work in cultural history, landscape studies in geography and art history, and environmental history to explore what happens when external agendas confront local realities - a story central to the Canadian experience. Explorers, fishers, artists, and park planners all were forced to respond to the unique contours of this inland sea; their encounters defined a regional identity even as they constructed a popular image for the Bay in the national imagination."--Jacket.
In this exquisitely rendered memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. A Strong West Wind begins in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle–a place of both boredom and beauty, its flat horizons broken only by oil derricks, grain elevators, and church steeples. Its story belongs to a girl who grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, who took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. What she found there, from renegade women to men who lit out for the territory, turned out to offer a blueprint for her own future. Caldwell would grow up to become a writer, but first she would have to fall in love with a man who was every mother’s nightmare, live through the anguish and fire of the Vietnam years, and defy the father she adored, who had served as a master sergeant in the Second World War. A Strong West Wind is a memoir of culture and history–of fathers and daughters, of two world wars and the passionate rebellions of the sixties. But it is also about the mythology of place and the evolution of a sensibility: about how literature can shape and even anticipate a life. Caldwell possesses the extraordinary ability to illuminate the desires, stories, and lives of ordinary people. Written with humanity, urgency, and beautiful restraint, A Strong West Wind is a magical and unforgettable book, destined to become an American classic.
Winner of the Staunch Book Prize. “A beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune An extraordinary new novel by Samantha Harvey—whose books have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), and the Guardian First Book Award—The Western Wind is a riveting story of faith, guilt, and the freedom of confession. It’s 1491. In the small village of Oakham, its wealthiest and most industrious resident, Tom Newman, is swept away by the river during the early hours of Shrove Saturday. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident? Narrated from the perspective of local priest John Reve—patient shepherd to his wayward flock—a shadowy portrait of the community comes to light through its residents’ tortured revelations. As some of their darkest secrets are revealed, the intrigue of the unexplained death ripples through the congregation. But will Reve, a man with secrets of his own, discover what happened to Newman? And what will happen if he can’t? Written with timeless eloquence, steeped in the spiritual traditions of the Middle Ages, and brimming with propulsive suspense, The Western Wind finds Samantha Harvey at the pinnacle of her outstanding novelistic power. “Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient . . . a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets.” —The New York Times Book Review “Ms. Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities.” —The Wall Street Journal “Brings medieval England back to life.” —The Washington Post
The Georgian Bay demonstrates that Canadian history must be told as an interaction between people and landscape, and landscape history told as a dialogue between changing ideas about nature and experience in a particular place.
These copies were typewritten by the librarian of the Sweetwater Library, because no published copies were available. There was a demand for this title because of local ties.
Hunting for Empire offers a fresh cultural history of sport and imperialism. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. In doing so he produces a unique theoretical lens through which to study nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert's Land. Sharply written and evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the Canadian wilderness.
Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness – with abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada’s contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturbing images – deforested mountains, empty fisheries, and melting ice caps. Adopting both a chronological and thematic approach, Laurel MacDowell examines human interactions with the land, and the origins of our current environmental crisis, from first peoples to the Kyoto Protocol. This richly illustrated exploration of the past from an environmental perspective will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about – and look at – Canada.
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
