Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven
Ross King

Beginning in 1912, Defiant Spirits traces the artistic development of Tom Thomson and the future members of the Group of Seven, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, over a dozen years in Canadian history. Working in an eclectic and sometimes controversial blend of modernist styles, they produced what an English critic celebrated in the 1920s as the "most vital group of paintings" of the 20th century. Inspired by Cezanne, Van Gogh and other modernist artists, they tried to interpret the Ontario landscape in light of the strategies of the international avant-garde. Based after 1914 in the purpose-built Studio Building for Canadian Art, the young artists embarked on what Lawren Harris called "an all-engrossing adventure": travelling north into the Canadian Shield and forging a style of painting appropriate to what they regarded as the unique features of Canada's northern landscape.

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One Family’s War:
The Wartime Letters of Clarence Bourassa, 1940–1944
edited by Rollie Bourassa

One Family's War is a deeply moving true story brought to life through the powerfully personal letters of Clarence Ovilla Bourassa of Lafleche, Saskatchewan, who had enlisted with the South Saskatchewan Regiment in March 1940. Written and sent home between 1940 and 1944, the correspondence reveals the boredom, fear, hunger, fatigue, and especially the loneliness, of Clarence's wartime experience. The letters also shed light on the home front in Lafleche, where Clarence's wife Hazel and their two sons, Rollie and his younger brother Murray, waited for their husband and father to return.

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Looking Back:
Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs
and Intersections of Culture, History and Identity
S. Leigh Matthews

When we think about women settlers on the Prairies, our notions tend to veer between the nostalgic image of the 'cheerful helpmate' and the grim deprivation of the 'reluctant immigrant'. In this ground-breaking new study, Leigh Matthews shows how a critical approach to the life-writing of individual prairie women can broaden and deepen our understanding of the settlement era. Reopening for examination a substantial body of memoirs published after 1950 but now largely out of print, Matthews engages critical and feminist theory to close the gap between our polarized stereotypes and the actual lived experiences of rural prairie women.

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Catch the Gleam:
Mount Royal, From College to University, 1910–2009
Donald N. Baker

Mount Royal College began in Calgary in 1911 as a small, private residential Methodist institution offering advanced elementary and secondary schooling to students from both the city and the rural hinterland.

This lively and sensitive history draws on an impressive body of archival sources, oral histories, and interviews as well as sound and current scholarship on the history and theory of post-secondary education.

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Gold Diggers:
Striking It Rich In The Klondike
Charlotte Gray

This is the story of the Gold Rush through the intimate lives of six extraordinary people: the saintly priest Father Judge; the feisty entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney; the struggling writer Jack London; the imperious British journalist Flora Shaw; the legendary Sam Steele of the Mounties; and the prospector William Haskell. Brilliantly interweaving their stories, Gray creates a fascinating panorama of a frontier town where desperados, saloon keepers, gamblers, dance hall girls, churchmen and law-makers were thrown together in a volatile time.

Beautifully illustrated with period photographs and documents of the Gold Rush, Gold Diggers is a colourful and entertaining journey into a world gone mad for wealth.

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