Elusive Destiny: The Political Vocation of John Napier Turner
Paul Litt

Elusive Destiny reveals the inner workings of Liberal Party politics in their heyday as charted through the meteoric rise and fall of John Napier Turner. Drawing on extensive interviews, including several with John Turner himself, this engrossing work highlights Turner's time as Minister of Justice and Finance, exposing his deep clashes with Trudeau over language rights, social spending, and Quebec. Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is that it answers one of the prevailing mysteries of Canadian politics: how did the Liberal Party's star apprentice of the 1970s become its also-ran of the 1980s?

Buy from Chapters

Telling it to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court
Arthur J. Ray

Arthur Ray's extensive knowledge in the history of the fur trade and Native economic history brought him into the courts as an expert witness in the mid-1980s. For over twenty-five years he has been a part of landmark litigation concerning treaty rights, Aboriginal title, and Métis rights. In Telling It to the Judge, Ray recalls lengthy courtroom battles over lines of evidence, historical interpretation, and philosophies of history, reflecting on the problems inherent in teaching history in the adversarial courtroom setting. Told with charm and based on extensive experience, Telling It to the Judge is a unique narrative of courtroom strategy in the effort to obtain constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights.

Buy from Chapters

Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell
Warren M. Elofson

Warren Elofson debunks the myth of the American "wild west" and the Canadian "mild west" by demonstrating that cattlemen on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel shared a common experience. Focusing on Montana, Southern Alberta, Southern Saskatchewan, and the well-known figure of Charlie Russell — an artist and storyteller — Elofson examines the lives of cowboys and ranch owners, looking closely at the prevalence of drunkenness, prostitution, gunplay, rustling, and vigilante justice in both Canada and the United States.

Buy from Chapters

Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada
Donica Belisle

The experience of walking down a store aisle — replete with displays, salespeople, and infinite choice — is so common we often forget retail has a short history. Retail Nation traces Canada's transformation into a modern consumer society back to an era (1890–1940) when department stores such as Eaton's ruled the shopping scene and promised to strengthen the nation. Department stores emerge as agents of modern nationalism, but the nation they helped to define — white, consumerist, middle-class — was more limited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

Buy from Chapters

Read our review

Extraordinary Canadians: Tommy Douglas
Vincent Lam

As leader of the national NDP, he was a staunch advocate of programs such as the Canada Pension Plan and was often the conscience of Parliament on matters of civil liberties. In the process, he made democratic socialism a part of mainstream Canadian political life. Giller Prize-winning author Vincent Lam, an emergency physician who works on the front lines of the health-care system, brings a novelist's eye to the life of one of Canada's greats.

Buy from Chapters

Read our review