The Essential Directors covers 56 influential directors from Hollywood, from the 1920's to the 70's. To lovers or scholars of film, a lot of these will be well known names to you, but there are some more obscure faces who have been forgotten in later years and are ripe for rediscovery. We get an introduction …
How our love of storytelling builds societies and tears them down. In his previous book, The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall showed us how humans see the world through the paradigm of stories. After all, most of our communication, almost all of our entertainment and all social media is essentially storytelling. We can take in facts …
A black prosecutor's fight for fairness. Laura Coates is a black woman in America who grew up with parents who fought to uphold and advance the work that people like Martin Luther King started. These strong ideals led to her working for the Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division, but when she moved …
Jane Goodall is an naturalist and primatologist whose work revolutionised how we understand animal intelligence. From her work with chimpanzees and other animals in Gombe, Tanzania, she came to understand the impact that people had on ecology and so she also became an activist as well. She's now in her 80's and speaks regularly about …
Continue reading The Book Of Hope by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams
"Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru." I was in my early teens when I first read Poe, which seems to be about the average time to start reading him. My copy of his stories had beautiful illustrations by Arthur Rackham, if I remember correctly, and I loved his dark stories of madness, horror …
Continue reading Poe For Your Problems by Catherine Baab-Muguira
I have a few books in my collection now that are about local or Canadian history, and they're all so fascinating. I came across this title, and was really intrigued to learn more. This one was from a small BC press, and I hope to share more of their titles with you in future, because …
I love film noir. I'm really into classic movies in general, but the way that film noir movies are bleak, urban, sometimes mysterious, full of men who can't get a break, femme fatales in sharp hats, and the inevitability of fate... It's such a great genre. Many of these movies were lost and the whole …
"PT Barnum, James Bailey, John Ringling, and the Death-Defying Saga of the American Circus". There's just something about the circus, isn't there? I love books set in or that are about the circus. They always have an element of hard scrabble lives and magic. I think I'm not the only one. Everyone has heard of …
"Why I am better than you and you are better than someone who didn't buy this book." That's the tagline on the cover, and that made me laugh, so then I wanted to read it. I think this one is intentionally polarizing and decidedly trying to annoy some people with it's cover design (ok, and …
According to this book, 80% of Americans believe in miracles. Talking publicly about that belief, however, is another thing. The authors of this book, along with Mary Beth Phillips who was their co-author on their previous book, The Miracle Chase, are three close friends who met through their kids. They each had a Catholic background, …
Continue reading The Miracle Collectors by Joan Luise Hill and Katie Mahon
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