True Stories
A collection of true stories. Get lost in the past with these fascinating biographies, memoirs, historical accounts, and more.
Reconciling History
- Jody Wilson-Raybould 
, Roshan Danesh
Hardcover
$39.95
Reader Reward Price: $35.96
One of Indigo's Top 10 History Books of 2024 and Top 100 Books of 2024 o One of the Toronto Star's 25 books to read this season
From the #1 national bestselling author of 'Indian' in the Cabinet and True Reconciliation, a truly unique history of our land--powerful, devastating, remarkable--as told through the voices of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
The totem pole forms the foundation for this unique and important oral history of Canada. Its goal is both toweringly ambitious and beautifully direct: To tell the story of this country in a way that prompts readers to look from different angles, to see its dimensions, its curves, and its cuts. To see that history has an arc, just as the totem pole rises, but to realize that it is also in the details along the way that important meanings are to be found. To recognize that the story of the past is always there to be retold and recast, and must be conveyed to generations to come. That in the act of re-telling, meaning is found, and strength is built.
When it comes to telling the history of Canada, and in particular the history of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, we need to accept that the way in which our history has traditionally been told has not been a common or shared enterprise. In many ways, it has been an exclusive and siloed one. Among the countless peoples and groups that make up this vast country, the voices and experiences of a few have too often dominated those of many others.
Reconciling History shares voices that have seldom been heard, and in this ground-breaking book they are telling and re-telling history from their perspectives. Born out of the oral history in True Reconciliation, and complemented throughout with stunning photography and art, Reconciling History takes this approach to telling our collective story to an entirely different level.
The Cure for Women
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Hardcover
$40.00
Reader Reward Price: $36.00
How Victorian male doctors used false science to argue that women were unfit for anything but motherhood--and the brilliant doctor who defied them
After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin's evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.
Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education. Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women's bodies and lives continues.
Cher
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Hardback
$45.00
Reader Reward Price: $40.50
***The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller***
***The Global #1 Bestseller***
The extraordinary life of Cher can be told by only one person . . . Cher herself.
After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir.
Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has been lauded by the Kennedy Center.
She is a lifelong activist and philanthropist.
As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship.
With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century.
Cher: The Memoir, Part One follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono--and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous, but eventually drove them apart.
Cher: The Memoir reveals the daughter, the sister, the wife, the lover, the mother, and the superstar.
It is a life too immense for only one book.
Rethinking Free Speech
- Peter Ives
Trade paperback
$25.00
Reader Reward Price: $22.50
Clashes over free speech rights and wrongs haunt public debates about the state of democracy, freedom and the future. While freedom of speech is recognized as foundational to democratic society, its meaning is persistently misunderstood and distorted. Prominent commentators have built massive platforms around claims that their right to free speech is being undermined. Critics of free speech correctly see these claims as a veil for misogyny, white-supremacy, colonialism and transphobia, concluding it is a political weapon to conserve entrenched power arrangements. But is this all there is to say?
Rethinking Free Speech will change the way you think about the politics of speech and its relationship to the future of freedom and democracy in the age of social media. Political theorist Peter Ives offers a new way of thinking about the essential and increasingly contentious debates around the politics of speech. Drawing on political philosophy, including the classic arguments of JS Mill, and everyday examples, Ives takes the reader on a journey through the hotspots of today's raging speech wars. In its bold and careful insights on the combative politics of language, Rethinking Free Speech provides a map for critically grasping these battles as they erupt in university classrooms, debates around the meaning of antisemitism, the "cancelling" of racist comedians and the proliferation of hate speech on social media. This is an original and essential guide to the perils and possibilities of communication for democracy and justice.
Freedom
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Hardcover
$53.00
Reader Reward Price: $47.70
For sixteen years, Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany and at the forefront of European and international politics. In her memoir, she looks back on her life in two German states--East Germany until 1990, and reunified Germany thereafter. How did she, coming from the East, rise to the top of the Christian Democratic Union to become the first woman to hold the office of chancellor? And how did she then become one of the most powerful heads of government in the Western world? What guided her?
In Freedom, Angela Merkel recounts daily life in the chancellor's office as well as the dramatic days and nights when she made far-reaching decisions in Berlin, Brussels, and beyond. She traces the long lines of change in international cooperation and reveals the pressure politicians face when seeking solutions to complex problems in a globalized world. Here, she takes us behind the scenes of international politics, demonstrating both the importance of personal conversations and, crucially, their limits.
Reflecting on politics in a time of increasing confrontation and division, Angela Merkel's memoir offers a unique insight into the inner workings of power--and is a determined and timely plea for freedom.
She Won The Vote For Women
- Robert E Hawkins
Trade paperback
$28.95
Reader Reward Price: $26.06
Lillian Beynon Thomas' suffragist campaign succeeded where all others had failed. This full-length biography fills an important gap in the history of the 'votes for women' movement, a campaign which saw Manitoba become the earliest federal or provincial Canadian jurisdiction to grant women the franchise.
Lillian's "Home Loving Hearts" page in the Prairie Farmer newspaper, a weekly column in which she advocated for a wide variety of women's rights, made her one of the most popular, pioneering women's page journalists on the prairie. During this time, she founded the rural Homemakers' Clubs affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan. To achieve the franchise, she eschewed the then traditional tools of back-room, partisan party politics by instead developing a broadly-based, grass-roots movement which stands as a forerunner of modern political campaign techniques.
Facing hostile opposition to her pacifist views in Winnipeg during World War One, she and her husband went into voluntary exile in New York City where she raised money through a newspaper column describing the plight of destitute sailors in that metropolis. Returning home, she became a leading Canadian short-story writer, playwright, and public advocate for a Canadian cultural identity, distinct from that of Britain or America.
This is the story of how a young girl came with her settler family to a desolate part of the hardscrabble prairie and who, despite these humble origins, succeeded in engineering a fundamental Canadian democratic reform and championing the emerging Canadian cultural nationalism.
Life's Short, Talk Fast
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Trade paperback
$23.99
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
Fast-talking, warm-hearted, and endlessly rewatchable, Gilmore Girls has bonded real-life mothers and daughters since 2000, when its iconic pilot introduced us to Lorelai, Rory, and their idyllic Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. More than twenty years later, it has become one of the most-streamed TV shows, ever. In an anthology as intimate and quick-witted as Gilmore Girls itself, best-selling author Ann Hood invites fifteen writers to investigate their personal relationships to the show. ("It's a show? It's a lifestyle. It's a religion.") Joanna Rakoff considers how Emily Gilmore helped her understand her own mother; Sanjena Sathian sees herself--and Asian American defiance--in Lane Kim; Freya North connects with her son through the show; Francesco Sedita discovers an antidote to pandemic loneliness; Nina de Gramont offers a comic ode to the unreality of Stars Hollow. For anyone who identifies as Team Logan, Team Jess, or even Team Dean, Life's Short, Talk Fast reveals what Gilmore Girls tells us about ourselves--and why it matters. This publication has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.; Warner Bros Television; or any other entity or individual associated with the creation or production of Gilmore Girls.
The Museum of Wes Anderson
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Hardcover
$47.00
Reader Reward Price: $42.30
Welcome to the Wes Anderson museum--a place packed with illustrations, ephemera, trivia, and insightful commentary, and as whimsical and visually arresting as the cult director's films themselves.
This museum in book form takes readers deep into the world of Wes Anderson. Bursting with an exhaustive and eclectic collection of film stills, accessories, clothes, souvenirs, books, and delightfully bizarre ephemera, this immersive treasury offers extraordinary insight into Wes Anderson's literary, musical, and cinematic influences, which range from Indian cinema, French pop music, Italian speed car racing, to The New Yorker magazine and the work of J. D. Salinger.
Among the museum's artifacts are a recipe for a ham sandwich from The French Dispatch's Le Sans Blague cafe; the history of Tang--the drink of choice for the campers in Moonrise Kingdom; and the secret of L'Air de Panache, the cologne worn by the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Readers will discover Anderson's connections to the balalaika, The Beatles, and Benjamin Britten, and they'll discover how the filmmaker was inspired by the works of Hal Ashby, Satyajit Ray, Orson Welles, Mike Nichols, and Francis Ford Coppola. Perfect for dipping into and filled with information that will surprise even the most diehard Wes Anderson fan, this technicolor treasury is as profoundly entertaining as it is authoritative.
Heartbreak Is the National Anthem
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Hardcover - discounted
$24.49
Reader Reward Price: $22.04
***The Instant New York Times Bestseller!***
An intimate look at the life and music of modern pop's most legendary figure, Taylor Swift, from leading music journalist Rob Sheffield.
A cultural phenomenon. A worldwide obsession. An agent of emotional chaos. There's no parallel to Taylor Swift in history: a teenage girl who turns into the world's favorite pop star, songwriter, storyteller, guitar hero, live performer, changing how music is made and heard. An all-time great on the level of The Beatles, Prince, or David Bowie.
Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is the first book that goes deep on the musical and cultural impact of Taylor Swift. Nobody can tell the story like Rob Sheffield, the bestselling and award-winning author of Dreaming the Beatles, On Bowie, and Love Is a Mix Tape. The legendary Rolling Stone journalist is the writer who has chronicled Taylor for every step of her long career, from her early days to the Eras Tour. Sheffield gets right to the heart of Swift and her music, her lyrics, her fan connection, her raw power.
At once one of the most beloved music figures of the past two decades and one of the most criticized, Taylor Swift is known as much for her life beyond her music as she is for her hits--the most public of stars, yet also the weirdest and most mysterious. In the tradition of Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem will inform and delight a legion of fans who hang on every word from Taylor and every word Rob writes on her.
Home and Away
- Mats Sundin , Amy Stuart
Hardcover
$39.99
Reader Reward Price: $35.99
INSTANT #1 BESTSELLER
In one of the last great remaining untold stories in all of sports, the Hall of Fame Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin shares for the first time an unfiltered look at playing hockey in Sweden and across North America as part of the sport's most fabled franchises.
Growing up in Sollentuna, Sweden, on the outskirts of Stockholm, Mats Sundin skated on the lake downhill from his house, a house his father had built with his own hands, on land his mother insisted on buying for their future. In the darkness of the Scandinavian winter Sundin would chase after his older brother on that lake for countless hours. Summers spent in nature with his grandparents instilled a lifelong love for the outdoors. Playing hockey in their driveway, the three Sundin brothers imagined scenes of suiting up for Sweden's national team and scoring a game winning goal against their favoured rival, the Soviet Union. It wasn't until his late teens that he caught the eyes of scouts and coaches from the other side of the Atlantic. At the 1989 NHL draft, eighteen-year-old Sundin was as surprised as anyone when he was selected first overall by the Quebec Nordiques.
After a few years as a Nordique, Sundin was traded to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for the highly popular Leaf captain, Wendel Clark. In his early years in Toronto, he felt both at home and from away, working extra hard to gain acceptance in the world's toughest hockey market. Even once he was named captain, Sundin didn't deviate from his quiet nature but instead lead by example, never asking anyone to work harder than he did. Over thirteen seasons with the team, he would learn just how fiery the cauldron of Leafs Nation could be.
In Home and Away, Mats Sundin writes openly for the first time about what it was like for him to uproot his life in Sweden to embark on a long hockey career an ocean away. Home and Away is an elegiac, heartfelt, and honest story of a man who followed his passions, cherished his family, faced heavy scrutiny, and ultimately earned his way into both the hearts of fans and the hockey record books. His journey transcends the rink and shows what it means to be a quiet and unpretentious Swedish kid who went on to become one of the most accomplished players in the history of the game.
Brothers
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Hardcover
$39.50
Reader Reward Price: $35.55
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
In this intimate and open account--nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you've ever read--Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love in a remarkable tribute to his beloved brother and band mate.
Told with acclaimed New Yorker writer Ariel Levy Brothers is seventy-year-old drummer Alex Van Halen's love letter to his younger brother, Edward, (Maybe "Ed," but never "Eddie"), written while still mourning his untimely death.
In his rough yet sweet voice, Alex recounts the brothers' childhood, first in the Netherlands and then in working class Pasadena, California, with an itinerant musician father and a very proper Indonesian-born mother--the kind of mom who admonished her boys to "always wear a suit" no matter how famous they became--a woman who was both proud and practical, nonchalant about taking a doggie bag from a star-studded dinner. He also shares tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behavior. But mostly his is a story of brotherhood, music, and enduring love.
"I was with him from day one," Alex writes. "We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800 square foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I've spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime."
There has never been an accurate account of them or the band, and Alex wants to set the record straight on Edward's life and death.
Brothers includes never-before-seen photos from the author's private archives.
Still Life with Remorse
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Hardcover
$43.50
Reader Reward Price: $39.15
From the critically acclaimed artist, designer, and author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty, My Favorite Things, and Women Holding Things comes a moving meditation in words and pictures on remorse, joy, ancestry, and memory.
Maira Kalman's most autobiographical and intimate work to date, Still Life with Remorse is a beautiful, four-color collection combining deeply personal stories and 50 striking full-color paintings in the vein of her and Alex Kalman's acclaimed Women Holding Things.
Tracing her family's story from her grandfather's birth in Belarus and emigration to Tel Aviv--where she was born--Maira considers her unique family history, illuminating the complex relationship between recollection, regret, happiness, and heritage. The vibrant original art accompanying these autobiographical pieces are mostly still lifes and interiors which serve as counterpoints to her powerful words. In addition to vignettes exploring her Israeli and Jewish roots, Kalman includes short stories about other great artists, writers, and composers, including Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Robert Schumann.
Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories.
The Forbidden Garden
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Hardcover
$39.99
Reader Reward Price: $35.99
From the award-winning author of The Island of Extraordinary Captives, the riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world's first seed bank who faced an impossible choice during the Siege of Leningrad: eat the collection to prevent starvation, or protect their life's work to help end world hunger?
In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad--now St. Petersburg--and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world's largest collection of seeds--more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous explorer, geneticist, and dissident Nikolai Vavilov, who had recently been disappeared by the Soviet government. After attempts to evacuate the priceless collection failed and supplies dwindled amongst the three million starving citizens, the employes at the Plant Institute were left with a terrible choice. Should they save the collection? Or themselves?
These were not just any seeds. The botanists believed they could be bred into heartier, disease-resistant, and more productive varieties suited for harsh climates, therefore changing the future of food production and preventing famines like those that had plagued their countrymen before. But protecting the seeds was no idle business. The scientists rescued potato samples under enemy fire, extinguished bombs landing on the seed bank's roof, and guarded the collection from scavengers, the bitter cold, and their own hunger. Then in the war's eleventh hour, Nazi plunderers presented a new threat to the collection...
Drawing from previously unseen sources, award-winning journalist Simon Parkin--who has "an inimitable capacity to find the human pulse in the underbelly of war" (The Spectator)--tells the incredible true story of the botanists who held their posts at the Plant Institute during the 872-day siege and the remarkable sacrifices they made in the name of science.
A Nation's Paper
- John Ibbitson
Hardcover
$45.00
Reader Reward Price: $40.50
From Canada's newspaper of record for 180 years, here are thirty-one brilliant and provocative essays by a diverse selection of their writers on how The Globe and Mail covered and influenced major events and issues from the paper's founding to the latest file.
Since 1844, the Globe and Mail and its predecessor, George Brown's Globe, have chronicled Canada: as a colony, a dominion, and a nation. To mark the paper's 180th anniversary, Globe writers explored thirty issues and events in which the national newspaper has influenced the course of the country: Confederation, settler migrations, regional tensions, tussles over language, religion, and race. The essays reveal a tapestry of progress, conflict, and still-incomplete reconciliation: Catholic-Protestant hostilities that are now mostly the stuff of memory; the betrayal of Indigenous peoples with which we still grapple; the frustrations and triumphs of women journalists; pandemics old and new; environmental challenges; the joys of covering sports and the arts; chronicling the nation's business, international coverage, the impossibility of Canada and of this newspaper, which both somehow flourish nonetheless.
Riveting, insightful, disturbing, witty, and always a joy to read, A Nation's Paper chronicles a country and a newspaper that have grown and struggled together - essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where we came from and where we are going.
The Globe and Mail will donate all its proceeds from the book to Journalists for Human Rights.
Hockey Rants and Raves
- Steve Dangle Glynn
Hardcover
$34.99
Reader Reward Price: $31.49
The hottest takes and biggest beefs about hockey from the wildly popular podcaster and YouTuber
Who would be on the Mount Rushmore of goalies?
Is Gretzky the Greatest Player of All Time (a.k.a. GOATzky)?
What are the most embarrassing Leaf losses of all time?
Why would you choose to play in a small market?
Steve "Dangle" Glynn was already a popular talking head on Sportsnet the night the Leafs lost to their own back-up goalie (and Zamboni driver), but his fandom skyrocketed after his rant following the hilarious mishap gained one million views on YouTube. Dangle is well known as a long-suffering Leafs fan, but he is more than just that. He shares his rants and opinions about all teams across the NHL, directing his laser focus onto hockey's greatest arguments, from the best players of all time, to the worst trades, to the most embarrassing Leafs losses.
From one of the most unique voices in hockey, Hockey Rants and Raves is packed with passionate, honest and often humorous takes on all things hockey--required reading for all fans of the game.
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