In the Winnipeg Free Press
A selection of books recently discussed in the Winnipeg Free Press. To see recent reviews and articles, visit the Free Press website.
Moon of the Crusted Snow
Waubgeshig Rice 
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The Accidental Veterinarian
DVM Philipp Schott
Trade paperback $20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00
Our Missing Hearts
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Hardcover
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An instant national bestseller o A Reese's Book Club Pick o An instant New York Times bestseller o A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 o A TIME Magazine Best Book of 2022
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year - the inspiring new novel about a mother's unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.
"It's impossible not to be moved."
--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review
"Riveting, tender, and timely."
--People, Book of the Week
"Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching...I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can't wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story!"
--Reese Witherspoon (Reese's Book Club October '22 Pick)
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve "American culture" in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic--including the work of Bird's mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn't know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn't wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It's a story about the power--and limitations--of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.
Mushrooming
- Diane Borsato , Kelsey Oseid
Hardcover
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Foraging for wild mushrooms is an increasingly popular pursuit and this beautifully produced volume--filled with insights, anecdotes and details about more than 120 common and charismatic fungi from across the northern hemisphere--will appeal to everyone from beginner mushroomers to advanced mycophiles. Mushrooming offers a new perspective on the fascinating, edible, deadly and strange world of fungi, from candy caps to earth stars, puff balls to poison pie, prized chanterelles, morels, hedgehogs and the bloodless destroying angel. There are mushrooms named after fairies and demons, little brown mushrooms that are wildly hallucinogenic, phallic specimens prized as aphrodisiacs, and mushrooms that are the colour of precious jewels. Some mushrooms look so much like woodland birds they are shot at by hunters, and others, incredibly, glow in the dark. Walk along with award-winning artist and educator Diane Borsato and illustrator Kelsey Oseid as they inspire foragers at all levels to see the wondrousness of fungi wherever they are: in the forest, the city park or the local market. Learn how mushrooming can radically expand our perspectives, connect us to nature and quietly enrich our lives.
Cassoulet Confessions
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Hardcover
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Cassoulet Confessions is an enthralling memoir by award-winning food and travel writer Sylvie Bigar that reveals how a simple journalistic assignment sparked a culinary obsession and transcended into a quest for identity. Set in the stunning southern French countryside, this honest and poignant memoir conveys hunger for authentic food and a universal hunger for home. In Cassoulet Confessions, Sylvie travels across the Atlantic from her home in New York to the origin of cassoulet - the Occitanie region of Southern France. There she immerses herself in all things cassoulet: the quintessential historic meat and bean stew. From her first spoonful, she is transported back to her dramatic childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, and finds herself journeying through an unexpected rabbit hole of memories. Not only does she discover the deeper meanings of her ancestral French cuisine, but she is ultimately transformed by having to face her unsettling, complex family history.
Sylvie's simple but poetic prose immerses us in her story: we smell the simmering aromas of French kitchens, empathize with her family dilemmas, and experience her internal struggle to understand and ultimately accept herself.
Lifesavers and Body Snatchers
- Tim Cook
Hardcover
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From Canada's top war historian, a definitive medical history of the Great War, illuminating how the carnage of modern battle gave birth to revolutionary life-saving innovations. It brings to light shocking revelations of the ways the brutality of combat and the necessity of agonizing battlefield decisions led to unimaginable strain for men and women of medicine who fought to save the lives of soldiers.
Medical care in almost all armies during the Great War, and especially in the Canadian medical services, was sophisticated and constantly evolving. Vastly more wounded soldiers were saved than lost. Doctors and surgeons prevented disease from decimating armies, confronted ghastly wounds from chemical weap-ons, remade shattered bodies, and struggled to ease soldiers' battle-haunted minds. After the war, the hard lessons learned by doctors and nurses were brought back to Canada. A new Department of Health created guidelines in the aftermath of the 1918-1919 influ-enza pandemic, which had killed 55,000 Canadians and millions around the world. In a grim irony, the fight to improve civilian health was furthered by the most destructive war up to that point in human history.
But medical advances were not the only thing brought back from Europe: Lifesavers and Body Snatchers exposes the disturbing story of the harvesting of human body parts in medical units behind the lines. Tim Cook has spent over a decade investigating the history of Canadian medical doctors removing the body parts of slain soldiers and transporting their brains, lungs, bones, and other organs to the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London, England. Almost 800 individual body parts were removed from the dead and sent to London, where they were stored, treated, and presented in exhibition galleries. After being exhibited there, the body parts were displayed in Canada. This uncovered history has never been told before and is part of the hidden legacy of the medical war.
Based on deep archival research and unpublished letters of soldiers and medical personnel, Lifesavers and Body Snatchers is a powerful narrative, told in Cook's literary style, which reveals how the medical services supported the soldiers at the front and forged a profound legacy in shaping Canadian public health in the decades that followed.
Touch Anywhere to Begin
- Mark Anthony Jarman
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From acclaimed author Mark Anthony Jarman comes Touch Anywhere to Begin, his first book of travel writing since the publication of the critically acclaimed Ireland's Eye in 2002.
In 18 unusual, head-spinning essays, Jarman can drift through Venice amid the revelry of carnival and the arrival of the impending pandemic or visit a private club along Shanghai's Huangpu River to be serenaded by a band of retired People's Liberation Army singers. In "Panthers and Gods Prowl a Palace of Sin," an invitation to the Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai forges a connection with a jetlagged pair of Arctic throat singers and a doctor fascinated by Canada. In "Jesus on the Mainline," an extended hospitalization beside the intubated victim of a drunk-driving accident reveals a difficult family drama.
And this, of course, is only the beginning. Masterfully written, Touch Anywhere to Begin penetrates the impressionistic moments and intimacies of travel to reveal character and place like none other.
What's Past Is Prologue
- Gail Bowen
Hardcover
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From Arthur Ellis Award-winning Grand Master of Crime Writers comes the newest installment in the Joanne Kilbourn series When Libby Hogarth, the go-to lawyer for the rich or famous who have committed heinous crimes, comes to Regina to deliver the prestigious Mellohawk Lecture, she is met with a torrent of hostility and misinformation. Libby Hogarth had successfully defended Jared Delio, a wildly popular national radio host, against charges of sexual abuse brought against him by three Regina women. Her no-holds-barred cross-examination of the women stirred up a rage that still smolders. Zack and Joanne Shreve's commitment to protect Libby goes beyond the fact that in defending Delio, Libby had simply applied the principles at the root of the justice system. Zack and Libby share a history. They were the last two students to article with Fred C. Harney, a brilliant alcoholic lawyer who changed both their lives. Sawyer MacLeish, Libby's associate, was like a much-loved third son to Joanne when he was growing up, and she fears that Sawyer will suffer collateral damage from any attack on Libby. Joanne's fears are not groundless, and when the inevitable happens, Joanne, Zack, and their extended family must pick up the pieces.
The Philosophy of Modern Song
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Hardcover
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The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan's first book of new writing since 2004's Chronicles: Volume One--and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan's unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work's transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
Covid-19
- Jacalyn Duffin
Hardcover
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For two years the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the world. The physician and medical historian Jacalyn Duffin presents a global history of the virus, with a focus on Canada. Duffin describes the frightening appearance of the virus and its identification by scientists in China; subsequent outbreaks on cruise ships; the relentless spread to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere; and the immediate attempts to confront it. COVID-19 next explores the scientific history of infections generally, and the discovery of coronaviruses in particular. Taking a broad approach, the book explains the advent of tests, treatments, and vaccines, as well as the practical politics behind interventions, including quarantines, barrier technologies, lockdowns, and social and financial supports. In concluding chapters Duffin analyzes the outcome of successive waves of COVID-19 infection around the world: the toll of human suffering, the successes and failures of control measures, vaccine rollouts, and grassroots opposition to governments' attempts to limit the spread and mitigate social and economic damages. Closing with the fraught search for the origins of COVID-19, Duffin considers the implications of an "infodemic" and provides an cautionary outlook for the future.
Big Men Fear Me
- Mark Bourrie
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The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most influential media moguls. When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh's biography "one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history"--until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh's inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.
Overcome
- Anne Mahon
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Abandonment, loss, endless transitions, self-reliance, continued persistence, and fierce beauty all coexist in this compelling collection of stories of ten women who journey from victims of the child welfare system to survivors, and beyond. These women face endless challenges, oppression, and trauma but discover their power through creativity, self-awareness, education, motherhood, and extreme empathy. They decipher their personal stories looking back through the lens of their lived experience to contribute to changing the narratives of how people who grew up in in the child welfare system see themselves, and how society sees them. These stories create compassion and understanding, breaking down biases. They also illustrate the direct and multi-faceted relationships between residential schools, the breakdown of Indigenous families, the perpetuated system racism of of the child welfare system and oppression through other societal systems. Many of these women are the voices of those who could have been murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls but have lived to tell their stories. Embracing their humanity, their courageous sharing teaches and informs us. These heartbreaking and inspiring stories will educate and create change.
Not Russian
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A gripping, illuminating novel about recent Russian aggressions and the humans caught in the crossfire.
One evening in 2015, the journalist Pavel Vladimirovich and his wife Tatyana are at home when the news breaks that there has been a terrorist attack. Over a hundred people have been taken hostage in the Church of the Epiphany in the village of Nikolskoye near Moscow. As they watch, on the TV screen appears the face of one of the terrorists: Vadim Petrovich Seryegin, an old friend of Pavel's.
The friendship between the two men evolved through periods of conflict, war, peace, emigration, and isolation. Pavel may be one of Vadim's only friends, and when others realize this, he is asked to negotiate with Vadim.
The Church is horrifyingly silent when Pavel enters. Vadim welcomes Pavel but refuses to capitulate. As the stakes get higher and higher, Vadim's story including his connection to the wars in Chechnya and the Ukraine is revealed and it becomes clear that the first meeting between the two men was not all it first seemed to be to Pavel.
Back in the church, Pavel learns that the terrorists have one and only one demand, and that it concerns the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
True Reconciliation
- Jody Wilson-Raybould
Hardcover
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From the #1 bestselling author of 'Indian' in the Cabinet, a groundbreaking and accessible roadmap to advancing true reconciliation across Canada.
There is one question Canadians have asked Jody Wilson-Raybould more than any other: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? It is clear that people from all over the country want to take concrete and tangible action that will make real change. We just need to know how to get started. This book provides that next step. For Wilson-Raybould, what individuals and organizations need to do to advance true reconciliation is self-evident, accessible, and achievable. True Reconciliation is broken down into three core practices--Learn, Understand, and Act--that can be applied by individuals, communities, organizations, and governments.
The practices are based not only on the historical and contemporary experience of Indigenous peoples in their relentless efforts to effect transformative change and decolonization, but also on the deep understanding and expertise about what has been effective in the past, what we are doing right, and wrong, today, and what our collective future requires. Fundamental to a shared way of thinking is an understanding of the Indigenous experience throughout the story of Canada. In a manner that reflects how work is done in the Big House, True Reconciliation features an "oral" history of these lands, told through Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices from our past and present.
The ultimate and attainable goal of True Reconciliation is to break down the silos we've created that prevent meaningful change, to be empowered to increasingly act as "inbetweeners," and to take full advantage of this moment in our history to positively transform the country into a place we can all be proud of.
The Light We Carry
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Hardcover - discounted
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER o ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2022 o In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, #1 bestselling memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.
There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life's big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?
Michelle Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles--the earned wisdom that helps her continue to "become." She details her most valuable practices, like "starting kind," "going high," and assembling a "kitchen table" of trusted friends and mentors. With trademark humor, candor, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.
"When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it," writes Michelle Obama. A rewarding blend of powerful stories and profound advice that will ignite conversation, The Light We Carry inspires readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.
Someday, Maybe
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Hardcover
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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK o A BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB PICK o A LIBRARYREADS PICK
"If you are someone who gravitates toward emotional gut punch reads, allow me to introduce you to this spectacular debut..."--BuzzFeed
Here are three things you should know about my husband: He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado.
He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because...
On New Year's Eve, he died.
And here is one thing you should know about me: I found him.
Bonus fact: No. I am not okay.
Someday, Maybe is a stunning, witty debut novel about a young woman's emotional journey through unimaginable loss, pulled along by her tight-knit Nigerian family, a posse of friends, and the love and laughter she shared with her husband.
"Incisive and witty. I couldn't put it down."--Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström, internationally bestselling author of In Every Mirror She's Black
"A masterfully woven exposition on love and loss. Nwabineli is magic with words."--Bolu Babalola, internationally bestselling author of Honey and Spice
It's Not TV
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Hardcover
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"A read so riveting, it's not hard to imagine watching it unfold on Sunday nights." --The Associated Press
"An incisive account that is more than a rosy victory lap for one of TV's most influential channels." --Eric Deggans, NPR's "Books We Love"
The inside story of HBO, the start-up company that reinvented television--by two veteran media reporters
HBO changed how stories could be told on TV. The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Game of Thrones. The network's meteoric rise heralded the second golden age of television with serialized shows that examined and reflected American anxieties, fears, and secret passions through complicated characters who were flawed and often unlikable. HBO's own behind-the-scenes story is as complex, compelling, and innovative as the dramas the network created, driven by unorthodox executives who pushed the boundaries of what viewers understood as television at the turn of the century. Originally conceived by a small upstart group of entrepreneurs to bring Hollywood movies into living rooms across America, the scrappy network grew into one of the most influential and respected players in Hollywood. It's Not TV is the deeply reported, definitive story of one of America's most daring and popular cultural institutions, laying bare HBO's growth, dominance, and vulnerability within the capricious media landscape over the past fifty years.
Through the visionary executives, showrunners, and producers who shaped HBO, seasoned journalists Gillette and Koblin bring to life a dynamic cast of characters who drove the company's creative innovation in astonishing ways--outmaneuvering copycat competitors, taming Hollywood studios, transforming 1980s comedians and athletes like Chris Rock and Mike Tyson into superstars, and in the late 1990s and 2000s elevating the commercial-free, serialized drama to a revered art form. But in the midst of all its success, HBO was also defined by misbehaving executives, internal power struggles, and a few crucial miscalculations.
As data-driven models like Netflix have taken over streaming, HBO's artful, instinctual, and humanistic approach to storytelling is in jeopardy. Taking readers into the boardrooms and behind the camera, It's Not TV tells the surprising, fascinating story of HBO's ascent, its groundbreaking influence on American business, technology, and popular culture, and its increasingly precarious position in the very market it created.
