McGill Authors

Proceeds from the sale of each book will benefit the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre.

McGILL AUTHOR

Catering to those who want to be as health conscious as they are passionate about food, The Smart Palate is a delightful cookbook featuring over 180 triple-tested recipes, full-colour photographs, chef’s tips, smart food facts, and nutritional analyses for every meal from breakfast to dessert, covering everything from smoothies, soups, and salads to grains, meats, and sweets.

Providing information on how to incorporate wholesome, perhaps unfamiliar, ingredients into everyday menus, this book showcases novel methods for preparing traditional favourites in healthful ways. Sugars and fats are adjusted in the recipes to minimal amounts or substituted altogether with alternative ingredients without compromising taste. While fresh, local ingredients are emphasized, the need for frozen and canned goods in a fast-paced life is also taken into account. Popular Montreal chemistry professor Joe Schwarcz weighs in with science-based information on the health benefits of many of the foods featured here, as well as fascinating historical facts about their origins.

A fundraising project endorsed by the McGill University Faculty of Medicine that also honours the scientists at McGill’s Goodman Cancer Research Centre, The Smart Palate offers indispensable guidelines for choosing and preparing foods that sustain and enrich a healthy life.

Tina Landsman Abbey is a self-taught home cook and baker, and a co-editor of several cookbooks including Cooking with Love: The Best Recipes from Montreal’s Finest Cooks.

Gail Goldfarb Karp’s love of great food and keen sense of taste stems from the wonderful cooking of her paternal Polish grandmother and maternal Hungarian grandmother.

Joe Schwarcz is director of the McGill Office for Science and Society, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, and host of The Dr. Joe Schwarcz Show on CJAD 800 in Montreal.

McGILL AUTHOR

Tommy Schnurmacher has written a book that could change your life. It changed his.

As a writer, Montreal media icon Schnurmacher is an intense force of nature, a seismic swell of visceral empathy, laser-sharp wit and courageous self-analysis.

Now meet Olga. Auschwitz prisoner A-25057, aka Mom, A fearless, dramatic and unpredictable maverick. An original.

Exposing the souls of a family for all to see, Make-up Tips from Auschwitz is an addictive page-turner. Schnurmacher's voice resonates with a lyrical cadence all his own and an unsettling candor reminiscent of humorist David Sedaris and essayist Augusten Burroughs.

Like the Oscar-winning film, Life is Beautiful, Schnurmacher revisits the Holocaust with rays of light in the darkness.

Sparkling with chutzpah and charm, this is a story of a family's cultural collision and delightful dysfunction. With the growing pains of Shtisel, the earthiness of The Simpsons and the fierce family loyalty of The Sopranos, these newcomers from Hungary defy authority. They figured out early on that conventional values were not enough. It was their moxie that allowed them to succeed.

Schmooze with the passing parade that includes John Lennon, Elizabeth Taylor and Crystal Nacht. You will laugh out loud as you meet a cast of supporting characters who redefine eccentric: the 50-minute therapist, the psychic rabbi and a superstitious hypochondriac named Paris.

Once you get to know these mutineers from the mainstream, you will want to organize an intervention. Or at least a Passover Seder.

Publication date: August 15th, 2019

278 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

"Health care is not failing but succeeding, expensively, and we don't want to pay for it. So the administrations, public and private alike, intervene to cut costs, and herein lies the failure."

In this sure-to-be-controversial book, leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to reframing the management and organization of health care. The problem is not management per se but a form of remote-control management detached from the operations yet determined to control them. It reorganizes relentlessly, measures like mad, promotes a heroic form of leadership, favors competition where the need is for cooperation, and pretends that the calling of health care should be managed like a business.

"Management in health care should be about dedicated and continuous care more than interventionist and episodic cures."

This professional form of organizing is the source of health care's great strength as well as its debilitating weakness. In its administration, as in its operations, it categorizes whatever it can to apply standardized practices whose results can be measured. When the categories fit, this works wonderfully well. The physician diagnoses appendicitis and operates; some administrator ticks the appropriate box and pays. But what happens when the fit fails--when patients fall outside the categories or across several categories or need to be treated as people beneath the categories or when the managers and professionals pass each other like ships in the night?

To cope with all this, Mintzberg says that we need to reorganize our heads instead of our institutions. He discusses how we can think differently about systems and strategies, sectors and scale, measurement and management, leadership and organization, competition and collaboration.

"Market control of health care is crass, state control is crude, professional control is closed. We need all three--in their place."

The overall message of Mintzberg's masterful analysis is that care, cure, control, and community have to work together, within health-care institutions and across them, to deliver quantity, quality, and equality simultaneously.

Medical

Health Care Delivery

Administration

Health Policy

Publication Date: May 15, 2017

272 Pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Canada will become the first G7 country to legalize cannabis, and the world is watching. The primary concern facing the Liberal government as it seeks to fulfill its 2015 campaign promise to "legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana" is whether it can be done without making the situation worse. As the Liberal platform pointed out, the current regime lets illegal cannabis fall into the hands of minors, pours large profits into organized crime, and traps many people in the criminal justice system for what is arguably a victimless crime. While the legalization of marijuana in Canada begins with a straightforward change of the criminal code, its ramifications go far beyond this. Legalization will have a serious impact on the country's international treaty commitments, interprovincial relations, taxation and regulatory regimes, and social and health policies. The essays in this book address these outcomes from three main perspectives: the decades-long political path to legalization; the assumptions that underwrite the new policy, in particular the desire to stamp out the black market; and how legalization in Canada looks in an international context. Bringing together analysis by policy makers and scholars, including the architect of marijuana legislation in Portugal - a trailblazing jurisdiction - High Time provides an urgent and necessary overview of Canada's Cannabis Act.

Political Science

Public Policy

Publication Date: March 4th, 2019
240 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Set in Montreal and New York between the wars, a spellbinding story about two orphans whose unusual magnetism and talent allow them to imagine a sensational future, from the best-selling, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize-short-listed author.

Exquisitely imagined and hypnotically told, The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. Set in the early part of the 20th century, it is an unparalleled tale of abandoned children, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose fortune hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to escape one's origins. It might also take true love.

Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long their true talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing for the rich, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.

Separated as teenagers, both escape into the city's underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs, and theft in order to survive. Ruthless and unforgiving, Montreal in the 1930s is no place for song and dance. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes, the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they'll go to extreme lengths to make those dreams come true. After Rose, Pierrot, and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls hit the stage and the alleys, the underworld will never look the same.

With extraordinary storytelling, musical language, and an extravagantly realized world, acclaimed author Heather O'Neill enchants us with her best novel yet - one so magical there is no escaping its spell.

Written by a McGill alumna.

Publication Date: October 17, 2017

400 Pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Bestselling popular science author Dr. Joe Schwarcz debunks the baloney and serves up the raw facts in this appetizing collection about the things we eat.

Eating has become a confusing experience. Should we follow a keto diet? Is sugar the next tobacco? Does fermented cabbage juice cure disease? Are lectins toxic? Is drinking poppy seed tea risky? What's with probiotics? Can packaging contaminate food? Should our nuts be activated? What is cockroach milk?

We all have questions, and Dr. Joe Schwarcz has the answers, some of which will astonish you. Guaranteed to satisfy your hunger for palatable and relevant scientific information, Dr. Joe separates fact from fiction in this collection of new and updated articles about what to eat, what not to eat, and how to recognize the scientific basis of food chemistry.

Health & Fitness

Diet & Nutrition

Chemistry

Life Sciences

Publication Date: October 08, 2019

312 pages

MCGILL AUTHOR

Across the world, democracies are suffering from a disconnect between the people and political elites. In communities where jobs and industry are scarce, many feel the government is incapable of understanding their needs or addressing their problems. The resulting frustration has fueled the success of destabilizing demagogues. To reverse this pattern and restore responsible government, we need to reinvigorate democracy at the local level. But what does that mean? Drawing on examples of successful community building in cities large and small, from a shrinking village in rural Austria to a neglected section of San Diego, Reconstructing Democracy makes a powerful case for re-engaging citizens. It highlights innovative grassroots projects and shows how local activists can form alliances and discover their own power to solve problems.

Publication Date: March 17th, 2020.

120 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Launched by healthcare providers in January 2018, the Hand Hold campaign confronted the Quebec government's practice of separating children from their families during medical evacuation airlifts, which disproportionately affected remote and northern Indigenous communities.

Pediatric emergency physician Samir Shaheen-Hussain's captivating narrative of this successful campaign, which garnered unprecedented public attention and media coverage, seeks to answer lingering questions about why such a cruel practice remained in place for so long. In doing so it serves as an indispensable case study of contemporary medical colonialism in Quebec. Fighting for a Hand to Hold exposes the medical establishment's role in the displacement, colonization, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Through meticulously gathered government documentation, historical scholarship, media reports, public inquiries, and personal testimonies, Shaheen-Hussain connects the draconian medevac practice with often-disregarded crimes and medical violence inflicted specifically on Indigenous children. This devastating history and ongoing medical colonialism prevent Indigenous communities from attaining internationally recognized measures of health and social well-being because of the pervasive, systemic anti-Indigenous racism that persists in the Canadian public health care system - and in settler society at large.

Shaheen-Hussain's unique perspective combines his experience as a frontline pediatrician with his long-standing involvement in anti-authoritarian social justice movements. Sparked by the indifference and callousness of those in power, this book draws on the innovative work of Indigenous scholars and activists to conclude that a broader decolonization struggle calling for reparations, land reclamation, and self-determination for Indigenous peoples is critical to achieve reconciliation in Canada.

Administration & Policy

Health Administration Policy

Children's Studies

Publication Date: Sept. 23 2020

288 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

With the addition of a contextualized introduction, here is the first annotated translation of the eighth- century clan history Toshi Kaden or the History of the Fujiwara House. Hitherto, scholars have focused on the more famous eighth-century imperial histories Nihon Shoki and Kojiki, but other sources such as the History of the Fujiwara House provide a narrative that complements or deviates from the official histories. The book was written to provide students and researchers with additional material to reconsider the political and intellectual currents of seventh- and eighth-century Japan and, in addition, reveal further insight into the career and motivations of its controversial author, the courtier Fujiwara no Nakamaro.

Publication date: April 30 2020

114 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

Far from being a nave hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.

With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

Psychology

Social Science

Violence in Society

Publication Date: February 13, 2018

576 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Curators. Activists. Hockey Players. Students. Medical Illustrators. Secretaries. Portrait Artists. Sculptors.

Many Women, Many Voices celebrates the voices of women in all of those roles and many more. Shining a light on the untold stories of the women who have shaped McGill and Montreal, it offers illustrated vignettes from the ROAAr collections – Rare Books and Special Collections, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, the Visual Arts Collection, and the McGill University Archives.

McGILL AUTHOR

On the brink of forty, Bea Rose has lost her lover, her business, and her bearings. When the opportunity arises to work on a summer production of King Lear to be staged in various parks around Montreal, she takes it, despite her utter lack of theatre experience.

Things get off to a rocky start when Bea meets the artistic director, Artie White, a childhood friend whose presence stirs up painful memories. Then, inadvertently attracting the attentions of the play's aging star, she learns that she must tread carefully among the egos and relationships of the company. At the same time, Bea's father begins behaving erratically, and her younger sister Cara discovers cracks in the foundation of an apparently perfect life.

The sisters do their best to care for their beloved, demanding father, but his deteriorating condition is more than they can handle. Meanwhile, the star of Lear is also faltering amidst the confusions of age, illness, and regret. When a raucous party whirls out of control, the various forces in Bea's life collide, culminating in a violent act that could destroy more than one life. But that act also reveals how lives might be united in new ways.

Tender, vivid, and powerful, Lear's Shadow is a richly satisfying meditation on love's power to bind and to liberate. It's a lyrical reminder that even in the face of grief, life's joy can be embraced.

Women

Literary

Family Life

Publication Date: July 10th, 2018

336 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

In forty-two succinct, surprising essays, legendary scholar Henry Mintzberg brings management down from the clouds and onto solid ground.

If you're like most managers and things keep you up at night, now you can turn to a book that's designed especially for you! But you won't find talking rabbits or princesses here. (There is a cow, but it doesn't jump.) Henry Mintzberg has culled forty-two of the best posts from his widely read blog and turned them into a deceptively light, sneakily serious compendium of sometimes heretical reflections on management.

The moral here is this: managers need to leave their castles and find out what's actually going on in their kingdoms. And like real bedtime stories, these essays have metaphors galore. So prepare to grow strategies like weeds and organize like a cow. Discover the maestro myth of managing, find the soft underbelly of hard data, and learn why downsizing is bloodletting and your board should be a bee. Mintzberg writes, "Just try not to be outraged by anything you read, because some of my most outrageous ideas turn out to be my best. They just take a while to become obvious."

Business & Economics

Management

Organizational Behavior

Publication Date: February 5th, 2019

192 pages

McGILL AUTHOR

Paul Broca made the most significant discovery in nineteenth-century human biology when he found that speech resides within the left frontal lobe of the human brain. As a young surgeon working at the hospice at Bicêtre on the outskirts of Paris - a repository for the criminal, the insane, the indigent, and the sick - Broca had to overcome derision, acrimony, personal attacks, vindictiveness, and prevailing doctrines before his findings were accepted. Based on a new reading and translation of original records by Broca, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, and Gustave Dax, Fearful Asymmetry recounts the story of this hard-won scientific discovery. Richard Leblanc describes the contentious process, beginning with Bouillaud, who laid the groundwork for the findings, that led Broca on the trail of discovery as he struggled to bring forward a fundamental truth of neurology and, ultimately, of the human condition. Finally, Leblanc connects the research of the three French scientists to the work of Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute in the twentieth century, when neurology moved beyond postmortem anatomical studies to direct observations of the conscious brain. Making many of the debates about localization available for the first time in English, Fearful Asymmetry provides a detailed account of one critical scientific success and the long history behind it.

Medical

History

Language Arts & Disciplines

Publication Date: August 01, 2017
280 pages