McGill Authors
The Smart Palate
Proceeds from the sale of each book will benefit the Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre. 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.
Fearful Asymmetry
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 Bic?tre 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
Catharine Parr Traill's the Female Emigrant's Guide
Our Rural Selves
Life in the countryside, often perceived as either idyllic or depleted, has long been misrepresented. Challenging the stereotypes and myths that surround the idea of rurality, Our Rural Selves interrogates and represents individual and collective memories of childhood in rural landscapes and small towns. Drawing on visual artifacts whose origins range from the early twentieth century to today, such as photographs, films, objects, picture books, and digital games, contributors offer readings of childhood that are geographically, ethnically, and culturally diverse. They examine the memories of Indigenous children, the experiences of back-to-the-land youth, and boom-or-bust childhoods within the petroleum, farming, and fishing industries. Illustrating often neglected and overlooked aspects of adolescence, this collection suggests new ways of studying social connectedness and collective futures. Innovative and revealing in its use of visual studies, autoethnography, and memory-work, Our Rural Selves explores representation, imagination, and what it means to grow up rural in Canada.
Social Science
Rural
Children's Studies
Publication Date: April 26th, 2019
296 pages
Managing the Myths of Health Care
Power Shift
ABOUT THE BOOK
The facts are indisputable. When women get even a bit of education, the whole of society improves. When they get a bit of healthcare, everyone lives longer. In many ways, it has never been a better time to be a woman: a fundamental shift has been occurring. Yet from Toronto to Timbuktu the promise of equality still eludes half the world’s population.
In her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong illustrates how the status of the female half of humanity is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. Drawing on anthropology, social science, literature, politics, and economics, she examines the many beginnings of the role of women in society, and the evolutionary revisions over millennia in the realms of sex, religion, custom, culture, politics, and economics. What ultimately comes to light is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost to us all.
Publication date: September 17, 2019
304 pages
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SALLY ARMSTRONG is an award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist. She is the author of four bestselling books: Ascent of Women: A New Age Is Dawning for Every Mother’s Daughter, The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor, Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan, and Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan’s Women. Armstrong was the first journalist to bring the story of the women of Afghanistan to the world. She has also covered stories in conflict zones from Bosnia and Somalia to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, Jordan, and Israel. She is a four-time winner of the Amnesty International Canada media award, the recipient of ten honorary degrees, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. She was born and raised in Montreal, lives in Toronto, and spends the summer in New Brunswick.
The Lonely Hearts Hotel: A Novel
Enlightenment Now
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
Property and Dispossession
Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.
Native American
History
North American
Publication Date: January 11, 2018
400 pages
The Good Liar
One explosion. Three women. Countless secrets. From bestselling author Catherine McKenzie comes a suspenseful, unsettling novel about what lurks in the wake of tragedy.
Everybody hides. Everybody lies.
On October 10th, three women’s lives are forever altered by a terrible accident.
Cecily was supposed to be in the building that exploded in Chicago and killed her husband. A photo taken of her as she watched the horrifying scene quickly brings her unwanted media attention as the “poster child” of the haunting event. Cecily has secrets she’s desperately trying to hide but cannot find a way to divert the media’s attention from her and her family.
Franny lost her birth mother—Cecily’s best friend—in the destruction shortly after the two met. A year later, she and Cecily team up to help families obtain financial compensation for their loss, but their budding friendship is derailed when it starts to become clear Franny’s story doesn’t quite add up. How did she manage to track down her mother? And why did her mother keep Franny a secret even after they’d met?
A thousand miles away in Montreal, Kate is trying to create a new life. But what led her to leave Chicago in the first place? Will she succeed in moving on from her mistakes or will Kate be drawn back into her old life?
With surprising twists and turns, The Good Liar is a riveting read by a masterful storyteller that will make readers wonder how far they’d go to hide their own secrets.
Mystery
Canadian Detectives
Literature & Fiction
Publication Date: OApril 3rd, 2018
432 pages
Many Women, Many Voices
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.
Bedtime Stories for Managers
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
In Search of the True Russia
Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity.
Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within "high" culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of "us vs. us" rather than "us vs. them." She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where "true" Russians reside.
Literary Criticism
Russian & Former Soviet Union
Popular Culture
Publication Date: June 26th, 2018
216 pages
Lear's Shadow
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
Defying Limits
I had dreamt about becoming an astronaut from the time I watched Alan Shepard launch on the first American sub-orbital flight on May 5, 1961. Eleven days before my seventh birthday, I committed to a new goal: one day, I would fly in outer space.
Dr. Dave has led the sort of life that most people only dream of. He has set records for spacewalking. He has lived undersea for weeks at a time. He has saved lives as an emergency doctor, launched into the stratosphere twice, and performed surgery in zero gravity.
But if you ask him how he became so accomplished, he'll say: "I'm just a curious kid from Saskatchewan." Curious indeed.
Dr. Dave never lost his desire to explore nor his fascination with the world. Whether he was exploring the woods behind his childhood home or floating in space at the end of the Canadarm, Dave tried to see every moment of his life as filled with beauty and meaning. He learned to scuba dive at only twelve years old, became a doctor despite academic struggles as an undergraduate, and overcame stiff odds and fierce competition to join the ranks of the astronauts he had idolized as a child.
There were setbacks and challenges along the way--the loss of friends in the Columbia disaster, a cancer diagnosis that nearly prevented him from returning to space--but through it all, Dave never lost sight of his goal. And when he finally had the chance to fly among the stars, he came to realize that although the destination can be spectacular, it's the journey that truly matters.
In Defying Limits, Dave shares the events that have defined his life, showing us that whether we're gravity-defying astronauts or earth-bound terrestrials, we can all live an infinite, fulfilled life by relishing the value and importance of each moment. The greatest fear that we all face is not the fear of dying, but the fear of never having lived. Each of us is greater than we believe. And, together, we can exceed our limits to soar farther and higher than we ever imagined.
Adventurers & Explorers
Biography & Autobiography
Personal Memoirs
Publication Date: October 30th, 2018
240 pages
High Time: The Legalization and Regulation of Cannabis in Canada
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
The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era
As the aspirations of the two rising Asian powers collide, the China-India rivalry is likely to shape twenty-first-century international politics in the region and far beyond.
This volume by T.V. Paul and an international group of leading scholars examines whether the rivalry between the two countries that began in the 1950s will intensify or dissipate in the twenty-first century. The China-India relationship is important to analyze because past experience has shown that when two rising great powers share a border, the relationship is volatile and potentially dangerous. India and China's relationship faces a number of challenges, including multiple border disputes that periodically flare up, division over the status of Tibet and the Dalai Lama, the strategic challenge to India posed by China's close relationship with Pakistan, the Chinese navy's greater presence in the Indian Ocean, and the two states' competition for natural resources. Despite these irritants, however, both countries agree on issues such as global financial reforms and climate change and have much to gain from increasing trade and investment, so there are reasons for optimism as well as pessimism.
The contributors to this volume answer the following questions: What explains the peculiar contours of this rivalry? What influence does accelerated globalization, especially increased trade and investment, have on this rivalry? What impact do US-China competition and China's expanding navy have on this rivalry? Under what conditions will it escalate or end? The China-India Rivalry in the Globalization Era will be of great interest to students, scholars, and policymakers concerned with Indian and Chinese foreign policy and Asian security.
Political Science
International Relations
General
Publication Date: November 3rd, 2018
312 pages
Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion
This collection addresses, as it exemplifies, an identity crisis in contemporary philosophy of religion. It represents a unique two-way dialogue between philosophers of religion and scholars of religion and broaches issues pertaining to the philosophy of religion and the philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and religious studies, theology, and the modern academy on the other. While each author manages the current challenges in philosophy of religion differently, one can nonetheless discern a polyphony of interests surrounding a postcritical, postsecular appreciation of religion. In part 1, contributors ask how philosophy of religion can accommodate both the strengths and weaknesses of Western analytic and continental traditions; incorporate developments in ideology critique, gender studies, and Asian philosophies; and negotiate the perceived stalemate in philosophy of religion. Part 2 addresses these questions in terms of a philosophy of religion that is postcolonial in intention and multidisciplinary in orientation and features scholarship from the fields of both religion and theology. An underlying theme is the importance of ushering philosophy of religion into a postphenomenological era of religious studies and theology. This is a neglected dimension in many laudable discussions about philosophy of religion that this volume hopes to emend.
Religion
Philosophy
Publication Date: January 2nd, 2019
318 pages
Religious Journeys in India
In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra.
Comparative Religion
Social Science
Anthropology
Publication Date: January 2nd, 2019
338 pages
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