With iridescent blues and greens, damselflies are some of the most beautiful flying insects as well as the most primitive. As members of the insect order Odonata they are related to dragonflies but are classified in a separate suborder. These aquatic insects are a delight to the eye and a fascinating creature of study. In Damselflies of Alberta, naturalist John Acorn describes the twenty-two species native to the province. Exhaustively researched, yet written in an accessi... [READ MORE]

Dance of the Sexes reveals that Alice Munro's gender very much colours and influences her fiction in dramatic ways, expressing itself in what feminist theorists have identified as "writing the body." Beverly Rasporich examines Munro as folk artist, ironist, and regionalist in relation to her femaleness and feminism.

By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith's debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith's limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles-her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of memory, world travel, ekphrasis, myth, and more-exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or pilgrimage, to meet the w... [READ MORE]

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canad... [READ MORE]

Alberta is well known for its fossil treasures, and author John Acorn is as keen on the long-dead creatures of Alberta as he is on the living. Here, John features 80 of the most noteworthy fossils, fossil locations, and fossil hunters from this most palaeontological of provinces. There's more to the story of "deep Alberta" than dinosaurs, but dinosaur fans will find all their favourite beasts here as well -- from Edmontosaurus to Tyrannosaurus rex, and everything... [READ MORE]

A rare social-science experiment was recently undertaken in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Within the space of one year, all three provincial governments embarked on programs to eliminate their deficits. This volume considers the political culture of each province, examines the strategies chosen, and measures the comparative outcomes of the experiment.

What if Demeter, the timeless fertility goddess of ancient Greek myth, slipped through a crack into the twenty-first century, shook off her ankle bracelets, corn tassels, and garlands, and began a tour of our improbable culture? Award-winning poet Susan McCaslin exercises the profound mother-daughter trauma forged in the Demeter-Persephone myth with unapologetic modernity. This sequence takes on a novel life all its own: Hades steals away the maiden into a cult/culture of ... [READ MORE]

Deriving is a feminist exploration of the creation of life, of family, and of words themselves. Delisle asks: How does past infertility colour the experience of new motherhood? How do historical voices echo in the present? How does language impact our ways of being in the world? These poems embrace the rich material of mothering with unapologetic honesty, confronting the experiences that some would keep hidden. Fear, anger, envy mix with joy and ultimately hope, as Delisle... [READ MORE]

This catalogue describes in precis form the contents of a magnificent collection of Sephardic manuscripts and texts that resides in the University of Alberta Library. The book also provides an excellent introduction to the Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa after their expulsion from Spain in 1492.

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This book presents a dozen papers from experts in various parts of the world discussing the next stage in the development of the vastly expanding field of dual system estimation and providing some documentation of experiments with the method in francophone Africa and Liberia.

Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951) was an extraordinary writer and political figure of the Ukrainian generation that was active in the early twentieth century. In his stories, novels, and plays he broke with populist and literary-realist traditions and rebelled against the social mores and political system of the tsarist empire, often raising provocative questions about morality and authenticity. Vynnychenko wrote most of his 23 plays while he lived as an émigré. ... [READ MORE]

This oral autobiography of two remarkable Cree women tells their life stories against a backdrop of government discrimination, First Nations activism, and the resurgence of First Nations communities. Nellie Carlson and Kathleen Steinhauer, who helped to organize the Indian Rights for Indian Women movement in western Canada in the 1960s, fought the Canadian government's interpretation of treaty and Indigenous Rights, the Indian Act, and the male power structure in their own... [READ MORE]

Dissonant Methods is an innovative collection that probes how, by approaching teaching creatively, postsecondary instructors can resist the constrictions of neoliberalism. Based on the foundations of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, whereby educators are asked to explore teaching as scholarship, these essays offer concrete and practical meditations on resistant and sustainable teaching. The contributors seek to undermine forms of oppression frequently found in higher ... [READ MORE]

Articles explore distance education, focusing on northern and remote communities in Canada, Botswana, and Nigeria. Programs in post-secondary education, including teacher training, credit and non-credit programs, are described. Also explores theoretical perspectives on the notion of 'community' and 'sustainability'. Chapters by: Denis Wall; Michael Robinson; Margaret Haughey; Richard D. Hotchkis and Linda Dreidger; Hafiz Wali; Johannes N. S. Mutanyatta; Dennis B. Sharpe; T... [READ MORE]

C. Ian Jackson was one of four graduate students who embarked upon Operation Hazen, part of Canada's contribution to the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year. Their work at the weather and research station at Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island exposed them to unusual cold -- 121 days with temperatures below -40o -- as well as isolation. The failure of their radio shortly after their arrival deprived them of contact with the world beyond. Based on lengthy letters written to h... [READ MORE]

Tony Robinson-Smith, his wife Nadya, and ten Bhutanese college students set out to run 578 kilometres (360 miles) across the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. Joined by a stray dog, they slogged over five mountain passes, bathed in ice-clogged streams, ate over log fires, and stopped at every store, restaurant, guesthouse, and dzong to raise money for the Tarayana Foundation. The “Tara-thon” was the first endeavour of its kind and gave 350 village children th... [READ MORE]

Translation is tricky business. The translator has to transform the foreign to the familiar while moving and pleasing his or her audience. Louise Ladouceur knows theatre from a multi-dimensional perspective that gives her research a particular authority as she moves between two of the dominant cultures of Canada: French and English. Through the analysis of six plays from each linguistic repertoire, written and translated between 1961 and 2000, her award-winning book compar... [READ MORE]

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong ... [READ MORE]

Art takes many forms. In this selection of Asian court attire, dating from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the phrase "you are what you wear" resonates. Vollmer journeys back to the thirteenth-century Chinese Empire, where ancestors of the ruling Manchu conquerors dressed fittingly. These exquisite costumes remind us that royalty once set fashion standards the way that celebrities do today, but that these garments also promoted distinct national and political messa... [READ MORE]