McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

The 49th Shelf

Canadian books are getting a well-deserved boost today. Canadian Bookshelf announced that Amazon.ca is its lead sponsor for 2012, and that the site will now offer expanded features and book listings under the new name The 49th Shelf. Since its launch in June 2011, the site has steadily gained a following of book readers keen to discuss Canadian fiction and non-fiction, post recommended reading lists and discover new books among the 50,000 titles to be found on this uniquely Canadian book community.

The 49th Shelf's extensive listings of Canadian fiction, graphic novels, children's books, and non-fiction is the largest public collection of Canadian books ever assembled.

The site is edited by Kerry Clare, who presents a weekly selection of great reads and, together with host and producer Julie Wilson, publishes guest posts, book recommendations and interviews with notable Canadian authors.

Kerry Clare said of the project's momentum: "It's been exciting to see book fans discovering the site for themselves over the past few months, and we’re looking forward to providing them with still more ways to engage and to find books that they’ll love." 

The announcement today also marks the introduction of new features on the newly enhanced 49thShelf.com including:

• Expanded listings for Canadian eBooks 
• More original content from bestselling authors and rising stars 
• Book giveaways that allow readers to sample the most anticipated books of 2012

The 49th Shelf is produced by the Association of Canadian Publishers in association with the Canadian Publishers’ Council with funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

David Thompson and the War of 1812

The following is excerpted from The Writings of David Thompson edited by William E. Moreau.

Although Thompson’s involvement in the War of 1812–1814 was minor, he was to play a pivotal role in the settlement of the issues that had led to the hostilities.  Under the terms of the December 1814 Treaty of Ghent, the International Boundary Commission (IBC) was established in order to survey and settle the border between the United States and British North America. The IBC began its work in 1816, and from 1817 to 1827 Thompson served as the astronomer and surveyor under articles  6 and 7 of the treaty, dealing with the boundary from St Regis on the St  Lawrence River to the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods. Eight summers were filled with rigorous travel in this area, as the IBC teams conducted field surveys, and the intervening seasons were devoted to the preparation of maps and charts, correspondence with officials, and several conferences in New York City and Albany. Thompson considered this work to be of such significance that in later life he habitually signed himself “Astronomer and Surveyor Under the 6th and 7th Articles of the Treaty of Ghent.” With this role, which came with an annual salary of $2,000, and with his continued stake in the North West Company, Thompson enjoyed high social status and material prosperity at Williamstown, and he was able to purchase several properties, including four large parcels of farmland in Glengarry County, two potash works, and an island in the St Lawrence River. But this prosperity did not last. Reflecting on his post-IBC years, Thompson later wrote to  British Secretary of State Lord Stanley, “[H]aving a large family, I endeavoured to increase what I had, but unfortunately lost all I had.”

 

From more information on David Thompson and the War of 1812 read the most recent David Thompson Bicentennial newsletter.

 

Further Reading

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Bloomsbury's Rabbi

New universities in Ontario?

Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide

Leave No Doubt and the 2nd anniversary of Canada's Olympic gold medal hockey win

Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain

"Professor Naylor indicts the U.S.A and the United Kingdom of extreme and exploitive capitalism."

Meet Ted Hiebert, author of the upcoming In Praise of Nonsense

Love

Doctor to the North

 

What else?

Halfway through the eBook (r)evolution?

Shoppers angry about the higher cost of books in Canada

Michael Seidenberg's NY secret bookstore

Canadian book count tracks increase in reading

E-books can’t burn

Are books and the internet about to merge?

 

Upcoming

Feb - March - Book launch for Interregional Migration and Public Policy in Canada

• Feb 29, 5 pm, Carleton University, River Building, 5th floor, Ottawa
• March 1, 5 pm, University of Ottawa

March 8, 7 pm - Book launch, Intergovernmental Policy Capacity in Canada, Ryerson, Toronto

March - Lecture, readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

• March 19, 5 pm, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
• March 21, 1 pm, University College of London, UK
• March 21, 6 pm, Gower Street Waterstones, UK

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2, Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of Disposession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

Leave No Doubt

Leave No Doubt 

A Credo for Chasing Your Dreams
By Mike Babcock, with Rick Larsen

APRIL 2012 

"This is a story about a belief in what's possible, about seizing the moment we are all given and about what truly lives deep inside the heart of a leader - a desire so powerful that no force can block its path. Mike Babcock saw the winning goal long before it was scored. He had to. Leave No Doubt is a chronicle about vision, about effort, teamwork, heartbreak, and destiny. A truth about confronting a fear and giving a country a moment in time."

John Furlong, CEO, Vancouver 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games

 

---

 

FEBRUARY 28, 2012 marks the second anniversary of Canada's thrilling Olympic gold medal hockey win. This historic moment is recounted in Leave No Doubt: A Credo for Chasing Your Dreams, a new book by Team Canada head coach Mike Babcock, forthcoming in April 2012.

 

From LEAVE NO DOUBT:

Sunday, February 28^th, 2010.  Vancouver, Canada.  It was Canada against the United States in the gold medal game for men’s hockey on the final day of the Olympics.  Our entire nation was watching.  And with 24 second left in the third period, the Americans scored the tying goal.  My daughter Taylor, who was in the stands, slumped into her seat, put her head in her hands and burst into tears.  Her reaction was a very personal one, but what she felt captured the emotion of people across our country.

 

Ownership of our game, our dream, our destiny was going into overtime.

 

MEDIA INQUIRIES -

Jacqui Davis, Publicist
Tel - (514) 398.2555
jacqueline.davis@mcgill.ca

Barbaric Civilization

Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide by Christopher Powell is a provocative analysis of how genocides result from the expansion of Western civilization. Connecting historical developments with everyday life occurrences, and discussing examples ranging from thirteenth-century Languedoc to 1994 Rwanda, Powell offers an original framework for analyzing, comparing, and discussing genocides as variable outcomes of a common underlying social system, raising unsettling questions about the contradictions of Western civilization and the possibility of a world without genocide.

 

 

Barbaric Civilization in the media

 

• Podcast: Prof. Chris Powell on why ‘Canada’ and ‘genocide’ can and should belong in the same sentence  (Interview on Urban Nation)

Genocide goes back thousands of years, to Rome's destruction of Carthage, he said. "I couldn't even count -- it's a distressingly common event. Some scholars have called the 20th century the century of genocide."

• Interview: List of global atrocities includes residential schools (Winnipeg Free Press)

 

• Video: Indian residential school system an act of genocide: prof (APTN National News)

"Canadians like to think we are a moral country, that we are the good guys. A lot of Canadians recognize that the residential schools were painful, that there was abuse," says Powell. "But there isn't still a widespread recognition that they were a part of a systematic attempt to eliminate by force Aboriginal culture."

• News story: Saganash calls on Duncan to apologize over residential schools comment (APTN National News)

 

• News story: Federal official wanted emails deleted outlining plan to stonewall on residential school genocide questions (APTN National News)

 

To learn more about Barbaric Civilization, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

- Interview on Urban Nation, 104.7 StreetzFM , “Chris Powell, Author, ‘Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide’”, aired 4 August 2011, available online at http://soundcloud.com/urbannation/chris-powell-pt1 and http://soundcloud.com/urbannation/chris-powell-pt2.  The same interview is also linked from this web page:  http://www.mediaindigena.com/rickharp/issues-and-politics/interview-prof-chris-powell-on-why-canada-and-genocide-can-and-should-belong-in-the-same-sentence

 

- Interview for the Winnipeg Free Press, “List of global atrocities includes residential schools: U of M professor pens genocide book”, published 7 September 2011, available online at http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/list-of-global-atrocities-includes-residential-schools-129359608.html

 

- Interview for Aboriginal People’s Television Network, “Indian residential school system an act of genocide: prof”, aired 19 September 2011, available online at http://aptn.ca/pages/news/2011/09/20/indian-residential-school-system-an-act-of-genocide-prof

 

- Quoted in news story “Saganash calls on Duncan to apologize over residential schools comment”, Aboriginal People’s Television Network, aired 27 October 2011. Online at http://aptn.ca/pages/news/2011/10/27/residential-schools-saganashduncan-apologize/

 

- Quoted again in news story "Federal official wanted emails deleted outlining plan to stonewall on residential school genocide questions", Aboriginal People’s Television Network, aired 13 January 2012. Online at http://aptn.ca/pages/news/2012/01/13/federal-official-wanted-emails-deleted-outlining-plan-to-stonewall-on-residential-school-genocide-questions/

New universities in Ontario?

The following is excerpted from the article New universities in Ontario – are they necessary?

 

In its most recent Throne Speech, the Ontario government, echoing an election promise, pledged to create 60,000 additional postsecondary spaces and three new undergraduate campuses. But what form should these new institutions take? Should they be primarily teaching universities? Should they include an online institute? How about satellite campuses of existing universities? Should they accommodate the needs of underrepresented students? Are they needed at all?

These are some of the questions that were debated at a conference held Feb. 7 at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Setting the stage for the discussion were Ian Clark and David Trick, two of three authors of a controversial book, Academic Reform: Policy Options for Improving the Quality and Cost-Effectiveness of Undergraduate Education in Ontario. The two argued that any new institution built in the province should be a primarily teaching university in which full-time faculty members would spend about 80 percent of their time teaching, compared to 40 percent at most traditional universities in the province. The result, they predicted, will be smaller class sizes, lower operating costs and, ultimately, lower tuition.

Read the full article

 

Ian Clark and David Trick, authors of Academic Reform, will be
featured in an upcoming episode of The Sunday Edition.

 

To learn more about Academic Reform, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Bloomsbury's Rabbi

The following is excerpted from Bloomsbury's Rabbi by Matthew Ackerman:

 

A translator stands between two languages and between the two worlds that the languages represent.  If he does his job well, he may belong in neither place.  Such was the fate of Samuel Koteliansky, an emigré Russian Jew in London, who translated Chekhov, befriended D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and circulated on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group.  These activities, portrayed by Galya Diment in her new biography of Koteliansky, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, did not add up to much in the way of literary accomplishment.  But Koteliansky—Kot, his English friends called him—saw a great deal of the literary lions whose accomplishments and personal lives burnt on through the entire 20th century.  

(...)

His most important literary friendships were with Lawrence and Mansfield, lasting until their early deaths of tuberculosis. The relationships seem to have rested mostly on Kot's devotion to the talent and success of these major authors—and his motherly opposition to their romantic partners. He was also a "combination bookkeeper, errand boy, and mailing clerk" for Lawrence's literary magazine, the Signature.  Lawrence, for his part, allowed himself to be used in Kot's sometimes-quixotic literary promotion schemes, which often reached publication stage only because Kot was able to assure a publisher of Lawrence's participation or an introduction to other famous writers.  

But Kot had successes as well—mostly in the early 1920s, beginning with his translation of Gorky's Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy for Hogarth Press. The book turned Hogarth from a small vanity shop into a proper enterprise—thanks in part to its salacious content, such as Gorky's recollecting Tolstoy stories of "indefatigable" whoring.  

But, then, indefatigable whoring seems to have pervaded much of Bloomsbury.  Their primary sport, gossip, focused on shifting heterosexual and homosexual liaisons, overlaid with a preening sense of moral progress.  Bloomsbury played a significant part in making this the governing style of our own morally fractured age.

Read the full review

 

Readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

• Feb 13, Gelber Conference Centre, (entrance 5151 Cote St. Catherine Road, between Mountain Sights & Westbury)
• Feb 14, Carleton University, Ottawa
• Feb 14, Collected Works, Ottawa

To learn more about A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Books selected for the AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

Canada Prize short list highlights

D.H. Lawrence and Samuel Koteliansky

In honour of Charles Dickens’ 200th

These Mysterious People

 

What else?

Blue Metropolis refines and extends its web presence

Finer points lost in Google translation

Popular etymology is crowded with myths

Designers on book covers of the future

Amazon Publishing bookshop boycott grows

An Amazon bookstore?

 

Upcoming

Feb - Readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury:

• Feb 13, Montreal Jewish Community Centre
• Feb 14, Carleton University, Ottawa
• Feb 14, Collected Works, Ottawa

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2 at Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

MQUP Books Selected for the AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show

Judging for the 2012 AAUP Book, Jacket and Journal Show took place January 26-27 at the AAUP Central Office in New York City. Approximately 226 books, 300 jacket and cover design entries, and 4 journals were entered. 49 books, 1 journal, and 30 jackets/covers were chosen by the jurors as the very best examples from this pool of excellent design.

The 2012 Book, Jacket, & Journal Show will premiere at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Chicago, June 18-20, 2012. The show will be exhibited around the country from September 2012 to April 2013; dates and locations will be announced in late summer.

Click here for the full list.

 

Trade Illustrated

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet
Designer: David LeBlanc (studio oneonone)
Production Coordinator: Susanne McAdam

A natural history and illustrations of the New World in the seventeenth century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jackets and Covers

Blindfold by John Mikhail Asfour
Designer: David Drummond
Production Coordinator: Susanne McAdam
Art Director: Susanne McAdam

A moving collection of poems on the distance surrounding disability.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading the 21st Century: Books of the Decade, 2000-2009 by Stan Persky
Designer: David Drummond
Production Coordinator: Susanne McAdam
Art Director: Susanne McAdam

The state of the world, books, and reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Re-invention of the European Radical Right: Populism, Regionalism, and the Italian Lega Nord by Andrej Zaslove
Designer: David Drummond
Production Coordinator: Susanne McAdam
Art Director: Susanne McAdam

A look at the forces behind the rise of contemporary Europe's radical right.

Canada Prizes short list highlights excellence in humanities and social sciences research

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - McGill-Queen's is very pleased to announce that we have four books shortlisted in three Canada Prize categories. Prizes will be presented at a special ceremony on Friday, March 30, 2012 at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montreal.

Read the press release from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences/la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines here. 

Congratulations to Marilyn McKay, Roderick and Sharon Stewart, Peter van Wyck, and Michel Ducharme!

CANADA PRIZE IN THE HUMANITIES

Picturing the Land Marilyn J. McKay

Richly illustrated and filled with sophisticated and innovative commentary, Picturing the Land provides new and distinct histories of the landscape art of French and English Canada.

 

 

 

Phoenix Roderick Stewart and Sharon Stewart

Based on extensive research in Canada, Spain, and China, and in-depth interviews with Bethune's family, friends, colleagues, and patients, Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune is the definitive Bethune biography for our time.

 

 

 

 

CANADA PRIZE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Highway of the Atom Peter C. van Wyck

From the fur trade routes of the far North, to the deserts of New Mexico and wartime Japan, The Highway of the Atom weaves together crucial missing pieces about the beginning of the Atomic Age in startling and unexpected ways.

 

 

 

 

 

PRIX DU CANADA EN SCIENCES SOCIALES

Le concept de liberté au Canada à l'époque des Révolutions atlantiques (1776-1838) Michel Ducharme

Cet ouvrage revisite l'histoire intellectuelle et politique canadienne entre la révolution américaine et les rébellions de 1837-1838 au Haut et au Bas-Canada en la réintégrant dans le cadre des Révolutions atlantiques qui ont secoué l'Europe et l'Amérique entre 1776 et 1838.Reposant sur un cadre théorique inspiré des travaux des historiens intellectuels du monde atlantique, il traite plus particulièrement de l'importance du concept de liberté dans le développement de l'État dans les deux colonies.

 

MEDIA INQUIRIES -

Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist   

tel 514 398 2555   email jacqueline.davis@mcgill.ca