(ages 2 – 5)  Little Bear closes his eyes and wishes and wishes and wishes for his dreams to come true. But when he opens his eyes, he’s still just Little Bear living in the Arctic tundra. Mother Bear tenderly shows him how many of his wishes do come true, from being able to swim with the playful belugas, to gazing at the dazzling northern lights. Finally, Little Bear is delighted to discover that he was Mother Bear’s wish come true! Readers will be touched by this reassuring tale of love and hope, which is of the “Storybook” series of board books – uplifting stories that shine with glitter, foil, texture, and more. Durable, padded covers, rounded corners, and an easy-to-hold size, along with touching text and colorful illustrations, ensure that these storybooks will be treasured by children and parents alike.

About the Author

Author, illustrator, and graphic designer Per-Henrik Gürth was born in Freiburg, Germany, and now calls Kingston, Ontario, home. His bold and lively illustrations can be found in the bestselling “Canada Concept Books” from Kids Can Press, including Oh! Canada and ABC of Canada, which was a Canadian Children’s Book Centre “Our Choice” selection. In When Wishes Come True, Per creates soft scenes filled with texture and light to complement the heartwarming story inspired by his daughter, Emily, who was Per’s own wish come true.

Canadian and British airmen engaged in fierce and deadly battles in the skies over Europe during the Second World War. Those who survived often had to overcome incredible obstacles to do so — dodging bullets and German troops, escaping from burning planes and enduring forced marches if they became prisoners. The Survivors tells some of these stories — tales that are so amazing they sound like fiction.

In one story, a tail gunner from Montreal survived despite being unconscious when blown out of his bomber. Another story describes how the crew of a navigator from Ottawa used chewing gum to fill holes in their aircraft. And another tells how a pilot from Northern Ontario parachuted out of his plane and became the target of a German machine-gunner, but within hours 120 Germans surrendered to him.

These painstakingly researched stories will enable you to feel what now-aging veterans endured when they were young men in the air war against Nazi Germany.

About the Author

Ian Darling comes from an air force family. His father, as well as his two uncles, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Darling is the author of Go Ask Dad and is the editorial writer at The Record. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

Imagining a New Canadian Economy:The New World Economy, and Canada’s Place In It

With the onset of the current economic crisis, one chapter in the economic history of the world is ending and a new one is beginning. What role will Canada play in this vastly altered world?

James Laxer examines the anatomy of the crash: the forces that have controlled the global system and the forces that have the capacity to usher in a new global system as the U.S.-centred age of globalization comes to an end. He explores what needs to be done to combat the crash in Canada, and poses the questions we all want to have answered. What comes next for the global economy, and what does this mean for Canada? Where will we fit in? Is an egalitarian economic future possible? What could an economics for humanity look like?

A reflective and useful treatise on where we go from here, Beyond the Bubble is a must-read by one of Canada’s best-known political commentators.

About James Laxer

JAMES LAXER is a Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. An award-winning author and a former Toronto Star columnist, Laxer is the author of twenty-one books, including Perils of Empire and Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism.

The ad men behind CBC Radio’s The Age of Persuasion combine lively social history and years of industry experience to show how the art of persuasion shapes our culture.

Witty, erudite and irrepressibly irreverent, The Age of Persuasion provides a hugely entertaining — and eye-opening — insider’s look at the ever-expanding world of marketing.

The Age of Persuasion is for those who say “advertising doesn’t work on me” as well as those who want to understand how this industry has become inseparable from modern culture. Using their popular CBC Radio series as a starting point, Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant tell the fascinating story of how modern marketing came of age — from the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond. With insider anecdotes and examples drawn from pop culture, they also probe deeply into the day-to-day workings and ethics of a business that is rapidly evolving in the age of Facebook and YouTube.

About the Author

Terry O’Reilly is the award-winning co-founder of Pirate Radio and Television in Toronto and New York. Together with Mike Tennant he created the CBC Radio series O’Reilly on Advertising and The Age of Persuasion.

 In the 1960s, Canada began a seismic shift away from the core policies and values upon which the country had been built. A nation of “makers” transformed itself into a nation of “takers.” Crowley argues that the time has come for the pendulum to swing back—back to a time when Canadians were less willing to rely on the state for support; when people went where the work was rather than waiting for the work to come to them. Thought-provoking, meticulously detailed and ultimately polarizing, Fearful Symmetry is required reading for anyone who is interested in where this country began, where it’s been, and where it’s going. “… Fearful Symmetry is an audacious, provocative and impressively researched volume. In setting out a new way of looking at the country’s development, it will open more eyes than it closes.” -  Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail “[O] ne of the most insightful books ever written about this country…. I know I am prone to exaggeration which is probably why I was able to have a 15-year career in politics, but I do not exaggerate when I say this is the best book I have ever read about our country.” — Monte Solberg, Sun Media “Founder of the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, Brian Lee Crowley has written a courageous book with absolutely unique analysis and interpretation. Part lament, part celebration, Fearful Symmetry is most of all a profoundly optimistic book. Why? Rush to read it as soon as you can. ” – Globe and Mail

Wily trickster Coyote is having his friends over for a little solstice get-together in the woods when a little girl comes by unexpectedly. She leads the friends through the snowy woods to the mall — a place they had never seen before. The trickster goes crazy with glee as he shops with abandon, only to discover that filling a shopping cart with goodies is not quite the same thing as actually paying for them. The trickster is tricked and goes back to his cabin in the woods — somewhat subdued — though nothing can keep Coyote down for long. Thomas King is known for his fiction featuring Canada’s Native people, while Gary Clement’s artwork has appeared in several popular children’s books. “A Coyote Solstice Tale” blends King’s brilliant deadpan humor and Clement’s evocative watercolors in this witty critique of consumerism and consumption aimed at all ages.

 The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

Adam One, the kindly leader of God’s Gardeners — a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion — has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have been spared: Ren, a young trapeze-dancer, locked inside a high-end sex club; and one of God’s Gardeners, Toby, who is barricaded inside a luxurious spa. Have others survived?

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and witty, The Year of the Flood unfolds Toby’s and Ren’s stories during the years prior to their meeting again. The novel not only brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.

Review quotes

“This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits, but overall it’s more optimistic than Oryx & Crake. Its characters have a compassion and energy lacking in Jimmy, the wounded and floating lothario at the previous novel’s center. Each novel can be enjoyed independently of the other, but what’s perhaps most impressive is the degree of connection between them. Together they form halves of a single epic…”
— Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“The tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood’s] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Trust Margaret Atwood to put her finger on the pulse of the future….”
— Globe and Mail

“Atwood is a natural seer for an age that does not want to look too closely at what it condones, or refuses to see.”
— Glasgow Herald“Margaret Atwood has outdone — and outsung — herself this time. The Year of the Flood is at once a solemn praise song to human hope and a dead-serious poke at our capacity for self-destruction. The novel shows the Nobel Prize-worthy Margaret Atwood at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers.”
— Elle Magazine

They all depend on cheap oil. And in a world of dwindling oil supplies and steadily mounting demand around the world, there is no such thing as cheap oil. Oil might be less expensive in the middle of a recession, but it will never be cheap again.

Take away cheap oil, and the global economy is getting the shock of its life.

From the ageing oilfields of Saudi Arabia and the United States to the Canadian tar sands, from the shopping malls of Dubai to the shuttered auto plants of North America and Europe, from the made-in-China products on the shelves of the Wal-Mart down the road to the collapse of Wall Street giants, everything is connected to the price of oil

Interest rates, carbon trading, inflation, farmers’ markets and the wave of trade protectionism washing up all over the world in the wake of various economic stimulus and bailout packages – they all hinge on the new realities of a world where demand for oil eventually outstrips supply.

According to maverick economist Jeff Rubin, there will be no energy bailout. The global economy has suffered oil crises in the past, but this time around the rules have changed. And that means the future is not going to be a continuation of the past. For generations we have built wealth by burning more and more oil. Our cars, our homes, our whole world has been getting bigger in the cheap-oil era. Now it is about to get smaller.

There will be winners as well as losers as the age of globalization comes to an end. The auto industry will never recover from this oil-induced recession, but other manufacturers will be opening up mothballed factories. Distance will soon cost money, and so will burning carbon – both will bring long-lost jobs back home. We may not see the kind of economic growth that globalization has brought, but local economies will be revitalized, as will our cities and neighborhoods.

Whether we like it or not, our world is about to get a whole lot smaller.

Jeff Rubin was the Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets for almost twenty years. He was one of the first economists to accurately predict soaring oil prices back in 2000 and is now one of the world’s most sought after energy experts. He lives in Toronto.

Almost every Canadian wants to adopt a greener lifestyle. Vanessa Farquharson is doing it, one day at a time. Tired of hearing everyone talk about going green, she decided to take on one eco-friendly challenge every day, and stick with it. A single woman living in a downtown condo with Sophie, her cat, Vanessa makes hundreds of adjustments to her comfortable existence and quickly realizes that she may be getting in over her head, much to the amusement of her coworkers at the right-wing National Post. Month by month, My Green Year documents Vanessa’s journey, as she makes changes both little — switching to an all-natural lip-balm — and big — unplugging her fridge and selling her car. She explores several green movements — joins the local Freecycle network, does a week-long permaculture bike trip, and checks out the bandwagon-jumping consumer trends at the inaugural Green Living Show — to see if the grass really is greener on the organic and pesticide-free side of the fence. Slowly overhauling her life, she’s forced to reflect on not only the personal indulgences she’s become dependent on, discovering that some the biggest changes are the easiest to make. A funny and personal look at an issue that concerns us all, My Green Year is the perfect antidote to the smug or doom-saying green books. With her wry, candid voice and sharp insight, Vanessa offers an inspirational example: we can change our lives for the planet, one day at a time.

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is a shocking and controversial look at the corruption of Canada’s human rights commissions.“On January 11, 2008, I was summoned to a 90-minute government interrogation. My crime? As the publisher of Western Standard magazine, I had reprinted the Danish cartoons of Mohammed to illustrate a news story. I was charged with the offence of “discrimination,” and made to appear before Alberta’s “human rights commission” for questioning. As crazy as it sounds, I became the only person in the world to face legal sanction for printing those cartoons.”As a result of this highly publicized event, Ezra Levant began investigating other instances in which innocent people have had their freedoms compromised by bureaucrats presuming to protect Canadians’ human rights. He discovered some disturbing and even bizarre cases, such as the tribunal ruling that an employee at a McDonald’s restaurant in Vancouver did not have to wash her hands at work. And the human rights complaint filed by a Calgary hair stylist against the women at a salon school who called him a “loser.” In another case that seemed stranger than fiction, an emotionally unstable transvestite fought for — and won — the right to counsel female rape victims, despite the anguished pleas of those same traumatized victims. Human rights commissions now monitor political opinions, fine people for expressing politically incorrect viewpoints, censor websites, and even ban people, permanently, from saying certain things. The book is a result of Levant’s ordeal and the research it inspired. It shows how our concept of human rights has morphed into something dangerous and drastically different from its original meaning. Shakedown is a convincing plea to Canadians to reclaim their basic liberties.