Other books that might interest you

• 

  It Should Be Easy to Fix

  Bonnie Robichaud

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In 1977, Bonnie Robichaud accepted a job at the Department of Defence military base in North Bay, Ontario. After a string of dead-end jobs, with five young children at home, Robichaud was ecstatic to have found a unionized job with steady pay, benefits, and vacation time.
  		 
  After her supervisor began to sexually harass and intimidate her, her story could have followed the same course as countless women before her: endure, stay silent, and eventually quit. Instead, Robichaud filed a complaint after her probation period was up. When a high-ranking officer said she was the only one who had ever complained, Robichaud said, “Good. Then it should be easy to fix.”
  		 
  This timely and revelatory memoir follows her gruelling eleven-year fight for justice, which was won in the Supreme Court of Canada. The unanimous decision set a historic legal precedent that employers are responsible for maintaining a respectful and harassment-free workplace. Robichaud’s story is a landmark piece of Canadian labour history—one that is more relevant today than ever.

  Show book

• 

  Life Wasn't Boring

  Colin Groves

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Soldiering is a serious, frequently bloody business. That aspect has been documented endlessly. But behind the blood, thunder and de-humanising aspects of conflict are people – people in uniform and people supporting them. All of them have personal feelings and aspirations and they experience the humdrum assortment of daily occurrences that closely match those of their counterparts in civil society. Those aspects of their lives are not widely reported, or appreciated, and it is on those that this book has its focus.
  'Life Wasn't Boring' relates the life, times, successes, failures and, most importantly, the personal inter-actions and loves of a professional infantry officer and his family, over more than a third of the century that was his service. Some parts are as serious as can be expected of a military account. Other parts might surprise, entertain and even amuse the reader. Together they hold up a mirror to reveal the human side of being a soldier.

  Show book

• 

  The Portraitist - Frans Hals and...

  Steven M. Nadler

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the listener into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. 
   
   
   
  Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. 
   
   
    
  Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. 
   
   
    
  Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

  Show book

• 

  River Songs - Moments of Wild...

  Steve Duda

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  River Songs is rich with bracing, authentic, generous stories—writing that revels in language and spirit. Avoiding most of fly fishing's clichés—the romantic elegies, the Moby-Dick-like conquests, the play-by-play detailing a "victory" over a fish—Steve Duda instead offers pieces that breathe lived experience, reveal vulnerabilities, and convey a broad perspective of what it means to have "a long run with a tight crew." Duda is interested in what has been learned out there on the river: what is it about this "ridiculous activity" that connects us to this planet, makes us human, gives us hope? 
   
   
   
  River Songs focuses on the in-between moments and the unexpected revelations—awe, fear, frustration, doubt, joy—that are as much a part of fishing as tying knots and chucking flies. Listeners ride along with Duda in battered pickup trucks, fish "between jobs," look longingly at unfished famous rivers while touring with a country-punk band, and wonder how a fishing trip led to getting a tooth pulled while being surrounded by trash-talking friends. They will find beauty, discovery, heartbreak, good dogs, and the wonder of nature within the expanse of Northwest landscapes and beyond.

  Show book

• 

  The Greatest Viking - The Life...

  Desmond Seward

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A ruthless Viking warrior who named his most prized battle weapon after the Norse goddess of death, Olav Haraldsson and his mercenaries wrought terror and destruction from the Baltic to Galicia in the early eleventh century. Thousands were put to the sword, enslaved, or ransomed. In England, Canterbury was sacked, its archbishop murdered, and London Bridge pulled down. The loot amassed from years of plunder helped Olav win the throne of Norway, and a century after his death he was proclaimed "Eternal King" and has been a national hero there ever since. 
   
   
   
  Despite his bloodthirsty beginnings, Olav converted to Christianity and, in a personal vendetta against the old Norse gods, made Norway Christian too, thereby changing irrevocably the Viking world he was born into. Told with reference to Norse sagas, early chronicles, and the work of modern scholars, Desmond Seward paints an intensely vivid and colorful portrait of the life and times of arguably the greatest Viking of them all.

  Show book

• 

  And I Cried Too - Confronting...

  Mike Hartnett

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Mike and his wife, Barbara, moved to Lincoln, Illinois, in 1972. The town of 17,000 was charming, friendly, and safe. As employees of Lincoln College, a small, private junior college, they quickly grew to enjoy the subtle pleasures of small-town living. Then the campus was hit with a series of burglaries and a student disappeared. Finally, the murders began. This is Mike Hartnett’s personal story, memories that have taken him more than forty years to write. This is not a true crime exposé or a who-dunnit mystery. This is simply a story about one man on the periphery of a series of events that devastate a community for a time. It is a story about the guilt that lingers and the questions that remain. 
  About the Author: 
  Mike Hartnett was a retired high school English/Speech teacher and business journalist (magazine columnist and editor and newsletter publisher), winning awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He led a memoir-writing group for the Douglas County Senior Citizen Center and was a co-leader of a men’s writing group at the Douglas County Jail. 
       Mike is the co-author of a play, Worthy of the Name, which was presented at Chicago’s Cultural Affairs Center, and a collaborator of a readers’ theater production, Prose & Cons, Voices From Behind Bars. 

  Show book