Society & Social Sciences Books

Common and exotic, glamorous and ferocious, sociable and sullen: zebras mean many things to many people. The extraordinary beauty of their striped coats makes them one of the world's most recognisable animals. They have been immortalised in paint by...

Berries are enmeshed with human history. Widely available in nature, they have been part of the human diet for millennia, and today they inspire everything from lip-gloss flavours to amusement parks. However diminutive their size, berries are of such...

Highly regarded woodpecker expert Gerard Gorman presents a unique natural, social, and cultural history of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are among the most remarkable birds in the avian world, having evolved a unique anatomy that enables them to peck and bore...

The zombie has shuffled with dead-eyed, remorseless menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore and superstition to become the dominant image of the undead today. In contemporary visions of global apocalypse, such as the...

Perfumed, sweet, succulent, cooling; a ripe melon can be one of the most delicious of fruits. Sylvia Lovegren untangles the melon's long and complex history and follows the journeys of the varied fruits known as melons from the sandy wastes of the...

For over a century, the banana has been rumoured to be everybody's favourite fruit. Quick and easy to eat, tasty and versatile in its culinary uses, the banana is a staple of many diets around the world. The banana's history, however, is more than simply...

Double-decker buses, bowler hats, and cricket may be synonymous with British culture, but when it comes to their cuisine, nothing comes to mind faster than fish and chips. Sprinkled with salt and vinegar and often accompanied by mushy peas, fish and...

This is a detailed history of rice, from its origin as a staple food in Asian and West African countries to its ubiquitous place in meals across the world today. It explores rice in society, literature, music, painting and...

This book explores the apple's history and the latest debates about the use of agrichemicals, the rise of organic and heirloom orchards, and the hopes and fears of genetic crop modification. Beautifully illustrated with...

A guide to the music and multifaceted career of Canadian artists and songwriters Tegan and Sara.Through interviews with Tegan and Sara, their collaborators, journalists, and fans, this book explores the multifaceted career of one of music's most...

'Did you keep a list of the words coined by Covid? Wayne Grady did! They're deftly woven into a journal/timeline, taking us through two years of surrealism and limbo.' - Margaret AtwoodThis exploration of the many new terms of...

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing meets Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep in this fascinating deep-dive into the science and history of sleep.In Search of Sleep is both a self-help manual for insomniacs, and a sweeping critique of the hustle culture that...

Art and physics collide in this expansive exploration of how knowledge can be translated across disciplinary communities to activate new aesthetic and scientific perspectives.Leaning Out of Windows shares findings from a six-year collaboration by a group...

Sticky Picturesexamines and celebrates the evolving work of Montreal-based artist Janet Werner. In her paintings, Werner builds a constellation of spatial and figurative explorations drawn from fashion magazines and art history to create collage-like...

Gathie Falk: Revelations, published on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition curated by Sarah Milroy, investigates the career of a legendary Canadian artist.Now in her nineties, Gathie Falk was born in 1928 in Brandon, Manitoba, settling finally...

EXPERT IN THE FIELD: Carolyn Stern combines an academic foundation (she is a university professor) with practical hands-on experience to provide a to provide an encompassing system for improving ones leadership skill through understanding emotions. She...

When Women Rise is a timely, transformative, and inspiring guide for women who want to bring more joy, power, and peace into their lives. It invites every woman to nurture her inner wisdom and strength, transcend the prevailing fears of our time, and...

Knowledge Within: Treasures of the Northwest Coast looks into seventeen of the numerous sites in the Pacific Northwest region with major collections of Northwest Coast Indigenous material culture, bringing attention to a wide range of approaches to...

Weegee was a street photographer for New York's popular press in the 1940s. He was infamous for adjusting the position of dead bodies at crime scenes to make his photographs more pleasing to the eye. Wauter Mannaert and Max de Radigus have succeeded...

First collection of visual work by renowed Canadian poet Phyllis Webb *A Dream in the Eye presents colour reproductions of the paintings and photocollages of renowned poet Phyllis Webb. A Governor General's Awardwinning poet and a member of the Order of...

**One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2023****Esquire's August 2023 Book Club Pick** 'If books are important to you because you're a reader or a writer, then how books are sold should be important to you as well...

Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon-and gaining new appreciation-amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops.Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and...

Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award Finalist for the 2023 Ottawa Book Award in English Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2023 National Business Book Award The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most...

Shortlisted for the 2024 Speaker's Book Award Nominated for the 2024 Heritage Toronto Book Award AHamilton Review of BooksBest Book of 2023Deborah Dundas is a journalist who grew up poor and almost didn't make it to university. In On Class, she talks to...

In this compelling whodunnit, Elaine Dewar reads the science, follows the money, and connects the geopolitical interests to the spin.When the first TV newscast described a SARS-like flu affecting a distant Chinese metropolis, investigative journalist...

Reaching Mithymna describes the Syrian refugee crisis from a Canadian volunteer's perspective. Secondary theme of the search for identity, familial and ethnic or cultural: Heighton's mother emigrated from Greece.Will appeal to politically-minded readers...

Shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction It's a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Boy wants girl. Girl says no. Boy takes what he wants anyway. After a violent sexual assault, Eden Boudreau was faced with a choice: call...

Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as...

A suspenseful, authoritative account of how the battle against a mid-century polio epidemic sparked a revolution in medical care.Americans knew polio as the 'summer plague'. In countries further North, however, the virus arrived later...

A radiant, unforgettable memoir of one woman's 450 days spent in captivity, and her defiant refusal to have her humanity stripped away.When Edith meets Luca in a small Northern town, the two connect instantly. Under the Northern Lights, they develop a...

Racial justice without shame and blame: Choudhury explores the emotionally loaded topic of racism in a compassionate, scientific manner that everyone can understand, whether you are Black, Indigenous, a person of color (BIPOC) or white. Business...

Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world the...

Readers of Susan Cain's Quiet and Daniel Pink's When will appreciate this passionate investigation into creativity and the human brain - from the perspective of an author investigating her own brain after a concussion.Author and...

"[Daniel Pauly] is an iconoclastic fisheries scientist ... who is so decidedly global in his life and outlook that he is nearly a man without a country."-NEW YORK TIMES"Daniel Pauly is a friend whose work has inspired me for years."-TED DANSONDaniel...

This simple yet effective program empowers women with tools to explore their bodies, achieve better orgasms, and have more enjoyable sexJust like with anything else in life, if you want to get better at sex, you need to practice. And if you want to...

A writer and anthropologist searches for wild foods - and reveals what we lose in a world where wildness itself is misunderstood, commodified, and hotly pursuedTwo centuries ago, nearly half the North American diet was found in the wild. Today, so-called...

A renowned sexologist shows us we're not alone when it comes to problems of sex and love.Ann-Marlene Henning has improved the sex lives of thousands through her TV show and advice blog. Now, readers can experience her sought-after talk therapy in Let's...

The first-ever biography of Mozhdah Jamalzadah: refugee, pop singer, and champion of women's rights.Many have tried to silence her, but Mozhdah Jamalzadah remains the most powerful female voice of her generation in Afghanistan, boldly speaking out about...

A powerful, intimate look at the life of a beloved folk icon and activist.Folk hero. Songwriter icon. Living legend. Buffy Sainte-Marie is all of these things and more. In this, Sainte-Marie's first and only authorized biography, music critic Andrea...

"An illuminating and memorable twenty-first-century journey. From this angle, Burning Man looks bourgeois." -Ted Conover, author of Newjack and The Routes of ManAt age twenty-two, writer Chris Urquhart left a life of middle-class comfort to document the...

From the winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, a revelatory look into an obscured piece of Canadian history: what was then called the Eskimo Identification Tag SystemIn 2001, Dr. Norma Dunning applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary...

A thought-provoking and provocative challenge to consumerism (with plenty of name-dropping and celebrity antics).Sassy and satirical, Shopomania is an economic, environmental and social study. This light-hearted, dark-souled dictionary of coined words,...

Forty influential and diverse Canadians with expertise in subjects such as Indigenous rights, climate change, social justice and race, gun control, higher education and poetry reflect on everything Canada is getting right-and what still needs to change...

Disability, death and divorce are part of a string of losses that leave this award-winning musician fundamentally changed as she learns to navigate her grief and find a way forward.Christa Couture lost a piece of herself-in more ways than one. She lost a...

Toques, mittens and scarves are all associated with northern climates, but the quintessential garment of Canadian knitting is surely the bulky and distinctly patterned West Coast cardigan. In the early twentieth century, Indigenous woolworkers on...

This new collection of Wagamese's non-fiction work gathers together more of his short pieces, many of which have never been in print beforeCurated by award-winning author and playwright Drew Hayden TaylorWagamese's Embers has sold over 70,000 copies...

A prequel to the award-winning Red: A Haida Manga, combining the expressive style of Korean manhwa with classical Haida art and legend."The ragged edges of the temperate rainforest reach far out onto an island in the western seas. It is a place where one...