Drink the Bitter Root: A Search for Justice and Healing in Africa

After the First World War, many Canadians were concerned with the possibility of national regeneration. Progressive-minded politicians, academics, church leaders, and social reformers turned increasingly to the state for solutions. Yet, as significant as the state was in articulating and instituting a new morality, outside actors such as employers were active in pursuing reform agendas as well, taking aim at the welfare of the family, citizen, and nation. Citizen Docker considers this trend, focusing on the Vancouver waterfront as a case in point.

After the war, waterfront employers embarked on an ambitious program ? welfare capitalism ? to ease industrial relations, increase the efficiency of the port, and, ultimately, recondition longshoremen themselves. Andrew Parnaby considers these reforms as a microcosm of the process of accommodation between labour and capital that affected Canadian society as a whole in the 1920s and 1930s. By creating a new sense of entitlement among waterfront workers, one that could not be satisfied by employers during the Great Depression, welfare capitalism played an important role in the cultural transformation that took place after the Second World War.

Encompassing labour and gender history, aboriginal studies, and the study of state formation, Citizen Docker examines the deep shift in the aspirations of working people, and the implications that shift had on Canadian society in the interwar years and beyond.

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
 
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
 
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

A true story that rivals the travels of Burton or Stanley for excitement, and surpasses them in scientific achievements.

In 1849 Heinrich Barth joined a small British expedition into unexplored regions of Islamic North and Central Africa. One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.

Yet because of shifting politics, European preconceptions about Africa, and his own thorny personality, Barth has been almost forgotten. The general public has never heard of him, his epic journey, or his still-pertinent observations about Africa and Islam; and his monumental five-volume Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa is rare even in libraries. Though he made his journey for the British government, he has never had a biography in English. Barth and his achievements have fallen through a crack in history.