True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole

Beleaguered divorce attorney Christopher Irvin was far more astute at putting marriages asunder than creating one of his own. So when the specter of death shattered the quiet complacency of his well-ordered world, he began to re-evaluate his life from the ground up.

Chris' search for meaning leads him directly to his expatriate uncle, Roy Lankster, a decorated member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. Nearly 50 years earlier, Roy's P 51 Mustang fighter plane crashed in France in the lead up to WWII's D-Day invasion. Broken, battered and barely alive, he's rescued by Marie Renoir, a member of the French Resistance'. Their courage in the face of the ever present danger of capture is only overshadowed by a love between them so powerful that it rivals the first and greatest love in human history. The raging war, synthetic insanity, and the unassigned immoral forces of the universe conspire to tear them apart.

Chris, through Roy's writings, relives his uncle's relentless struggle to reunite with his love for the ages, and embarks himself on a personal journey of love and redemption.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011

Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war

Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.

Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."

Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours.

The legendary tale of Ernest Shackleton's grueling Antarctic expedition, recounted in riveting first-person detail by the captain of HMS Endurance.

Few people have read as widely in the field of Canadiana as has John Robert Colombo. The curiosity of this Toronto writer, editor, and anthologist knows few if any bounds when it comes to the lore, literature, history, culture, and character of Canada. He has an inquiring mind and he seems able to find national and even international twists to subjects of interest or importance.

Fascinating Canada, his latest book, is the product of over half a century of research, reading, writing, and thinking. Some years ago the author produced a trilogy of question-and-answer books 1,000 Questions about Canada, 999 Questions about Canada, 1,000 Questions about Canada. The first two were published by Doubleday Canada, the third one in 2001 by Dundurn Press. The same format is adapted to the material in the present book, but this time the majority of the questions are short whereas a good many of the answers are quite long discussions of the subjects at hand: concise questions followed by considered answers.

Here is a book about the Canadian past, present, and future. The information in Fascinating Canada is organized under four headings (People, Places, Things, Ideas) and there is a detailed Index for ready reference. This book may serve as a work of popular reference, but it has been written to stimulate inquiry and spark the sense of surprise in the minds of readers who know something about this amazing country but perhaps not as much as the author. Open this book and begin to read ... and match wits with author and researcher John Robert Colombo.