Recent Library Acquisitions

Last Month's New Books List:

JULY/AUGUST 2009 RECENT ACQUISITIONS LIST

B - Philosophy. Psychology. Religion

The resurrection by Geza Vermes

The story of Christ's crucifixion and subsequent resurrection is the rock of faith on which Christianity is founded. But on what evidence is the most miraculous phenomenon in religious history based?

World-famous Biblical scholar Geza Vermes has studied all the evidence that still remains, over two thousand years after Jesus Christ was reported to have risen from the dead. Examining the Jewish Bible, the New Testament and other accounts left to us, as well as contemporary attitudes to the afterlife, he takes us through each episode with a historian's focus: the crucifixion, the treatment of the body, the statements of the women who found the empty tomb, and the visions of Christ by his disciples. Unravelling the true meaning conveyed in the Gospels, the Acts and St Paul, Vermes shines new light on the developing faith in the risen Christ among the first followers of Jesus.

BT482 .V47 2008

Homilies for everyday life by Fr. Ruldoph Novecosky, OSB

This book brings a human message into the readings, often with humour or human experiences, which make the homilies easy to understand and answers some of the questions that we can all relate to in daily life.  Written with such eloquence, troubled souls can fine love, compassion, forgiveness and caring on each page.  Lessons for the heart are so simply and gently told that they linger in the mind long after the book is put down.

It contains a wealth of ideas and is a must read for anyone involved in lay ministries.

BX1756 .N68 2009

Practicing Catholic by James Carroll

Practicing Catholic is a personal history of the American Catholic Church during James Carroll's lifetime. It traces the transformation of a medieval institution suspicious of American ideas of freedom and democracy into a church that has begun to embrace basic American principles of pluralism and respect for conscience. The books tells the story of heroes (Pope John XXII, Thomas Merton, Cardinal Richard Cushing, William Sloane Coffin), and great events (Vatican II, the Kennedys, the end of the Cold War). Considering the new meaning of belief in the secular world, it stands against fundamentalisms of "neo-atheists", as well as of born again Christians. The book shows how and why the world needs a renewed, rational, vital Catholic Church.

All of this is centered in the life-journey of its author, who embraced the priesthood in his youth, but who finds in the writing life a renewal of religious belief. For James Carroll faith is a practice--like all practice, it aims at getting better.

BX4705 .C327 A3 2009

E - History. Americas

Qallunaat: why white people are funny [DVD]

Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny, is a docu-comedy show created as a collaboration between filmmaker Mark Sandiford and Inuit writer and satirist Zebedee Nungak. The show takes a humorous, irreverent look at North American society through the eyes of Inuit filmmakers, turning the camera lens around after other cultures have studied Inuit cultures for so many years.

The Inuit term for white people, Qallunaat (pronounced howl-u-not) is at times laugh out loud funny and an insightful analysis.  

E99 .E7 Q25 2006

FC - History. Canada

An honourable calling: political memoirs by Allan Blakeney

As Premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982, Allan Blakeney played a pivotal role in the shaping of modern Canada. In this engaging and candid political memoir, Blakeney reflects on his four decades of public service, offering first-hand insights on the introduction of government-sponsored medicare, the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, and new approaches to natural resource development.

Blakeney provides not only a vibrant picture of the Canadian political landscape, but also vivid portraits of some of Canada's most fascinating political personalities including Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Renm Levesque, Tommy Douglas, Bill Davis, and Peter Lougheed. He supplies an insider's account of the controversial struggle between the federal and provincial governments as they attempted to reach a compromise in the creation of the Canadian Constitution. Relying on his career-long experience as a medicare advocate, including his work with Tommy Douglas, Blakeney comments on current public medicare issues such as how to finance health care, and the role, if any, of a parallel private system.

An Honourable Calling is a thoughtful commentary on many of the central issues in Canadian politics from the last half of the twentieth century and offers perceptive insights into some of the challenges facing Canadians in the decades ahead.

FC3527.1 .B43 A3 2008

H - Social Sciences

One red paperclip [DVD]

Meet the one-red-paperclip guy, Kyle MacDonald, a 26-year-old ex-geography student with a crazy scheme.  In the summer of 2005, Kyle announced to the world he was going to trade a red paperclip for a house-with just his blog as a bartering tool.  In one short year, this stunt took him from unemployment to international media darling, along the way attracting a popular radio deejay, a rock star, a movie producer and eventually a Saskatchewan municipal developer willing to talk real estate. 

Is Kyle the ultimate slacker or an internet marketing genius?  Floowi his roller-coaster ride and decide for yourself.

HF1019 .O54 2006 [DVD]

L - Education

Three cups of tea: one man's mission to promote peace-one school at a time by Greg Mortenson

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them.

Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way.

As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.

LC2330 .M67 2007

PS 8000 - Canadian Literature

Literary atlas of Canada: this is my country, what's yours? [DVD audio] by Noah Richler

This is a complete collection of author Noah Richler's 10-part radio series now available on DVD-Audio (playable on any DVD player).  Originally broadcast on CBC radio's Ideas in 2005 and The Sunday Edition in 2006, you can hear Canadian authors in their own words with the added bonus of extra portions of interviews and photographs of the authors in their surroundings. 

Margaret Atwood, Tomson Highway, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, and Guy Vanderhaeghe are but a fraction of over sixty authors interviewed.

PS8071.5 .I35 2006 [4 DVD audio set]

Niceman cometh by David Carpenter

Niceman Cometh is set in Saskatoon and would be classed as a love story / human nature novel. It tells the story of Glory who lives in Saskatoon and covers a year in Glory's life. We see the ups and downs of Glory's life as she struggles with day to day living, her 6 yr old son Bobby and the men who pass by and through her life. 

Carpenter captures both the bleakness and the unexpected joys of life.  Filled with moments of high homour but grounded by the sense of defeat and rejection we all face, this novel provides an insight into the human condition, its foibles, its delights and its lunacy.

PS8555 .A76 N52 2008

Going home: essays by Tim Lilburn

Like his contemporaries Robert Bringhurst, Ronald Wright, Dennis Lee, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky, Tim Lilburn has long been a deep thinker on issues of ecology and writing, and how the two fit together philosophically, morally, and ethically.

In Going Home, Lilburn addresses how we relate (often uneasily) to our physical landscape in Canada and the United States: we subjugated the land and as a result have forgotten that part of our intellectual past that would allow us to settle fully into this place.

Retrieving an almost lost strand in the Western intellectual tradition - the erotic, contemplative strand, from Plato to John Cassian to the Areopagite - Lilburn traces a history of eros and desire in the hope that this exercise and its awakening can lead us home to a full residence in North America.

Surprising and enlightening, the new collection finishes with two unforgettable personal essays, where the poet Tim Lilburn writes about his effort to enact desire in the place where his ancestors are buried, the flatlands and coulees of southern Saskatchewan. Masterful and timely, Going Home is a wake-up call to the whole of North America to the fact that our "home" is endangered because of the way we live in it.

PS8573 .I42 G65 2008

R - Medicine

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto by Michael Pollan

In his hugely influential treatise The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan traced a direct line between the industrialization of our food supply and the degradation of the environment.

His new book takes up where the previous work left off. Examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of health, this powerfully argued, thoroughly researched and elegant manifesto cuts straight to the chase with a maxim that is deceptively simple: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. But as Pollan explains, food in a country that is driven by a thirty-two billion-dollar marketing machine is both a loaded term and, in its purest sense, a holy grail.

The first section of his three-part essay refutes the authority of the diet bullies, pointing up the confluence of interests among manufacturers of processed foods, marketers and nutritional scientists-a cabal whose nutritional advice has given rise to a notably unhealthy preoccupation with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.

The second portion vivisects the Western diet, questioning, among other sacred cows, the idea that dietary fat leads to chronic illness. A writer of great subtlety, Pollan doesn't preach to the choir; in fact, rarely does he preach at all, preferring to lets the facts speak for themselves.

RA784 .P643 2008

T - Technology

Tar Sands: dirty oil and the future of a continent by Andrew Nikiforuk

Tar Sands is a  critical exposé of the open-pit mines that have made Canada one of the worst environmental offenders on earth.

While the world goes green, Canada has elected to go black into the tar. The frenzied development ($100 billion and counting) of the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the last six years has made Canada the world's fifth greatest global exporter of oil and turned the country into "an emerging energy superpower."

Combining extensive scientific research and compelling writing, Andrew Nikiforuk takes the reader to Fort McMurray, home to some of the world's largest open-pit mines, and explores this twenty-first-century pioneer town from the exorbitant cost of housing to its more serious social ills. He uncovers a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, aimless bush workers, American evangelicals, and the largest population of homeless people in northern Canada. He also explains that this micro-economy supplies gasoline for 50 percent of Canadian vehicles and 16 percent of U.S. demand

Though Nikiforuk is critical of the tar sands, the book does provide hope, and ends with an exploration of possible solutions to the problem.

TD195 .O4 N53 2008