Friday 8:30am join Morning Light host Michael Wolch in conversation with Chis Hall from McNally Robinson Booksellers to hear about more great books featured in their Bookseller newsletter. Plus, one of Michael's must reads from their July/August newsletter!

The first Friday of every month, McNally co-owner Chris Hall will be in our studios to discuss "What To Read", books featured in their bi-monthly newsletter entitled The Bookseller. 

 

This week we will talk about:

 

Game Change by Ken Dryden

First, Ken Dryden articulated our love for hockey in The Game. Then he spoke to our national pride in Home Game. Now the NHL Hall-of-Famer and former MP issues a challenge to make hockey safer, or risk losing it altogether in his new book Game Change.

With extensive research and interviews with former players such as Rhett Warrener, Marc Savard, Keith Primeau, as well as with leading figures in the fields of neurobiology and sports concussions, Dryden tells the remarkable story of an unremarkable journeyman NHL defenseman, Steve Montador, who died at the age of 35 after suffering multiple concussions sustained throughout his playing career.

In telling Montador's story, Dryden outlines a plan directed to players, fans, parents, and most of all to decision makers at the NHL, to counter the number one risk to hockey in the future — head injuries — without sacrificing the integrity of the game. (Hardcover. $32.00. McClelland & Stewart. October)

Join McNally's in their Winnipeg store on November 9 for the launch of Game Change.

 

 

The Shoe on the Roof by Will Ferguson

Imagine...meeting someone with the same name, the same history, the same family, the same identity as you. Now, imagine meeting another person making the same exact claim. What would that do to you?

From the Giller Prize-winning novelist of 419 comes the startling, funny, and heartbreaking story of a psychological experiment gone wrong.

Ever since his girlfriend ended their relationship, Thomas Rosanoff's life has been on a downward spiral. A gifted med student, he has spent his entire adulthood struggling to escape the legacy of his father, an esteemed psychiatrist who used him as a test subject when he was a boy. Thomas lived his entire young life as the "Boy in the Box," watched by researchers behind two-way glass.

But now the tables have turned. Thomas is the researcher, and his subjects are three homeless men, all of whom claim to be messiahs--but no three people can be the one and only saviour of the world. Thomas is determined to "cure" the three men of their delusions, and in so doing save his career--and maybe even his love life. But when Thomas's father intervenes in the experiment, events spin out of control, and Thomas must confront the voices he hears in the labyrinth of his own mind.

The Shoe on the Roof is an explosively imaginative tour de force, a novel that questions our definitions of sanity and madness, while exploring the magical reality that lies just beyond the world of scientific fact.

 

 

In Search of a Better World by Payam Akhavan

A work of memoir, history, and a call to action, In Search of a Better World, the 2017 CBC Massey Lecture, is a powerful and essential work on the major human rights struggles of our times.

In February of 2017, Amnesty International released their Annual Report for 2016 to 2017, concluding that the "us versus them" rhetoric increasingly employed by politicians is endangering human rights the world over. Renowned UN prosecutor and human rights scholar Payam Akhavan has encountered the grim realities of contemporary genocide throughout his life and career. He argues that deceptive utopias, political cynicism, and public apathy have given rise to major human rights abuses: from the religious persecution of Iranian Bahá'ís that shaped his personal life, to the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the rise of contemporary phenomena such as the Islamic State. But he also reflects on the inspiring resilience of the human spirit and the reality of our inextricable interdependence to liberate us, whether from hateful ideologies that deny the humanity of others or an empty consumerist culture that worships greed and self-indulgence.

A timely, essential, and passionate work of memoir and history, In Search of a Better World is a tour de force by an internationally renowned human rights lawyer.

 

 

If Clara by Martha Baillie

A mysterious manuscript falls into a bed-ridden writer's lap in this novel of broken bones, syrian folktales, and plummets of all varieties. In If Clara, nobody stands on firm ground. Daisy, an author confined to her home, her leg in a cast from hip to ankle, receives a parcel containing the manuscript of a novel about a Syrian refugee, and is asked to pose as its writer. Julia, a curator of installation art, has no idea that her sister, Clara, has written a novel. However, she does know that Clara suffers from a debilitating mental illness that renders her wildly unpredictable. And Maurice's life is changed by a pair of binoculars welded to the wall of Julia's gallery. These stories collide in a most unexpected way.

 

 

Maximum Canada by Doug Saunders

To face the future, Canada needs more Canadians. But why and how many?

Canada's population has always grown slowly, when it has grown at all. That wasn't by accident. For centuries before Confederation and a century after, colonial economic policies and an inward-facing world view isolated this country, attracting few of the people and building few of the institutions needed to sustain a sovereign nation. In fact, during most years before 1967, a greater number of people fled Canada than immigrated to it. Canada's growth has faltered and left us underpopulated ever since.

At Canada's 150th anniversary, a more open, pluralist and international vision has largely overturned that colonial mindset and become consensus across the country and its major political parties. But that consensus is ever fragile. Our small population continues to hamper our competitive clout, our ability to act independently in an increasingly unstable world, and our capacity to build the resources we need to make our future viable.

In Maximum Canada, a bold and detailed vision for Canada's future, award-winning author and Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders proposes a most audacious way forward: to avoid global obscurity and create lasting prosperity, to build equality and reconciliation of indigenous and regional divides, and to ensure economic and ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population.