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Felix Opatowski is only fifteen years old when he takes on the perilous job of smuggling goods out of the Lodz ghetto in exchange for food for his starving family. It is a skill that will serve him well as he tries to stay alive in Nazi-occupied Poland. With dogged determination, Felix endures months of harrowing conditions in the ghetto and slave labour camps until he is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in the spring of 1943.

When the Nazis invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel could only think about how to save "her" children. She accompanied them all the way to Auschwitz only to see them taken to the gas chamber. Her account of living and surviving in the camp and on the subsequent death march is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the unremitting cruelty. She returns to Czechoslovakia after the war, and attends university so that she can teach high school.

Animal Metropolis brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle: orca captivity in Vancouver, polar bear tourism in Churchill, Manitoba, fish on display in the Dominion Fisheries Museum, and the racialized memory of Jumbo the elephant in St. Thomas, Ontario.

Mrs. Strange was thrust, unprepared, into hard farm life on a Canadian ranch, with a background of London, gentle upbringing, a bit of the rough with the smooth in her war experiences, but with no training for hard labor and domestic slavery on an ill-equipped, rough frontier farm. But the fight challenged her -- and she made good. Her account of the experience is stimulating.

Written in response to the horrors he experienced and witnessed during the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl’s landmark book, Man’s Search for Meaning, has sold millions of copies and been translated into twenty-seven languages. But although Frankl’s thought and philosophy have been widely analyzed, until now little has been written about his life, and about the deeply loving, intensely spiritual relationship that led him and his wife to dedicate their lives to reducing pain and oppression in the world.

An exploration of the "enemy alien" experience in Canada during the Great War.

Approximately 8,000 Canadian civilians were imprisoned during the First World War because of their ethnic ties to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other enemy nations. Although not as well-known as the later internments of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, these incarcerations played a crucial role in shaping debates about Canadian citizenship, diversity, and loyalty.

Noam Chomsky and George W. Bush seldom agree, but they both argued that 9/11 stood alone in American history. Although the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction was new, Mark Anderson maintains that the response to the attack was not: it was, in fact, as old as the Republic itself.

Sometime during the summer of 1690, in east-central Saskatchewan, Englishmen Henry Kelsey and his Indian escorts walked out of the boreal forest and into a new world -- the northern great plains of western Canada. It was a landscape never encountered before by another European.

Ranging over 2,500 years, Cities in Civilization is a tribute to the city as the birthplace of Western civilization. Drawing on the contributions of economists and geographers, of cultural, technological, and social historians, Sir Peter Hall examines twenty-one cities at their greatest moments. Hall describes the achievements of these golden ages and outlines the precise combinations of forces -- both universal and local -- that led to each city's belle epoque.

A unique look at Canadian history, this book captures these milestones and many more in ten chapters outlined with sidebars, biographies, quotes, trivia and illustrations. It is the story of the people, places and events that have shaped the country.