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Big, skilled, mean, and nearly indestructible, Howe dominated hockey for decades. Today any bruising forward hopes to be compared with the guy who wore number 9 for Detroit for so many years. His incredible twenty consecutive seasons among the top five scorers in the NHL. Scoring 100 points after the age of forty. Playing for Team Canada against the Russians while sharing the ice with his two sons. What seems even less likely is that another player will suit up as a professional hockey player in six different decades.

The unforgettable memoir of a family betrayed by a cruel deception. Pauline Dakin, a well-known CBC journalist, spent her childhood on the run. Without warning or goodbyes, her mother twice uprooted her and her brother, moving thousands of miles away from family and friends. Years later her mother revealed they'd been running from the Mafia and were receiving protection from a covert anti-organized crime task force. When her mother decided to go into protective custody, an exhausted Dakin planned to disappear as well. But before that happened, she made a horrifying discovery.

The immense eighteenth-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue. Led by the legendary Danish captain Vitus Bering, the ten-year voyage, which included scientists, artists, mariners, soldiers, and laborers, discovered Alaska, opened the Pacific fur trade, and, thanks to the brilliant naturalist Georg Steller, discovered dozens of New World plants and animals.

For gardening aficionados and Francophiles, a love letter to the Versailles Palace and grounds, from the man who knows them best. In Alain Baraton's Versailles, every grove tells a story. As the gardener-in-chief, Baraton lives on its grounds, and since 1982 he has devoted his life to the gardens, orchards, and fields that were loved by France's kings and queens as much as the palace itself. His memoir captures the essence of the connection between gardeners and the earth they tend, no matter how humble or grand.

On August 23, 2008, Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped outside Mogadishu in Somalia. The kidnappers’ demand was simple: pay millions or Amanda would be killed. For the next 460 days, Amanda’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, did everything in her power to get her daughter back alive. A brave, small-town mother with no experience in hostage negotiations, Lorinda was called upon by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to be the lead communicator with “Adam”—the Somali man who identified himself as the English-speaking negotiator for Amanda’s kidnappers.

Many issues can strain a marriage relationship, but none is as challenging as a life-threatening illness. Every year, almost two hundred thousand women are diagnosed with breast cancer. When Racinda Nygren joined the ranks of these women, she and her husband, Bruce, were thrust into an agonizing season of their marriage. With warmth and depth, Bruce shares their moving story. Touching the Shadows shows the power of love and faith amid a harrowing trial and will encourage readers to renew their own commitment to their spouse and celebrate God's special gift of love together.

The Gibson family, of One Man's Medicine, emigrates to the Canadian West. Readers will recall that Gibson and his wife, both Scottish physicians, were established in family practice near the English port city of Hull. In time, Gibson now relates, Britain's National Health Service impinged so greatly on their practice that they packed up their teenage daughter, sold their possessions, and relocated in the tiny Alberta town of Okotoks, within sight of the Rockies 100 miles from Calgary. There follow short, homespun vignettes of Gibson's new practice.

You may have heard of David Hartman: Temple University held a press conference when he entered medical school there, the first blind student accepted into such a program. This biography, however, spends perhaps 20 pages on that controversial four-year experience; the larger part concerns his previous history, from the onset of blindness at age eight through his years of education at special and mainstream schools, examining in some detail his struggle for admission to medical school.

In this deeply moving memoir, Margaret Trudeau speaks with candour and insight about the illness that silently shaped her life -- a life lived often in turbulence and in the public's fascination. Plagued since childhood by extreme moods, Margaret was ill-prepared for the high-profile role into which she was cast at age twenty-two, as Canada's youngest first lady. Captivated by her high spirits, youth and beauty, Canadians fell in love with Margaret, just as they had with her charismatic husband, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, three years earlier.

Helen grew up in a pit village in Tyneside in the post-war years, with her gran, aunties and uncles living nearby. She felt safe with them, but they could not protect her from her neglectful mother and violent father. Behind closed doors, she suffered years of abuse. Sometimes she talked to an imaginary sister, the only one who understood her pain. Jenny was adopted at six weeks and grew up in Newcastle. An only child, she knew she was loved, and with the support of her parents she went on to become a golfing champion, but still she felt that something was missing...