Review: Genuinely extraordinary... Unmatched by any other modern thinker ... A prophet for our times (Dominic Sandbrook Daily Mail); The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now (New York Times); Everyone must read 12 Rules For Life... The most enlightening book I have read in ages. Google him if you like, if it makes you feel better. It will, by the way. But get the book, that is the most important thing. And then read it. And then pass it on to a friend (Chris Evans); In a different intellectual league... Peterson can take the most difficult ideas and make them entertaining. This may be why his YouTube videos have had 35m views. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star (Observer); Charismatic and exceptionally articulate.... Peterson is a new kind of public intellectual, using YouTube to spread ideas infinitely wider than predecessors such as Bertrand Russell or Isaiah Berlin (Amol Rajan New Statesman); Anyone who is in a position of leadership would find it very insightful ... Jordan Peterson is a profound writer (Gina Miller); It is that rare thing: self-help that might actually be helpful (New Statesman); Fascinating ... Peterson is brilliant on many subjects (Bryan Appleyard Sunday Times); One of the most eclectic and stimulating public intellectuals at large today, fearless and impassioned (Matthew d'Ancona Guardian); Profound, charismatic and serious... One of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years (Tim Lott Spectator).From the Inside Flap: What are the most valuable things that everyone should know?Acclaimed clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has reshaped the modern understanding of personality, and now he has become one of the world's most influential public thinkers, with his lectures on topics from the Bible to romantic relationships to mythology drawing tens of millions of viewers. In an era of unprecedented change and polarizing politics, his frank and refreshing message about the value of individual responsibility and ancient wisdom has resonated around the world.In this book, he provides twelve profound and practical principles for how to live a meaningful life, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today. Happiness is a pointless goal, he shows us. Instead we must search for meaning, not for its own sake, but as a defence against the suffering that is intrinsic to our existence.Drawing on vivid examples from his clinical practice and personal life, cutting edge psychology and philosophy, and lessons from humanity's oldest myths and stories, Peterson takes the reader on an intellectual journey like no other. Gripping, thought-provoking and deeply rewarding, 12 Rules for Life offers an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to our modern problems.About the Author: Jordan B. Peterson is a Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Raised in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, he has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt-plane, and built a Kwagu'l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, and his book Maps of Meaning revolutionized the psychology of religion. Formerly a professor at Harvard University, he was nominated for its prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Peterson, Jordan B.

Medical Books

Random House Canada

Hank Wallins is a broken man working the night shift in a meaningless job. Tormented by the tinnitus constantly ringing in his ears, he sleepwalks through life, too scarred by a tragic love affair to try again. When a madman pushes him into the path of an oncoming subway train, this scrape with death re-awakens Hank to the world. Craving a reengagement with passion, he reaches out to a young slightly cross-eyed Russian beauty who he locates on a website. He ventures by plane to meet the lovely and mysterious Anna in her hometown of St. Petersburg. Anna Verkoskova seeks to flee not only the hopelessness of her economic situation, but also the reminders of her own failed love affair with Ruslan, a womanizing Dagastani rock star look-alike from the Chechen region. Finding no particular reason to dislike the kind, lumbering Hank, she agrees to follow him to Canada. But once she has left Russia behind, she is overwhelmed by homesickness and a dread of disappearing into the grey Toronto winter. Then she receives a frightening note: Ruslan has been kidnapped. She races home immediately, carrying a bag stuffed with cash. Hank’s cash. Held captive and tortured by the FSB, Ruslan has been crippled by his tormentors and injected with N20, a mysterious CIA-developed serum that fills its victims’ brains with the totality of human knowledge, rendering them insane. Ruslan is traded to Chechen radicals and ransomed. As Anna is now associated with a “rich” Westerner, she is now a target for the ransom. Ruslan’s former political disengagement has been replaced by a new sort of apathy, one that renders him a pawn to whomever has control of the omniscient demons in his ears screaming for blood. Returned to St. Petersburg and reunited with Ruslan, Anna quickly realizes that her former lover has been lost to her forever, as has her nation. With few options, she returns to the safety of Hank and Canada and discovers that, with her passion for Ruslan faded, she has room for new passions to emerge. But she also carries with her a life-altering secret. The novel unfolds through the words of a narrator who describes himself as an abomination, yet he is heroic and compassionate, and capable of immense acts of love, including the creation of this very narrative itself–a gift for his unborn half-sister. His horrors have been formed as a result of untold millennia of blood hatred. But it is through his existence that our protagonists transcend their own human culpability. A kaleidoscopic and riotous tale, voiced by one of the most unusual narrators in literary history, Robert Hough’s The Culprits puts shape and flesh to the murky unknowns surrounding a real-life terrorist incident and all that led up to it, shining a light into some of humanity’s most inscrutable sins. This novel is at once a mind-blowing hallucination and a classic love story, exploring the human thirsts for love and passion, for allegiance and trust, and for terrible vengeance.

The Culprits

Literature & Fiction

Hough, Robert

World Literature

In his own words, Bret Hart’s honest, perceptive, startling account of his life in and out of the pro wrestling ring. The sixth-born son of the pro wrestling dynasty founded by Stu Hart and his elegant wife, Helen, Bret Hart is a Canadian icon. As a teenager, he could have been an amateur wrestling Olympic contender, but instead he turned to the family business, climbing into the ring for his dad’s western circuit, Stampede Wrestling. From his early twenties until he retired at 43, Hart kept an audio diary, recording stories of the wrestling life, the relentless travel, the practical jokes, the sex and drugs, and the real rivalries (as opposed to the staged ones). The result is an intimate, no-holds-barred account that will keep readers, not just wrestling fans, riveted. Hart achieved superstardom in pink tights, and won multiple wrestling belts in multiple territories, for both the WWF (now the WWE) and WCW. But he also paid the price in betrayals (most famously by Vince McMahon, a man he had served loyally); in tragic deaths, including the loss of his brother Owen, who died when a stunt went terribly wrong; and in his own massive stroke, most likely resulting from a concussion he received in the ring, and from which, with the spirit of a true champion, he has battled back. Widely considered by his peers as one of the business’s best technicians and workers, Hart describes pro wrestling as part dancing, part acting, and part dangerous physical pursuit. He is proud that in all his years in the ring he never seriously hurt a single wrestler, yet did his utmost to deliver to his fans an experience as credible as it was exciting. He also records the incredible toll the business takes on its workhorses: he estimates that twenty or more of the wrestlers he was regularly matched with have died young, weakened by their own coping mechanisms, namely drugs, alcohol, and steroids. That toll included his own brother-in-law, Davey Boy Smith. No one has ever written about wrestling like Bret Hart. No one has ever lived a life like Bret Hart’s. For as long as I can remember, my world was filled with liars and bullshitters, losers and pretenders, but I also saw the good side of pro wrestling. To me there is something bordering on beautiful about a brotherhood of big tough men who pretended to hurt one another for a living instead of actually doing it. Any idiot can hurt someone. —from Hitman

Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling

Sports & Outdoors

Hart, Bret

Biographies

If Bill Bryson were to join a Winnipeg funeral home as an apprentice, and if he searched for the meaning of life and death while he was at it, you'd have Curtains - enlightening, full of life in the midst of death, and very funny. "There's a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to civilians, and they're happy with that arrangement. My job covers that gap." At forty-four Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry: is this really the way we want to say our final goodbyes? The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker. Curtainsis about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the heart and head are the last parts to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; funeral directors have been known to dance during the service - out of sight of funeral goers, of course, and with the utmost respect for the dead. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust - or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved - Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century.

Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training

Politics & Social Sciences

Jokinen, Tom

Sociology

The Broken Shore

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction (Australia) Joe Cashin was different once. He moved easily then. He was surer and less thoughtful. But there are consequences when you’ve come so close to dying. For Cashin, they included a posting away from the world of Homicide to the quiet place on the coast where he grew up. Now all he has to do is play the country cop and walk the dogs. And sometimes think about how he was before. Then prominent local Charles Bourgoyne is beaten and left for dead. Everything seems to point to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; everyone seems to want it to. But Cashin is unconvinced. And as tragedy unfolds relentlessly into tragedy, he finds himself holding onto something that might be better let go.

Temple, Peter

Grainy CCTV footage shows a man walking into a bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells her to count to twenty-five. When he doesn't get his money in time, she is executed. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case. While Harry's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame gets in touch. He goes to dinner at her house and wakes up at home with no memory of the past twelve hours. The same morning the girl is found shot dead in her bed. Harry begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery. Gripping and surprising, Nemesisis the new thriller by one of the biggest stars of Scandinavian crime fiction.

Nemesis

NESBO,JO

Readers around the world have fallen for Kelley Armstrong’s intoxicating, sensual and wicked tales of the paranormal, in which demons and witches, werewolves and vampires collide – often hilariously, sometimes violently – with everyday life. In Armstrong’s first six novels, Elena, Paige and Eve have had their way with us. Now get ready for Jaime Vegas, the luscious, lovelorn and haunted necromancer. . . Jaime, who knows a thing or two about showbiz, is on a television shoot in Los Angeles when weird things start to happen. As a woman whose special talent is raising the dead, her threshold for weirdness is pretty high: she’s used to not only seeing dead people but hearing them speak to her in very emphatic terms. But for the first time in her life – as invisible hands brush her skin, unintelligible fragments of words are whispered into her ears, and beings move just at the corner of her eye–she knows what humans mean when they talk about being haunted. She is determined to get to the bottom of these manifestations, but as she sets out to solve the mystery she has no idea how scary her investigation will get, or to what depths ordinary humans will sink in their attempts to gain supernatural powers. As she digs into the dark underside of Los Angeles, she’ll need as much Otherworld help as she can get in order to survive, calling on her personal angel, Eve, and Hope, the well-meaning chaos demon. Jeremy, the alpha werewolf, is also by her side offering protection. And, Jaime hopes, maybe a little more than that. “As I knelt on the cobblestones to begin the ritual, I opened not some ancient leather pouch, but a Gucci make-up bag. . . . I know little about the geography and theology of the afterlife, but I do know that the worst spirits are kept secured, and my risk of “accidentally” tapping into a hell dimension is next to nil. Even if I do bring back some depraved killer’s spirit, what can it do to me? When you deprive someone of the ability to act in the living world, he’s pretty darned helpless. In death, even the worst killer plummets from lethal to merely annoying. Yet whatever had been trying to contact me apparently could cross that barrier, could act in the living world. . .at least on me. I added an extra helping of vervain to the censer.” —from No Humans Involved

No Humans Involved

Armstrong,Kelley

"The ultimate focus of the rest of my life is to eradicate the use of child soldiers and to eliminate even the thought of the use of children as instruments of war." —Roméo Dallaire In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that requires negligible technology, is simple to sustain, has unlimited versatility and incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism. In fact, there is no more complete end-to-end weapon system in the inventory of war-machines. What are these cheap, renewable, plentiful, sophisticated and expendable weapons? Children. Roméo Dallaire was first confronted with child soldiers in unnamed villages on the tops of the thousand hills of Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. The dilemma of the adult soldier who faced them is beautifully expressed in his book's title: when children are shooting at you, they are soldiers, but as soon as they are wounded or killed they are children once again. Believing that not one of us should tolerate a child being used in this fashion, Dallaire has made it his mission to end the use of child soldiers. In this book, he provides an intellectually daring and enlightening introduction to the child soldier phenomenon, as well as inspiring and concrete solutions to eradicate it.

They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers

Biographies & Memoirs

Dallaire, Roméo

Leaders & Notable People

The eagerly-awaited new book by Denise Chong, author of the award-winning, national bestseller, The Concubine’s Children. In her first book in a decade, beloved author Denise Chong, tells the story of a man who humiliated a repressive regime in front of the entire world, and whose daring gesture informs our view of human rights to this day. Despite his family’s impeccable Communist roots, Lu Decheng, a small town bus mechanic, grew up intuiting all that was wrong with Mao’s China. As a young man he believes truth and decency mattered, only to learn that preserving the Chairman’s legacy mattered more. Lu’s story reads like Shakespearean drama, peppered with defiance, love and betrayal. His steadfast refusal to acquiesce comes to a head, but not an end, with his infamous defacing of Mao’s portrait during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.

Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship

History

Chong, Denise

Asia

The first of its kind – a heavily illustrated, all-you-need-to-know book about the cult hit TV show, for both rabid fans and anyone who enjoys a hot toasted chicken finger. To the storied and pastoral locales of great Canadian fiction – Leacock’ s Mariposa, Lawrence’s Manawaka, Montgomery’s Avonlea – readers can now add the many splendours of Sunnyvale Trailer Park. With this lovingly designed volume, to grace even the finest toilet-side magazine basket, Ricky, Bubbles, Julian and the whole TPB crew stumble, bewildered and slightly aggravated, from the screen to the page – without spilling a drop of rum and Coke. Working in concert with the show’s creators Matthew Sibiga and Don Wininger have developed a wide range of interpretive devices, helpful lists, historical mementoes, legal advice, wrestling, kitty-care and grooming tips, and more, to aid in any fan’s appreciation of the show – or substitute for it when the cable is out. Added to these features is a two-page synopsis of every episode, including stats, air dates and best lines. Numerous photos and sidebars scattered throughout include quotes, philosophical gleanings and tidbits from the series. Just in time for new episodes on Netflix (or of yet-another-re-run) of one of the most popular television shows ever created in Canada, The Complete Trailer Park Boys truly will be a resource no fan can do without. Some sample chapter topics: Ricky: -A list of Rickyisms -Map of areas in the park where he has passed out -A detailed pictorial of his car/home Bubbles: -Bubbles’s shopping cart chop shop–behind the scenes -Go-cart performance specs -Bubbles eye chart Julian: -Julian’s fashion tips (how to match black with black) -Best money-making schemes -T-shirt wearing and the art of seduction -Julian’ s bartending mix book Other characters: -J-Roc rap lyrics -Ray’s tips on beating the government on disability -Corey and Trevor’s gas siphoning tips

The Complete Trailer Park Boys: How to Enjoy the Trailer Park Boys When the Cable is Out

Sibiga, Matthew

Wininger, Don

Dramas & Plays

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