The Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples

The Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples accomplishes a mammoth feat in drawing together the many threads that make up Canada’s multicultural tapestry. Paul Magocsi, one of North America’s most experienced scholars of ethnicity, oversaw this project, which took nine years and involved over 300 scholars worldwide. With 119 group entries in the work, topics covered include origin, process of migration, arrival and settlement, economic and community life, language and culture. The idea that emerges is that all Canadians, from Aboriginal peoples to the most recent immigrants, share in a tradition of migration. Those who fear this kind of exercise might confound the ever-looming Canadian identity question may be surprised. "Ethnicity does not replace Canadian identity," suggests contributingeditor Harold Troper. "It is Canadian identity."

Jeffrey B. Nugent, University of Southern California

The Red Shoes is a unique portrait of Margaret Atwood, one of Canada’s most distinguished authors. The book spans the 1950s to the late 1970s, following Atwood as she establishes herself as a writer and helps redefine the burgeoning literary culture in Canada.

Unlike a traditional biography, The Red Shoes focuses as much on the cultural context of the ’60s and ’70s – a time when a distinctly Canadian culture was beginning to emerge – as it does on Atwood’s formative years as a writer. An award-winning biographer and poet, Sullivan paints a compelling picture not only of a woman, but of a generation of women coming of age during one of the most radically shifting times in contemporary history

Lee and Daly have produced the first encyclopedia devoted exclusively to the world’s hunting and gathering peoples. This illustrated volume, which profiles over 50 hunter-gatherer societies existing around the world today, documents their archaeological background, lifestyle, means of subsistence, and social aspects of their lives such as social organization, gender relations and spirituality. Also included are cross-cultural comparisons of different societies, and essays on health, music, art and the colonial encounter. The result is not only a comprehensive reference work, but also an insight into a way of life that was universal among humans until 12,000 years ago. As Lee and Daly suggest in their introduction, hunters and gatherers "may hold the key to some of the central questions about the human condition," such as how to live without complex technology and "the possibility of living in Nature without destroying it."

Walking Since Daybreak is a historical account of World War II and its devastating effect on the author’s native Latvia and surrounding Eastern Europe. The book began as an academic analysis of Europe in 1945, as "an attempt to portray the cultural landscape of Europe after the firestorm." However, haunted and moved by the stories of his own family members and their horrible war experiences, Eksteins chooses instead to tell the story through them, starting in 1850 and moving forward through time. As a counterpoint, he looks back to World War II from the present, as both a historian in North American academia, and as one of the countless Eastern Europeans displaced by the war. Both perspectives converge in 1945, when the Baltic Republics are "virtually wiped out," over 30 million people are homeless and twice that number dead. As a counter to numbing statistics, this very personal way of documenting history helps readers truly understand the horror of the war.

These essays examine the problems arising when Aboriginal culture, much of which is preserved orally, is written down. Though written texts have the advantage of reaching a wider audience and assuring greater preservation, moving from the spoken to the written word raises editorial challenges. In the case of Aboriginal culture, a particular urgency is borne on the problem due to "the misrepresentation or silencing of Native speech that is characteristic of North American colonial history." The contributors bring different backgrounds to the topic, including comparative literature, anthropology and filmmaking. They explore issues such as the relationship between text and audience, the necessity of translating context as well as content, and the idea that alternative media such as film and drama may offer more faithful translations of Aboriginal culture.

Women and the Canadian Labour Market presents a comprehensive analysis of women’s participation in the workforce. The book takes into account the number of hours Canadian women devote to paid work, their earnings, occupations, and a wide range of factors affecting their work experiences. Based on census data from 1971, 1981 and1991, the book is the second in a series of eight census monographs by Statistics Canada. It is designed to be integrated into a variety of academic programs and to serve as background in the formulation and development of public policy on a wide range of issues that impact women’s workforce participation, including pay and employment equity, child care, family leave, overtime regulation, and job-sharing.

This book explores the process and the implications of unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. In her introduction, Morrison notes that the process of unification has been common throughout the history of science. Unified theories, such as Newtonian theory, or the current search in physics for a "theory of everything," have traditionally been regarded as having critical power to explain scientific phenomena. Morrison argues, however, that contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. In addition to addressing philosophical arguments about the nature of unification, the author provides several case studies from physics and biology to show how the unifying process actually takes place and how mathematics plays a crucial role in the process.

In this new, definitive biography of William Osler – the most famous physician of his time (1848-1919) – historian Michael Bliss draws on previously untapped sources to recreate the life and times of this charismatic figure. The author’s earlier biographical subject, Frederick Banting, is remembered today for his discovery of insulin. In contrast, Osler’s contribution to medicine was much more widespread: he revolutionized the profession itself. With an endless determination to understand and reconceptualize the pathology of disease, Osler personified the ideal doctor to his students, colleagues and patients. Born in rural Ontario, Osler rose from obscurity to teach medicine in Canada, the United States, and finally at Oxford, where he was Regius Professor of Medicine. Bliss’s work, which was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction, brings Osler to life against the dramatic backdrop of the coming of modern medicine.

The Dictionary of Old English Project celebrates its most recent publication: the 2000 release of its Corpus. Available on CD-ROM and on the world wide web, the Corpus is an electronic record of all surviving texts written in the first six centuries of the English language (600-1150 A.D.).

First developed in 1981, the updated Corpus is the essential tool for the compilation of the Dictionary itself, now one-third complete. It gives the editors access to every word in Old English, and so provides a comprehensive database for writing the Dictionary. This full coverage is almost unique in dictionary- making. The Corpus is also invaluable in its own right: it serves as an exhaustive primary source for all documents in English in the Anglo-Saxon period. With texts ranging widely from poetry to biblical translations to medical writings to legal records and chronicles, the Corpus is an enabling tool for all scholars with an interest in this historical period or in the origins andevolution of the English language.