The holiday season is here, and there's no better time to cozy up with a good book (or ten!). Open Book's Holiday Book Guide will direct you to some of the most engaging books on store shelves this season. Our Guide will be regularly updated throughout December, featuring a fresh theme with each listing. Today's theme: THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.
THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT:
Janet Wilson's Our Earth: How Kids Are Saving the Planet (Second Story Press) inspires young and old alike with true stories of remarkable kids who have put their original ideas for making the world a better place into action.
Is there a silver lining to the end of the world as we know it? Poet Steve McOrmond looks at our contemporary crisis with a mixture of self-deprecating humour and stark assessment in his newest collection, The Good News About Armageddon (Brick Books).
In her powerful YA novel Thunder Over Kandahar (Annick Press), Sharon E. McKay tells the story of two young girls, bound together by friendship and then torn apart by the perilous realities of present-day Afghanistan. Illustrated with original photography by Rafal Gerszak.
One of two collections by poet Antony Di Nardo to appear this season, Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books) filters the complex, ruined beauty of Beirut through the perspective of an attentive outsider.
Persistent Poverty: Voices from the Margins (Between the Lines) is a collective effort by Jamie Swift, Brice Balmer and Mira Dineen that exposes an ineffective social welfare system and tells the stories of men and women in over thirty Ontario communities who suffer for it.
Book of Hours (The Porcupine's Quill) by award-winning wood engraver George A. Walker is an homage like no other: through a series of affecting images of everyday city life he evokes the unexpected tragedy and violence of 9/11.
Toronto's Dalton Higgins is the coolest multi-culti media-savvy dad around. But he's not the only dad moving to a beat that mixes hip hop with technology with the social pressures of modern parenthood: Fatherhood 4.0 (Insomniac Press) profiles a diverse group of dads — including Michael "Pinball" Clemons, Lawrence Hill and Matt Galloway — who are doing their best in spite of it all.
Will you be missing the action on Parliament Hill over the holidays? Turn to Bob Rae's Exporting Democracy for an eloquent argument about the historical and contemporary challenges of democracy…"the worst form of government except all those other governments that have been tried," as Winston Churchill famously said.
Buy these books at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
Don't miss previous editions of the Holiday Book Guide! Check out the great line up for Stage, Screen and Song.
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