A Prairie Boy's Winter

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Sherrill E. Grace

"Canada and the Idea of North examines the ways in which Canadians have defined them-selves as a northern people in their literature, art, music, drama, history, geography, politics, and popular culture. From the Franklin Mystery, Glenn Gould's documentaries, the paintings of Lawren Harris, and Molson beer ads, the idea of the North has been central to the Canadian imagination.". "Sherrill Grace argues that Canadians have always used ideas of Canada-as-North to promote a distinct national identity and national unity. In a penultimate chapter - The North Writes Back - Grace presents newly emerging northern voices and shows how they view the long tradition of representing the North by southern activists, artists, and scholars.". "With the recent creation of Nunavut, increasing concern about northern ecosystems and social challenges, and renewed attention to Canada's role as a circumpolar nation, Canada and the Idea of North shows that nordicity still plays an urgent and central role in Canada at the start of the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.

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Peggy Gale

Videotexts is an invaluable collection of essays - a comprehensive guide to Canadian video artists and their works. The essays focus on important individual tapes and artists and on the development of narrative forms: to construct meaning and confirm memory. Revised and updated, they offer a "present-tense" assessment of works from the last twenty-five years, and of artists' ideas and processes as they were unfolding. Everyone interested in video and contemporary art and culture will want to read them.

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Jane Rule

Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide. Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s, a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging. Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment. Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule's characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives - choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.

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Eva Hagberg

Twenty-five recent residential projects from around the United States take the concept of "green living" to the next architectural level. Going beyond the simple use of sustainable materials, these houses are designed to frame a very particular vision of nature for their owners that brings them as close as possible to nature while remaining indoors. Featured are dynamic designs by today's most energetic architectural firms including ARO, Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, Diller Scofidio + Renfro as well as up-and-coming smaller firms. Houses vary in scale, complexity, and site to give a broad survey of the potential of this cutting-edge approach. Show More Show Less.