The Secret Language of Girls

Politics & Social Sciences

Vogels, Josey

Women's Studies

Thomas Allen & Son

Roots of Empathy— an evidence-based program developed in 1996 by longtime educator and social entrepreneur Mary Gordon — has already reached more than 270,000 children in Canada, the U.S., Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Now, asThe New York Timesreports that "empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten", Mary Gordon explains the value of and how best to nurture empathy and social and emotional literacy in all children — and thereby reduce aggression, antisocial behavior, and bullying.

Roots of Empathy: Changing the World, Child by Child

GORDON, Mary

Health, Fitness & Dieting

These nine razor-sharp stories herald the return of one of Canada’s most accomplished writers to the short story form. Stylistically varied and linguistically confident, here are compulsively readable stories that plumb the complexities of the human heart. A dying Finn, a philandering photographer recovering from an emergency splenectomy, a young woman heavy with an hysterical pregnancy - these are just some of the surprising characters that people these pages.

Pleased to Meet You

Literature & Fiction

Adderson, Caroline

Short Stories & Anthologies

At the height of the First World War, on Easter Monday April 9, 1917, in early morning sleet, sixteen battalions of the Canadian Corps rose along a six-kilometre line of trenches in northern France against the occupying Germans. All four Canadian divisions advanced in a line behind a well-rehearsed creeping barrage of artillery fire. By nightfall, the Germans had suffered a major setback. The Ridge, which other Allied troops had assaulted previously and failed to take, was firmly in Canadian hands. The Canadian Corps had achieved perhaps the greatest lightning strike in Canadian military history. One Paris newspaper called it "Canada's Easter gift to France." 
Of the 40,000 Canadians who fought at Vimy, nearly 10,000 became casualties. Many of their names are engraved on the famous monument that now stands on the ridge to commemorate the battle. It was the first time Canadians had fought as a distinct national army, and in many ways, it was a coming of age for the nation. 
The achievement of the Canadians on those April days in 1917 has become one of our lasting myths. Based on first-hand accounts, including archival photographs and maps, it is the voices of the soldiers who experienced the battle that comprise the thrust of the book. Like JUNO: Canadians at D-Day, Ted Barris paints a compelling and surprising human picture of what it was like to have stormed and taken Vimy Ridge.

Victory at Vimy: Canada Comes of Age, April 9-12, 1917

History

Barris, Ted

Barris, Theodore

Americas

When retiree Keith O'Reilly witnesses the murder of his neighbour by a pizza delivery man one night during a snowstorm, a unique series of stories begins to unfold. As the narrative seamlessly moves from neighbour to neighbour, house to house, the reader begins to understand, not only the circumstances that led to the murder, but the private secrets and personal struggles of many of the McKay Street residents. Travelling through the changing viewpoints of a more than a dozen of people in a small residential neighbourhood in St. John's, Newfoundland, The Glass Harmonica looks at the way common memories and shared experiences bend and warp as individuals recall the events of their lives, and how these distortions influence both the character's and the reader's understanding of the truth.

The Glass Harmonica

Wagersky, Russell

Wangersky, Russell

How do you get someone else committed to reaching their full potential? It’s a question that challenges new managers and seasoned executives alike, echoes through coaches’ heads as they watch a gifted athlete underachieve, and keeps parents up at night. In Igniting the Third Factor, Peter synthesizes his life’s work into the five core practices exceptional leaders use to ignite the Third Factor in themselves and others – whether it’s in the locker room before a gold medal Olympic hockey game or at a routine performance review. Peter works through an easy-to-understand model, providing a clear view of what separates ‘igniters’ from ‘extinguishers’ and exploring a wealth of strategies you can put to use immediately in your world. Like the laws of physics, these principles apply in any environment. They may look different when used by a parent, a manager, or a coach, but the forces of work remain the same. 
 Igniting the Third Factor is a fast-paced journey packed with familiar faces, engaging stories, and humor. As he moves from the dressing room to the corner office and back again, Peter weaves insights from well-known Canadian, American, and British coaches and executives with his personal experience to provide a practical guide to helping others excel – all set against the backdrop of an exciting 30 years of involvement in the Canadian Olympic Movement.

Ignite the Third Factor

Business & Money

Jensen, Peter

Management & Leadership

Like a tourist visiting his own life, David Gilmour’s narrator journeys in time to reexamine those critical moments that created him. He revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, the shock of a parent’s suicide, the trauma of a best friend’s bizarre dissembling, and the pain and humiliation of unrelenting jealousy, among other rites of passage. Set within an episodic narrative arc stories about the profound effect of Tolstoy, of theBeatles, of the cult of celebrity, of the delusion of drugs, and of the literary life on the winding road of the narrator’s progress. This compelling and deeply interesting picaresque novel is a creative tour de force from the hand of one of our master storytellers.
The Perfect Order of Thingsbreaks new fictional ground and is an astonishing story of a life lived fully and with breathtaking passion. David Gilmour is a novelist who has earned critical praise from literary figures as diverse as William Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and from publications as different as theNew York TimestoPeople magazine.
The author of six novels, he also hosted the award-winning Gilmour on the Arts. In 2005, his novelA Perfect Night to Go to Chinawon the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. His next book,The Film Club, was a finalist for the 2008 Charles Taylor Prize. It became an international bestseller, and has sold over 200,000 copies in Germany and over 100,000 copies in Brazil. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

The Perfect Order of Things

Gilmour, David

"The last time I talked to my mother, she announced that she hated my father." So begins Brian Fawcett’s compelling new book about happiness and a new way of looking at family. A public intellectual who will shame the devil in the interests of truth, Brian Fawcett has staunchly refused to buy into the prevailing techno-corporate ethos that defines our culture today. WithHuman Happiness, Fawcett has taken another leap into unexplored territory. Where previously Fawcett has explored such topics as globalization and the role of the media, this time he turns the lens inward to search for the meaning of happiness by examining the mysteries of marriage and family. Featuring prose that is often painfully candid and frequently laugh-out-loud funny,Human Happinessis a story-driven narrative centered around the seemingly happy marriage between Fawcett’s parents, about how familiesreallywork (or don’t), about the intergenerational conflicts that seem inevitable between headstrong fathers and sons, and how old hostilities can poison and distort through generations and – in extraordinary cases – can be resolved. For 25 years now, Brian Fawcett has been Canada’s most unconventional writer and public intellectual, a man Paul Quarrington described as our literature’senfant terribleandeminence grisrolled into one. His true gift is for making readers laugh while raising the most fundamental questions that face us. He might be Canada’s most original writer.

Human Happiness

FAWCETT, Brian

Shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2012 BMO Winterset Award From critically acclaimed and award-winning writer, Russell Wangersky, comes a new collection of short fiction. Everyone has something they’re good at: one particular personal skill that they use to keep their lives moving forward when their worlds suddenly become difficult or near-impossible. For some, it’s denial; for others, blunt pragmatism. Still others depend on an over-inflated view of self to keep criticism and doubt at bay. In his new short story collection, Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky—author of critically-acclaimed fiction and non-fiction including The Glass Harmonica, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself and The Hour of Bad Decisions— looks at what happens when people’s personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even selfdelusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defense has become their greatest weakness. From the caretaker of a prairie amusement park to the lone occupant of a collapsing Newfoundland town, from a travelling sports drink marketer with a pressing need to get off the road to an elevator inspector who finds himself losing his marriage while sensuously burying himself in the tastes and smells of the kitchen, these are people who spin wildly out of control, finding themselves in a new and different world.

Whirl Away

While sex has been historically a private matter, in the twentieth century it became a public obsession. Beginning in the early 1900s, people widely felt that increased openness about sex was the key to personal fulfillment and happy relationships. Yet this emphasis on the physical has eroded our understanding of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of intimacy. Today, sex has saturated contemporary life through television, movies, books, magazines, videos, tabloids, advertising, and the Internet. Meanwhile, desensitization and sexual dysfunction, obsession with body image, short-lived commitments, and high divorce rates are signs that our deepest private desires remain unfulfilled. We yearn for true connection with the romantic other, and our growing malaise has given rise to nostalgic myths of golden times that never really existed. Patricia Anderson's "Passion Lost", a lively history of sexual mores - from burgeoning sexual concerns of the 20th century's early years, the changing morality of the 1920s and 1930s, the liberties of wartime, and the 1950s' veneer of rectitude, to the freedoms of the following decades - examines those myths and paints a compelling new portrait illustrating how deeply the present is rooted in the past, and how our quest for intimacy has been hijacked by our public obsession with sex.

Passion Lost: Public Sex, Private Desire in the Twentieth Century

Anderson, Postdoctoral Fellow Department of History Patricia

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Books by Thomas Allen & Son