Breaking Trail

The autobiography of the first native person elected to federal office in Canada.

In her inspiring autobiography, mountain-climbing heroine Blum scales the heights of human aspiration and liberation, chronicling a life of astonishing achievement and courage.

Follow Edgar Hetteen from poverty to millonaire as he starts Polaris and Artic Cat snowmobile companies.

In August 1978, thirteen women left San Francisco for the Nepal Himalaya to make history as the first Americans—and the first women—to scale the treacherous slopes of Annapurna I, the world's tenth highest peak. Expedition leader Arlene Blum here tells their dramatic story: the logistical problems, storms, and hazardous ice climbing; the conflicts and reconciliations within the team; the terror of avalanches that threatened to sweep away camps and climbers. On October 15, two women and two Sherpas at last stood on the summit—but the celebration was cut short, for two days later, the two women of the second summit team fell to their deaths. Never before has such an account of mountaineering triumph and tragedy been told from a woman's point of view. By proving that women had the skill, strength, and courage necessary to make this difficult and dangerous climb, the 1978 Women's Himalayan Expedition's accomplishment had a positive impact around the world, changing perceptions about women's abilities in sports and other arenas. And Annapurna: A Woman's Place has become an acknowledged classic in the annals of women's achievements—a story of challenge and commitment told with passion, humor, and unflinching honesty.

When her father falls into a coma, Indian American photographer Sonya reluctantly returns to the family she'd fled years before. Her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay. Buried secrets rise to the surface, and as their father's condition worsens the daughters and their mother wrestle with private hopes for his survival or death, as well as their own demons and buried secrets.

'One of the best books I've read in the last five or ten years... Wild is angry, brave, sad, self-knowing, redemptive, raw, compelling, and brilliantly written, and I think it's destined to be loved by a lot of people, men and women, for a very long time.' Nick Hornby

Sherman Alexie meets William Gibson. Louise Erdrich meets Franz Kafka. Leslie Marmon Silko meets Philip K. Dick. However you might want to put it, this is Native American fiction in a whole new world. A surrealistic revisiting of the Cherokee Removal, Riding the Trail of Tears takes us to north Georgia in the near future, into a virtual-reality tourist compound where customers ride the Trail of Tears, and into the world of Tallulah Wilson, a Cherokee woman who works there. When several tourists lose consciousness inside the ride, employees and customers at the compound come to believe, naturally, that a terrorist attack is imminent. Little does Tallulah know that Cherokee Little People have taken up residence in the virtual world and fully intend to change the ride’s programming to suit their own point of view. Told by a narrator who knows all but can hardly be trusted, in a story reflecting generations of experience while recalling the events in a single day of Tallulah’s life, this funny and poignant tale revises American history even as it offers a new way of thinking, both virtual and very real, about the past for both Native Americans and their Anglo counterparts.

“Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore” (National Post). Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers—sixty million, or more—and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived. Once They Were Hats examines humanity’s fifteen-thousand–year relationship with Castor canadensis, and the beaver’s even older relationship with North American landscapes and ecosystems. From the waterlogged environs of the Beaver Capital of Canada to the wilderness cabin that controversial conservationist Grey Owl shared with pet beavers; from a bustling workshop where craftsmen make beaver-felt cowboy hats using century-old tools to a tidal marsh where an almost-lost link between beavers and salmon was recently found, it’s a journey of discovery to find out what happened after we nearly wiped this essential animal off the map, and how we can learn to live with beavers now that they’re returning. “Fascinating and smartly written.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)