Magnetic North

This book reveals the magnificent landscape paintings of the Group of Seven and their associates and explores how they contributed to Canada's modern cultural identity. The early decades of the 20th century were marked by artistic, economic, and social transformation in Canada and around the world. Starting in Toronto, a group of young modern artists, including Tom Thomson and Lawren S. Harris, and Emily Carr in British Columbia, desired to create a new painting vocabulary for the young nation coming into its own cultural identity. They turned away from city life and explored Canada's landscape, painting sublime vistas, monumental rivers, ancient forests around the great lakes, the mighty Rocky Mountains, and the arctic tundra, determined to break away from European stylistic traditions. Together, their paintings imagined a mythical Canada, expansive and rugged, that added to their country's growing sense of national pride. Featuring paintings, sketches, photographs, film stills, and documentary material, this catalog examines the language of Canadian modernism. It also includes essays and interviews that offer contemporary indigenous perspectives on the impact of industry on nature, issues surrounding national identity, and modern Canadian landscape painting. This generously illustrated book critically reviews Canada's modernism in art history.

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title More than a decade ago, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to understand a continent nearly lost to myth and lore. In the widely acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to find a hidden history buried in Antarctica's extreme surroundings. Now, Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to create a definitive picture of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming. Inspired by the spiraling shape of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise around the North Pole through the territories belonging to Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what once seemed an unchangeable landscape. As she witnesses the mounting pollution concentrated at the pole, Wheeler reckons with the illness of the whole organism of the earth. Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tough Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceful lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an urgent, beautiful book, rich in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It is a singular, deeply personal portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.

Tech-talk is something Aria Finch is fluent in. Romance and run-of-the-mill human interaction? Not so much. She’s intent on keeping her life simple and to the point. Good career? Check. Boyfriend? Check. Spoiled cat? Double check. When it comes to her boss, however, everything she’s struggling to build seems to go out the window. North Acquati is determined, successful, and gorgeous. Which wouldn’t be a problem if Finch hadn’t gotten herself wined, dined, and gifted a mysterious box that could get her killed. Her confusing feelings for North and the sudden danger she finds herself in only intensify as she’s tangled deeper into the web of North’s latest secret project. But is their chemistry genuine? Or is it nothing more than an elaborate manipulation with potentially devastating consequences?

Ernest Carl Oberholtzer was a central figure in the struggle to preserve the wilderness areas of the Minnesota-Ontario border, as well as an important advocate for the creation of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Toward Magnetic North is the story of Ernest Oberholtzer and Billy Magee's exploration of the then uncharted area of Saskatchewan up to Hudson Bay and into Manitoba. Oberholtzer's photos and journal entries capture the spirit of the wild places that he loved and admired.

This stunning collection from the award-winning poet Linda Gregerson examines the intersections of history, science, and art. Touching on subjects as diverse as a breakthrough discovery in cell biology and the films of Ingmar Bergman, the anatomy of a possum and the Nazi occupation of Poland, Gregerson seeks to distill "the shape of the question," the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. "Choose any angle you like," she writes, "the world is split in two." Longtime readers of Gregerson's poetry will be fascinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful American poets

"Occasionally shocking, often funny, and above all genuinely experimental, this collection explores developments in the field of Canadian video often overlooked in the United States. With critical essays on video theory and practice by senior and emerging media arts critics, theorists, and artists from the United States and Canada, Magnetic North offers an in-depth look at this vital art form." "Magnetic North includes early Canadian video art from the 1970s to the present, providing historical perspective and the basis for positioning this work in an international context. More than forty artists are represented, spanning divergent regions, eras, and genres that range from innovative documentary to conceptual art from experimental narrative to performance video. This compendium not only illustrates an important exhibition of established and emerging Canadian video artists, but also provides new scholarship and criticism in the field of contemporary art practice." "Critical essays by Peggy Gale, Nicole Gingras, Bruce Jenkins, Victor Masayesva, and Chris Straayer create a context for the work and cover topics such as the history of Canadian video, voice and language, materiality and hybridity, indigenous aesthetics, and the body and performance. A unique feature is impressions and responses to the work from a number of prominent filmmakers, artists, and writers, including George Lipsitz, Yvonne Rainer, and Carrie Mae Weems, which were commissioned for this volume. Also included are excerpts from scripts and fiction by some of the artists, as well as work in other media."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Justin Trudeau: scion of political royalty, privileged member of the 'Canadian Kennedy' dynasty, neglected son of difficult parents, actor, hot-tempered young delegate, selfie-taker, and possibly the world's most popular and telegenic leader. This thrilling book traces the remarkable rise of Justin Trudeau to become a desired and admired world leader in the grim age of Trump and Twitter. Trudeau manages to stay on good terms with The Donald while pushing through major reforms in Canada and remaining adored by fans abroad and at home. How does he do it? The secret may be in his backstory: Trudeau's political identity depends on his upbringing. Alan Hustak has been granted unprecedented access from friends and relatives of both Pierre and the young Justin Trudeau. Exposing Trudeau's childhood spent with a cold father, his experiences acting and teaching in Vancouver, and his eventual acceptance that his destiny lay in politics, Hustak weighs up the man against the objectified myth, and analyzes the evidence for Trudeau's sincerity, honesty and dedication to change. Is Trudeau truly the herald of a better kind of politics--or is this progressive agenda just a people-pleasing mask?