New Releases: September

MQUP is thrilled to announce 17 new titles this month. Our latest releases span across diverse topics, ranging from Canadian History to Political Science. We have a new addition to the Intoxicating History series, as well as two new poetry titles. Happy reading!

 The Adaptable Country

How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century

By Alasdair Roberts

The Adaptable Country outlines straightforward policy reforms to improve adaptability – the capacity to anticipate and manage danger. In a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity and human rights can also respond nimbly to existential threats.

Beothuk

How Story Made a People (Almost) Disappear

By Christopher Patrick Aylward

Narratives about the disappearance of the Beothuk are entrenched in historical accounts and the popular imagination. Only with the integration of Indigenous perspectives, beginning in the 1920s, was this accepted story seriously questioned. Beothuk demonstrates the impossibility of writing Indigenous history without Indigenous storytellers.

Cultural Change among the Algonquin in the Nineteenth Century

By Leila Inksetter, Translated by Bruce Inksetter

The nineteenth century was a time of upheaval for the Algonquin people. Focusing on those living around Lake Timiskaming and Lake Abitibi along the Ontario-Quebec border over a century, this book reveals the agency behind cultural change and shows how and why the Algonquin made certain deliberate choices during this period.

Deep Disposal

A Documentary Account of Burying Nuclear Waste in Canada

By William Leiss

High-level nuclear waste is the most hazardous byproduct of a useful energy source that is increasingly in demand. Finding the ideal place to store it permanently is an urgent policy crisis facing our country. Deep Disposal offers an essential primer to inform citizens about the nature of this crisis and how we might overcome it.

Finding Molly Johnson

Irish Famine Orphans in Canada

By Mark G. McGowan

In Finding Molly Johnson Mark McGowan seeks to find out what happened to children fleeing famine who were orphaned during the voyage from Ireland to Canada. He discovers that they were not legally adopted, often serving as unpaid labour to host families, thus unlocking an important chapter of the Irish emigrant experience.

The Hour of Absinthe

A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink

By Nina Studer

The Hour of Absinthe contextualizes and deconstructs some of the numerous myths surrounding absinthe, locating race, gender, class, and colonialism at the heart of France’s cultural narratives about the drink.

The Lives of Lake Ontario

An Environmental History

By Daniel Macfarlane

Lake Ontario has materially enabled and enriched the societies that have crowded its edges, from fertile agriculture landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. The Lives of Lake Ontario examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable resource.

Mainstreaming Porn

Sexual Integrity and the Law Online

By Elaine Craig

Mainstreaming Porn reveals how sexual norms, practices, and desires are shaped by corporate platforms such as Pornhub in the same way that social media has affected society at large. It is a powerful argument for law and policy responses to the impact of monopolistic, corporate porn platforms on the contours of sexual integrity in our communities.

Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada

Majesty, Ritual, and Rhetoric

By Colin M. Coates

Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada examines how the political precepts and practices of seventeenth-century France were translated to the distant settler colony to establish French political legitimacy in this new transatlantic setting.

Reckoning with History

Essays on Uses of the Past

Edited by Matthew Neufeld and K.J. Kesselring

This collection explores ways in which people have reckoned with history and put the past to work. Contributors respond to the writings of Daniel Woolf, whose scholarship illuminates the history of the historical discipline and the social circulation of the past.

The Service of Faith

An Ethnography of Mennonites and Development

By Philip Fountain

Asking what is the place of religion in development work, The Service of Faith offers an ethnography of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Christian development work in Indonesia, exploring the challenges, conundrums, theologies, and ethical commitments that shape Mennonite service.

Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service

By Donald J. Savoie

The federal public service plays a vital role in Canada’s development. Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service provides a comprehensive review of the challenges confronting the public service, how the relationship between politicians and career officials has evolved in recent years, and what motivates public servants.

The Twelfth of February

Canadian Aid for Gender Equality during the Rise of Violent Extremism in Pakistan

By Rhonda Gossen

Rhonda Gossen tells how war in Afghanistan influenced the spread of violent Islamic extremism in Pakistan, following the ebbs and flows of aid to both countries. Drawing on her experience as a development worker and interviews with activists, NGOs, officials, and diplomats, she considers how women’s organizations and NGOs resist violent extremism.

Water Quality

By Cynthia Woodman Kerkham

In lush and vivid poems, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool that simmers through a family’s veins, water is the main character here.

What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy

By Jane Cooper

In What Ukrainian Elections Taught Me about Democracy long-time election observer Jane Cooper recounts her experience monitoring a municipal election in Kirovohrad in 2015. Offering a framework for exploring what can go right or wrong during an election, at the core of this story is the inspirational battle of the poll workers at the bottom of the electoral pyramid struggling to keep the election honest.

With a Unity of Purpose

How the First World War Changed Newfoundland

By Michael Westcott

With a Unity of Purpose examines the transformation of Newfoundland during the First World War from a society underpinned by classical liberalism to one dominated by social liberalism, in which citizens and the state recognized their responsibilities to each other.

Without Beginning or End

By Jacqueline Bourque

Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire.