Tag: book prize

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Ken McGoogan’s Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery (Douglas & McIntyre).

Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin’s expeditions were monumental failures—the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discover the Northwest Passage.

This book, McGoogan’s sixth about Arctic exploration, challenges that vision. It rejects old orthodoxies, incorporates the latest discoveries, and interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy’s Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Métis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin’s last expedition?

The well-preserved wrecks of Erebus and Terror—located in 2014 and 2016—promise to yield more clues about what cost the lives of the expedition members, some of whom were reduced to cannibalism. Contemporary researchers, rejecting theories of lead poisoning and botulism, continue to seek conclusive evidence both underwater and on land.

Drawing on his own research and Inuit oral accounts, McGoogan teases out many intriguing aspects of Franklin’s expeditions, including the explorer’s lethal hubris in ignoring the expert advice of the Dene leader Akaitcho. Franklin disappeared into the Arcticin 1845, yet people remain fascinated with his final doomed voyage: what happened? McGoogan will captivate readers with his first-hand account of travelling to relevant locations, visiting the graves of dead sailors and experiencing the Arctic—one of the most dramatic and challenging landscapes on the planet.

Ken McGoogan is an award-winning and best-selling Canadian author who travels the world researching for his writing. He has published numerous fiction and non-fiction books, including several Arctic histories. His best-selling books include Dead Reckoning (Patrick Crean Editions, 2017), Fatal Passage, 50 Canadians Who Changed the World and Lady Franklin’s Revenge (Phyllis Bruce Books: 2001, 2013 and 2005). McGoogan has appeared in several documentaries to discuss Arctic exploration and is a fellow of the Explorers’ Club and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. McGoogan was born in Montréal and now lives in Guelph, ON.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Benjamin Perrin’s Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial (University of Toronto Press).

Based on first-hand interviews with survivors, people who have committed offences, and others on the frontlines, Indictment puts the Canadian criminal justice system on trial and proposes a bold new vision of transformative justice.

#MeToo. Black Lives Matter. Decriminalize Drugs. No More Stolen Sisters. Stop Stranger Attacks.

Do we need more cops or to defund the police? Harm reduction or treatment? Tougher sentences or prison abolition? The debate about Canada’s criminal justice system has rarely been so polarized – or so in need of fresh ideas. Indictment brings the heartrendingand captivating stories of survivors and people who have committed offences to the forefront to help us

understand why the criminal justice system is facing such an existential crisis.

Benjamin Perrin draws on his expertise as a lawyer, former top criminal justice advisor to the prime minister, and law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada toinvestigate the criminal justice system itself. Indictment critiques the system from a trauma-informed perspective, examining its treatment of victims of crime, Indigenous people and Black Canadians, people with substance use and mental health disorders, and people experiencing homelessness, poverty, and unemployment.

Perrin also shares insights from others on the frontlines, including prosecutors and defence lawyers, police chiefs, Indigenous leaders, victim support workers, corrections officers, public health experts, gang outreach workers, prisoner and victims’ rights advocates, criminologists, psychologists, and leading trauma experts. Bringing forward the voices of marginalized people, along with their stories of survival and resilience, Indictment shows that a better way is possible.

Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He has served in the Prime Minister’s Office as inhouse legal counsel and lead policy advisor on criminal justice and public safety. He was also a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada. He is the author of Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (Penguin Random House Canada).

A stunning account of the colossal wildfire at Fort McMurray, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s petroleum industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat

our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives fore

ver changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.

John Vaillant’s acclaimed, award-winning nonfiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar’s Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Vaillant has received the Governor General’s Literary Award, British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Leo Baskatawang’s Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law: Kinamaadiwin Inaakonigewin and the Treaty Right to Education (University of Manitoba Press).

In Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law Leo Baskatawang traces the history of the neglected treaty relationship between the Crown and the Anishinaabe Nation in Treaty #3, and the Canadian government’s egregious failings to administer effective education policy for Indigenous youth—failures epitomized by, but not limited to, the horrors of the residential school system.

Rooted in the belief that Indigenous education should be governed and administered by Indigenous peoples, Baskatawang envisions a hopeful future for Indigenous nations where their traditional laws are formally recognized and affirmed by the governments of Canada. Baskatawang thereby details the efforts being made in Treaty #3 territory to revitalize and codify the Anishinaabe education law, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin. Kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin considers education wholistically, such that it describes ways of knowing, being, doing, relating, and connecting to the land that are grounded in tradition, while also positioning its learners for success in  life, both on and off the reserve.

As the backbone of an Indigenous-led education system, kinamaadiwin inaakonigewin enacts Anishinaabe self-determination and has the potential to bring about cultural resurgence, language revitalization, and a new era of Crown-Indigenous relations in Canada. Reclaiming Anishinaabe Law challenges policy makers to push beyond apologies and performative politics , and to engage in meaningful reconciliation practices by recognizing and affirming the laws that the Anishinaabeg have always used to govern themselves.

Leo Baskatawang is Anishinaabe from Lac Des Mille Lacs First Nation in Treaty #3 territory. He is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba. Prior to beginning his academic career, Dr. Baskatawang served in the United States Army, where he completed two combat tours, with distinction, in service of the Global War on Terrorism and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Jason Bell’s Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy (HarperCollins Canada).

In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell of Halifax was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. But as MI6 secret agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6. Throughout this, a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress Bell’s alerts. Nevertheless, agent A12’s intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways that are only now being revealed.

Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. But the führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia and Poland to France, Germany,

Canada and Washington, DC, A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war. Informed by recently declassified documents, Cracking the Nazi Code is the first book to illuminate the astonishing exploits of Winthrop Bell, agent A12.

Jason Bell, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as a Fulbright professor in Germany (at Winthrop Bell’s alma mater, the University of Göttingen) and taught at universities in Belgium, the United States and Canada. He was the first scholar to be granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell’s classified espionage papers. Despite the coincidence of their surname, Jason and Winthrop Bell are not known relations.

There are ten books on the 2024 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize longlist and today we’re going to highlight Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay’s Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity (University of Manitoba Press).

Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways.

Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s.

They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination.

Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

Dr. Kristin Burnett is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Learn ing at Lakehead University. A settler scholar, Burnett has published broadly on topics related to Indigenous health and well-being, and much of her current research and policy work engages with systemic barriers to health care, social services and supports, and food.

Travis Hay is a historian of Canadian settler colonialism who was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is currently an assistant professor at Mount Royal University, the author of Inventing the Thrifty Gene, and the English Language Book Review Editor of Canadian Journal of Health History.