CARBON SHIFT: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Vintage Canada, 230 pages, $22
Homer-Dixon, a leading member of Canada's small band of public intellectuals, has assembled a collection of six essays by the influential likes of former CIBC world markets chief economist Jeff Rubin and Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson to address the challenge of shifting to a clean, low-carbon energy. Especially timely as the oil continues to gush in the Gulf of Mexico.
ZEITOUN By Dave Eggers, Vintage Canada, 337 pages, $21
Remember Louisiana's last disaster? Literary wunderkind Dave Eggers does, and this tale of an Arab-American family with a canoe in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and their efforts to paddle through various disasters is nuanced, moving and, yes, entertaining
THE JOURNEY OF LITTLE GANDHI By Elias Khoury, Picador, 194 pages, $18
If the city of Beirut can be said to have a novelist laureate, it's surely Elias Khoury. In this multi-layered novel, an aging prostitute tells the sad tale of Little Gandhi, a shoe-shine boy in a city pocked by war.
DEADLOCK IN KOREA: Canadian at War, 1950-1953 By Ted Barris, Thomas Allen, 318 pages, $24.95
Sixty years ago this summer, thousands of Canadian joined a UN-sponsored mission to stop a communist surge into South Korea; some 6,000 died in the effort. War historian Ted Barris interviewed more than 500 Canadian veterans to provide this vivid history of that ferocious conflict from the viewpoint of its participants.
MORDECAI RICHLER: Leaving St Urbain By Reinhold Kramer, McGill-Queen's, 498 pages, $29.95
A critical biography of the late, great Canadian writer that is also the story of his Montreal Jewish culture negotiating its way into the Canadian mainstream. A detailed life that is sympathetic without being reverent.
WHY SOCRATES DIED: Dispelling the Myth By Robin Waterfield, Emblem, 253 pages, $21
And we always thought it was for impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. But in this fascinating, lively, revisionist work, Robin Waterfield argues that the trial (in 399 BC) was more an attack on Socrates's supposed elitism and friendships with undesirables such as Alcibiades who were blamed for Athens' crushing defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War a few years earlier.
SUNNYSIDE By Glen David Gold, Vintage, 676 pages, $19.95
It's 1916 and Charlie Chaplin is king of an emerging Hollywood. In this rich, sweeping novel about glamour, celebrity and an emergent America (the First World War, too), Gold uses the Figure of the Little Tramp as a guide through the cultural labyrinth, something like E.L. Doctorow did in Ragtime.