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Josiah Neufeld believes faith can be driving force in environmental activism

Josiah Neufeld wants to believe the human race will do the right thing when it comes to saving the planet from ourselves.

He also believes there’s a higher power that has shaped our world and those who live on it.

Finding an intersection in his own life between faith and the facts about our climate crisis spurred the 42-year-old journalist to write his first book, The Temple at the End of the Universe: A Search for Spirituality in the Anthropocene. Published on June 6 by House of Anansi, Neufeld launches the book tonight at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where he’ll be joined in conversation with novelist Joan Thomas (Five Wives).

The child of Christian missionaries, Neufeld spent the first few years of his life in Burkina Faso before his family moved back to Blumenort. (He now lives in Winnipeg with his partner and two children.)

New in paper

Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos

By Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa with Philip Lerman (HarperCollins, $29)

The former Sopranos stars (and hosts of the Talking Sopranos podcast) chat with fellow cast members and crew from the hit HBO mobster series.

Hey, Good Luck Out There

History and humanization unfold in 'Haida Manga'

On a ship with torn sails, tossed by churning waters, the first of many Europeans needing rescue arrives along the coast of what is now British Columbia, before a Haida canoe brings an outstretched paddle and the warm light of salvation.

So begins the latest book of "Haida Manga" by artist and author Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, as he reaches into the history of his own family and of colonization in a work that blends Indigenous artistic influences with Japanese manga comic-book story telling.

The colourful watercolour panels of "JAJ: a Haida Manga" leap off the page as they draw the audience inside the world-spanning story.

Released in May, the book traces the journeys of both Yahgulanaas's ancestors and the eponymous Norwegian mariner Johan Adrian Jacobsen, who visited Haida Gwaii in 1882 in search of cultural items for a German museum during a time of escalating colonial violence against Indigenous Peoples.

St. Boniface-born Greenpeace co-founder fondly remembered in essay collection

Robert (“Bob”) Hunter is an undeservedly unheralded figure in Manitoba.

Ontario has twice honoured the pioneering environmental activist and co-founder of Greenpeace in its landscapes.

It created the 400-acre Bob Hunter Memorial Park in the greater Toronto area. And Toronto city council later named a 17-hectare municipal park near Scarborough Bob Hunter Greenspace.

But the native son of St. Boniface, who got his start as a reporter for the Winnipeg Tribune, has nada here to recognize him.

David Sedaris’ first children’s book, ‘Pretty Ugly,’ to be published next February

NEW YORK (AP) — David Sedaris is publishing his first children's book, a collaboration with Ian Falconer conceived decades ago and finished shortly before the “Olivia” creator died in March.

Toon Books, an imprint of Astra Publishing House, announced Thursday that “Pretty Ugly” will be published Feb. 27 of next year. A look at the “age-old question” of what makes people attractive or unattractive, “Pretty Ugly” began 20 years ago as a contribution to the anthology “Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids.”

More recently, Toon publisher Françoise Mouly, who helped edit “Little Lit,” thought "Pretty Ugly" would work as a stand-alone book.

“With the systematic attacks so-called conservatives are leveling on all those they see as deviant or even just different, it felt urgent to publish a tale with such a clear moral center,” Mouly said in a statement. “David and Ian agreed and earlier this year, we finalized the editing and design, prepping it for spring 2024 publication. A few weeks before he died, I sent Ian the dummy and — in true Ian style — he remarked, “this looks great. I can’t wait to see it bound ... and gagged.'”

Indigo's Reisman retiring, four directors leave

Nearly half the board of Indigo Books and Music Inc. is stepping down — including founder and executive chair Heather Reisman — in a stunning announcement that saw one director allege poor leadership and treatment.

Reisman, who built Indigo into Canada's biggest bookstore chain over a quarter-century, said she will retire this summer.

More immediate is the resignation of four other directors, including Dr. Chika Stacy Oriuwa. Appointed to the board in 2020, Oriuwa stepped down "because of her loss of confidence in board leadership and because of mistreatment," Indigo said in a release Wednesday.

The company provided no explanation for the departures of the three other directors — Frank Clegg, Howard Grosfield and Anne Marie O'Donovan — who collectively had served on the board for 40 years.

American Roger Reeves wins Griffin Poetry Prize

TORONTO - When Roger Reeves was named the winner of this year's Griffin Poetry Prize on Wednesday night, his head fell to his hands and his mind went blank.

The Austin, Texas-based writer was awarded the $130,000 honour at a ceremony in Toronto for his collection "Best Barbarian," which jurors praised for charting "ruptures and violences enacted across time and space — particularly against Black humanity."

It took a beat for thoughts to return to Reeves after he heard his book's name called out, he said. But when they did, he thought of his people.

"This is for my people. For my people, and for my people over the centuries, people that have fought, that have bled, that have worked, and people that have danced, that have enjoyed," he said in a brief interview after the ceremony.

Book Review: Elliot Page’s timely debut memoir ‘Pageboy’ is powerful, humanizing

"Pageboy" by Elliot Page (Flatiron Books)

Look, I admire Elliot Page as much as the next LGBTQ+ person and was swooning just as hard over this incredible cover and the mystery around the hush-hush book with the super-private advanced copies. In the end, it didn’t live up to the hype.

But it’s better that it doesn’t, because it humanizes the larger-than-life subject.

“Pageboy,” the highly anticipated debut memoir from trans actor, director and producer Elliot Page, begins by warning that the book follows a nonlinear narrative “because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear.” The story flits from memory to memory, following a thread that crisscrosses his life in all its comedy and tragedy and mundanity. There are awkward teen parties, wild surprise car-chase stunts and kids kicking the soccer ball around the yard.

Book Review: Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell pens powerful graphic memoir ‘The Talk’

“The Talk” by Darrin Bell (Henry Holt & Company)

Seeing the other children at the park playing with water guns, Darrin asks his mom for one. Her immediate response: No.

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Darrin Bell’s graphic memoir “The Talk” begins around age 6, when his mom first has “the talk” with him — the one about racism, fear and police brutality and the reason he can't have a realistic water gun like the other kids. It follows him into adulthood, when he is confronted with having the talk with his own son.

The result is a thought-provoking memoir beautifully rendered in expressive artwork for a powerful piece that’s easy to devour but harder to digest.

Book Review: ‘Mozart in Motion’ by Patrick Mackie seeks to bring composer to life in new ways

“Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces” by Patrick Mackie (Macmillan Publishers).

Writing a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nowadays is no easy task. The daunting list of predecessors, which spans centuries, who have already undertaken the assignment complicates any efforts to find unique angles and inroads through which to tell the composer’s story.

But Patrick Mackie exploits his background in both poetry and academia in an effort to bring Mozart to life in new ways.

In addition to relying on letters and extant accounts for “Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces,” Mackie also incorporates academic theory and philosophical reflections on how we collectively experience music today into his thematically organized biography. The result is still a familiar portrait of Mozart, but one that is painted in new colors.

Book Review: ‘George,’ a memoir by Frieda Hughes, is about saving and being saved by a wild bird

“George: A Magpie Memoir,” by Frieda Hughes (Avid Reader Press)

Frieda Hughes in an English poet and painter who has built a following on birding Instagram (@friedahughes) with her beguiling videos of owls. She has also written several children’s books and a weekly poetry column for The Times of London. Yet she has spent much of her life living in the shadow of her world-famous parents, the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

In her new book, “George: A Magpie Memoir,” her first work of nonfiction, Hughes recounts the nearly two years she spent caring for an injured baby magpie — a “tiny, feathered scrap” — at her ramshackle estate some 200 miles from London — and how it helped her come to terms with her traumatic legacy.

On one level, it is an expert bit of nature writing, akin to a David Attenborough documentary. But on another level, it is a psychologically profound investigation of how George, her other animals, and the extensive gardens she cultivates on an acre of land in the Welsh countryside give her the “stability and sense of permanence” that she lacked as a child.

How much of themselves do writers reveal in a poem?

TORONTO - All five poets shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize this year write in the first person, oftentimes about their lives. But they say it would be a mistake to take their work as non-fiction.

Below, The Canadian Press asked the nominees — along with the winner of the Griffin's First Canadian Book prize — to reflect on the role of the "self" in poetry.

Ada Limon, nominated for "The Hurting Kind"

The Canadian Press: How do you decide how much of yourself to show in a poem?

Pandemic pursuit of wonder delights

Subtitles do a lot of heavy lifting for authors of non-fiction. Though they dutifully wait their turn, making their appearance in self-effacingly small fonts, subtitles share what the would-be reader needs to know.

Beauty, joy found in encounters with nature

As even the longest life is short compared with that of the great, wheeling universe, Jean-François Beauchemin “strives to… balance this brevity… by way of joy… or otherwise the seeking of beauty.”

Courtroom thriller a mysterious masterclass

Seattle lawyer Keera Duggan reckons her zillionaire hunky client isn’t guilty, maybe, as she doggedly preps for her first murder trial... but he still gives her a case of the serious creeps.

Professor, student come to terms with love and loss in Kang’s new novel

Han Kang’s latest novel Greek Lessons is far more than a simple retelling of the age-old student-falls-in-love-with-their-professor trope. Instead, what she crafts is an intimate look into the lives of two people trying to find solace in the study of language as they navigate a world that is slowly slipping from their grip.

Set in Seoul (the city Kang calls home), a woman finds herself dealing with an egregious amount of loss. Her mother has recently passed, her ex-husband has gained full custody over her young son and she has lost her ability to speak. Having lost her speech once before as a teenager, and finding it returned to her by learning a new language, she attempts the same by joining a class on ancient Greek.

Her professor takes notice of her silence and solemn demeanour, reminded of a previous lover who was deaf. When his attempts to communicate with her through sign language fail, he seems to give up, though curiosity remains on either side: “There are times when they look at each other without speaking. Waiting for the lessons to begin… Little by little, his face became familiar to her,” Kang writes.

We learn that he too is experiencing a loss. That loss is of a strong cultural identity — his childhood having been split between South Korea and Germany — and the rapidly impending loss of his sight.

Métis women’s struggles span generations

Beautifully crafted and deeply moving, Manitoba-born, Newfoundland and Labrador-based Métis author Michelle Porter’s debut novel is a testament to the strength of Métis women.

Floridian trio look to right the wrongs of the past in Jones’ evocative new novel

Pebble & Dove is a story built around the generational relationships of women and the choices they make in attempting to right the wrongs of their mothers.

Canadian author Amy Jones’ third novel is told from the perspective of multiple characters, a narrative structure she also employed effectively in her 2016 debut We’re All In This Together and sophomore effort Every Little Piece of Me.

As in her earlier novels, Jones shows a particular mastery for setting a scene, bringing a Florida trailer park for retirees so vividly to life that the reader can feel the humidity, hear the cicadas and see the “chain restaurants and gun shops and laser-hair removal clinics… condo towers rising up between scrubs of palmettos, huge pines dripping with Spanish moss, vultures perched in their upper branches.”

Much of the action in the novel quirkily takes place in the Florida Keys aboard a 19th-century sailing ship turned into a tourist-trap aquarium, its main attraction a manatee named Pebble. (This appears to be loosely based on the real-life Miami Aquarium and Tackle Company and its manatee Snooty who, like Pebble, was born on a sailing ship converted into an aquarium in the 1930s and lived decades in captivity.)

Executive’s early plight in Sri Lanka influential

Every family’s legacy can be mixed, whether due to strained relationships, major or minor disagreements, external factors or some combination of issues. In his memoir Prisoner #1056: How I Survived War and Found Peace, Roy Ratnavel relates how his background as a Tamil man from Sri Lanka, and particularly his relationship with his father, influenced his later life and his determination to succeed in his new life.

Ratnavel grew up in Sri Lanka during a period of intense persecution of the Tamil people in that country. He became a political prisoner at the age of 17 before immigrating to Canada, where he worked at a variety of jobs before becoming an executive at CI International, Canada’s largest asset management company. Currently, he lives with his wife and son in Toronto. Prisoner #1056 is his first book.

In Prisoner #1056, Ratnavel tells the story of his early years in Sri Lanka where, as a teenager, he was rounded up together with other Tamils, taken to prison and tortured before being released three months later through the intervention of a family friend. The author’s father insisted on getting his son to Canada to give him a better life and the chance to flourish.

Only a short section of the book deals with the author’s imprisonment, but it establishes Ratnavel’s sense of obligation to work hard and thus justify his father’s decision. When he learned his father was shot and killed only days after Ratnavel’s departure, it gave the author an added incentive to do well in his new country.

Hanks’ colossal cast of characters provides inside look at movie magic

Chances are you’ve heard of Tom Hanks — movie actor, director, producer, global icon and collector of vintage typewriters. As it turns out, you can now add novelist to that list — actually, surprisingly good novelist.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Hanks’ second book (after his short-story collection, 2017’s Uncommon Type), is not without flaws, including a too-long title which, in a way, points to its excess — though the book holds many surprises.

There have been recent novels that weave together a myriad of characters over different time periods, such as Jennifer Egan’s excellent The Candy House, from last year. Hanks amps up the concept by dipping into the mindset of dozens of players. To say it’s an ensemble cast doesn’t do it justice.

Egan’s book followed minor characters and expanded their story by showing their lives and motivations. Hanks does a similar thing, but goes a bit too far. Upon meeting a new character, you start to worry if the next chapter will follow them back to conception, which in fact happens more than once.