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A Royal Air Force helicopter pilot fakes his own death to join a CIA paramilitary unit in this remarkable Cold War biography. RAF helicopter ace Terry Peet had a well-earned reputation for sheer guts. While in Malaya and Borneo, he cheated death time and again, earning a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. But Peet suddenly disappeared without trace—supposedly having drowned while scuba diving. Then, six years later, Peet reappeared. The media hailed him as a renegade hero when the story of his extraordinary double life was revealed. Peet had in fact been recruited by the CIA for clandestine paramilitary operations in the former Belgian Congo. He was then sent to Nigeria, where he led a UNICEF mission saving refugees from the Biafran War. Peet’s work with the CIA had the tacit approval of British Intelligence, but his departure from the RAF had to be covert. Yet none of this was mentioned in the summary presented at his court martial. Now Renegade Hero recounts the full story of the mysterious affair as told to the author by Peet himself.
The suspenseful true story of a love that defied Nazi oppression, and a harrowing journey to freedom. In 1945, Ditha Bruncel was living with her parents in the small town of Lossen, in Upper Silesia. Close Jewish friends had vanished, swastikas hung from every building, and neighbors were disappearing in the middle of the night. At the same time more than fifteen hundred British and Commonwealth airmen were being marched out of Stalag Luft VII, a POW camp in the same region. Twenty-three of these prisoners managed to escape from the marching column—and by chance hobbled into Lossen. One among them, Warrant Officer Gordon Slowey, was the man Ditha was destined to meet and fall in love with. Into Enemy Arms tells the extraordinary story of Ditha and the escaped POWs she helped save. Together, they embarked on a dangerous and daring flight out of Germany. As they faced exhaustion, hunger, extreme cold, and the constant risk of discovery, Ditha and Gordon’s love for one another intensified, and so did their determination to survive and escape.
A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world. The story of a boy and his best friend — a stuffed tiger — was a pitch-perfect distillation of the joys and horrors of childhood, and a celebration of imagination in its purest form. In Let’s Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin’s reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination — its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations — helped make Calvin and Hobbes North America’s last great comic strip.
The Peak: a university student newspaper with a hard-hitting mix of inflammatory editorials, hastily thrown-together comics and reviews, and a news section run the only way self-taught journalists know how—sloppily. Alex and Tracy are two of The Peak’s editors, staring down graduation and struggling to keep the paper relevant to an increasingly indifferent student body. But trouble looms large when a big-money free daily comes to the west-coast campus, threatening to swallow what remains of their readership whole. It’ll take the scoop of a lifetime to save their beloved campus rag … With savage wit, intoxicating energy, and a fine-tuned ear for the absurd, Michael Hingston drags the campus novel, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
The author examines the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip which is about a boy and his stuffed tiger best friend.
An up-close look at the rivalry between the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton Oilers, told from the perspective of those that were there. Sports writer and on-air personality Mark Spector pays tribute to the province's hockey heyday with a unique blend of humour and homage. "I hated every single guy on the Oilers, 'cause they all hated me." --Tim Hunter, the Calgary Flames In the 1980s, the province of Alberta was home to the two best hockey teams in the NHL. Aptly dubbed "Death Valley" due to the sheer talent and ability of its players, the province not only begat rivalry with other NHL teams, but also sparked fierce competition within its own borders. Thus began The Battle of Alberta, the hi...
Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby island of Redonda—where, with pomp and circumstance, he was declared the island’s king. A few years later, when Shiel set sail for a new life in London, his father gave him some advice: Try not to be strange. It was almost as if the elder Shiel knew what was coming. Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-...
Flynn hates the outdoors. Always has. He barely pays attention in his Outdoor Ed class. He has no interest in doing a book report on Lost in the Barrens. He doesn’t understand why anybody would want to go hiking or camping. But when he gets lost in the wilderness behind his parents’ friends’ house, it’s surprising what he remembers—insulate your clothes with leaves, eat snow to stay hydrated, build a shelter, eat lichen—and how hopelessly inept he is at survival techniques.
In Sweet Lechery, cultural journalist Jeet Heer offers a quirky collection of literary criticism that touches on a wide range of contemporary topics. From Margaret Atwood to Philip K. Dick, from Seth to Marshall McLuhan, Heer considers the literary and social contributions of canonical authors, artists, theorists and polemicists alike. Drawing from a variety of disciplines and genres, he links sex to economics, porn to high-brow literature, and tackles the oddball themes of cannibalism and vegetable sex in Canadian fiction. He examines the struggles of science fiction writers and the artistic opportunities of comic artists, weighing in on partisan politics for good measure. Rich with contextual detail and social commentary, these essays examine the cultural, historical and political forces that inform the books we read and write.
Intelligent clothing, superhero dictators, contagion-carrying computer games, cross-species reproduction... Welcome to the strange and startling world of Adam Marek; a menagerie of futuristic technology, sinister traditions and scientifically-grounded superpowers a place where the absurd and the mundane are not merely bedfellows, but interbreed. Pulsing at the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second collection is a single, unifying theme: a parent s instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child. Whether set amid unnerving visions of the near-future, or grounded in the domestic here-and-now, these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality, only the fantastically illogical can steel us against what ordinary life threatens.