Peter Johnston, retired ambassador, tells a story of five years in the Canadian Army in the Second World War, much of them spent as a sergeant in counter-intelligence, including close to two years rounding up amateur spies and other nasties in Italy. He writes of later years in the Canadian foreign service, some of them working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and many of them engaged in examining assessments of intelligence during the Cold War, entailing close contacts with the British and American intelligence authorities. He also writes of his life as an ambassador in Indonesia and of his subsequent adventures as an elections monitor in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Angola. Reviewing Johnston's book in the November issue of the Rockcliff News, Charles King, one-time Chief of the Ottawa Bureau of Southam News Services and former Associate Editor of the Ottawa Citizen, spoke of the author as "a snoop with a difference", as "an unconventional outsider looking in on the refinements of a diplomatic life", as "an intelligence officer in the dim, secret world of counter-espionage" who, "in all his adventures was sustained by an impish sense of the ridiculous nature of his role". Similar reactions were expressed in Bout de Papier, the quarterly journal of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers. David Peel, retired ambassador and Inspector General of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service 1994-98, began his review by expressing his "big disappointment, for which you should prepare yourself, when you get to page 164 of this little book: it ends. Far too soon." Among Peel's comments on Johnston's experiences in the Second World War, he noted that, "he makes his adventures in the long advance of the Canadians up the boot of Italy sound funny, ridiculous and touching but they give a vivid picture of war and the men who fought in it". On his life as a diplomat and civil servant, Peel suggested that "His age and experience gave him a perspective that other newcomers lacked and his stories and comments on the situations and people he encountered are, while generally kind, great fun and sometimes scathing-the sort of thing we all wish we'd had the courage to say at the time". Peel concluded his summary of the book's contents by referring back to his opening remark, that "at page 164, that's just how I felt about his book-reluctant to let go".

A collection of short stories exploring similar themes of escape, self-realization and fear, as well as the dark and sometimes surreal aspects of human nature.

In the summer of 1971 Frank Gohlke moved with his wife and young daughter from Middlebury, Vermont to Minneapolis, Minnesota. His vocation as a photographer had begun four years prior, but he had yet to define the subject that would occupy him for the next 45 years: the landscapes of ordinary life. The three bodies of work brought together in Speeding Trucks and Other Follies were all made between Gohlke's arrival in Minneapolis and the end of 1972 when he began photographing grain elevators, a project that first established his renown. In different ways these early series obliquely describe Gohlke's process of adjustment to his new surroundings. The "Speeding Trucks" photos of the first section began when Gohlke noticed how the shadows of the elm trees that once lined most Minneapolis streets were momentarily materialized on the bodies of passing trucks. The travel trailers in the second section were all found in a Minnesota State Park on one of the family's infrequent camping trips, while late-night rambles through Gohlke's Minneapolis neighborhood led organically to his series of dramatic night pictures in the last section. Notwithstanding their various subject matter, Gohlke's photos in this book collectively perform a kind of timeless alchemy on the everyday stuff of visual experience. Looking at these photos, it's hard not to believe that things really look like that; but we know they don't. In the interstice between the picture's testimony and the evidence of our senses is where my photos reside. Frank Gohlke

The Midnight Sons ~ Men as Wild and Rugged as The Last Frontier Itself Five brothers risk their lives to rescue those caught in the death grip of the Alaska wilderness…and find their hearts in danger of falling for women as tough as the Land of the Midnight Sun. The siren call of Alaska’s untamed wilderness, vast mountain ranges, and majestic glaciers draw thrill-seekers from around the globe. But with more unsolved missing person cases than anywhere else in the world, the Alaska Triangle has an ominous reputation. Enter the Midnight Sons, a team that risks their own lives to rescue those in peril. Being a hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, though. The pay sucks, as does the fact that the team leaders have to be ready to spring into action 24/7, 365 days a year—a lifestyle not conducive to a healthy love life. Worse, while the brothers are experts in their individual fields, they each harbor inner demons and secrets that threaten to tear their family apart… and jeopardize any chance of finding the women who could complete them. Book One: Sam’s Folly When a bigwig fight promoter needs someone to search for his missing fiancée, he hires expert tracker Sam Belgarde and his search dogs. Sam is more than a little reluctant. His family’s company, Search and Rescue Alaska, is in financial trouble, though, so if searching for a spoiled socialite will save it, then he’s willing to break the rules—just this once. After witnessing a murder, Nora Molina needs to get away—fast—and her best hope to escape without her passport is Alaska. A native of Argentina, Nora’s accustomed to harsh winters and high elevation, so she gets more than a little irritated when some tracker thinks she needs rescuing. Even if he is get-out sexy. And even if he’s the guy she stood up before leaving town. It’s going to be a long few days. When an unexpected storm rolls in, Sam and Nora find themselves in each other’s arms—to keep warm. Things get a little too hot when it’s clear someone wants the two of them to stay lost—permanently.

A luminous novel-funny and moving in equal measure-that shines with the author's unique talents Jacob's Folly is a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book, brimful of sparkling, unexpected characters, that takes on desire, faith, love, acting-and reincarnation. In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jew, a peddler of knives, saltcellars, and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, he is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can. More than two hundred years later, Jacob is amazed to find himself reincarnated as a fly in the Long Island suburbs of twenty-first-century America, his new life twisted in ways he could never have imagined. But even the tiniest of insects can influence the turning of the world, and thanks to his arrival, the lives of a reliable volunteer fireman and a young Orthodox Jewish woman nursing a secret ambition will never be the same. Through the unique lens of Jacob's consciousness, Rebecca Miller explores change in all its different guises-personal, spiritual, literal. The hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, the collision of fate and free will: Miller's world-which is our own, transfigured by her clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising wit-comes brilliantly to life in the pages of this profoundly original novel.