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Thoughtful, insightful and compelling, Granite is a well-executed imagining of what happened to cause the collapse of the civilisation of Great Zimbabwe (called Zimba Remabwe in the book). While adult historical fiction has experienced a recent resurgence in interest, narratives are mostly drawn from European history; Granite is refreshingly African, illuminating a relatively unexplored area in fiction. It also shifts fictionalised history away from the European centre: in the story, Zimba Remabwe exists as a sophisticated African city state well integrated with the rest of the mid-fifteenth-century world. It is a world in which Arab scholars travel from China and India to Europe and Britain, filing their chronicles in the revered library of Timbuktu."

Dance Legacies of Scotland compiles a collage of references portraying percussive Scottish dancing and explains what influenced a wide disappearance of hard-shoe steps from contemporary Scottish practices. Mats Melin and Jennifer Schoonover explore the historical references describing percussive dancing to illustrate how widespread the practice was, giving some glimpses of what it looked and sounded like. The authors also explain what influenced a wide disappearance of hard-shoe steps from Scottish dancing practices. Their research draws together fieldwork, references from historical sources in English, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and insights drawn from the authors’ practical knowledge of dances. They portray the complex network of dance dialects that existed in parallel across Scotland, and share how remnants of this vibrant tradition have endured in Scotland and the Scottish diaspora to the present day. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Dance and Music and its relationship to the history and culture of Scotland.

Once home to over 60 flourishing villages, Middlesex County, in the heart of southwestern Ontario, has a rich history just waiting to be discovered. Anthropologist and local history enthusiast Jennifer Grainger has, through extensive research and much personal exploration, produced a valuable document chronicling the "rise and fall" of these pioneering settlements, truly the foundation of all that exist in the area today. Nostalgia buffs, armchair adventurers, genealogists and curious daytrippers alike will welcome the arrival of this timely publication with its many fascinating stories and countless visual reminders of the past.

During the tumultuous formative years of the Canadian welfare state, many women rose through the ranks of the federal civil service to oversee the massive recruitment of Canadian women to aid in the Second World War. Ironically, it became the task of these same female mandarins to encourage women to return to the household once the war was over. Pick One Intelligent Girl reveals the elaborate psychological, economic, and managerial techniques that were used to recruit and train women for wartime military and civilian jobs, and then, at war's end, to move women out of the labour force altogether. Negotiating the fluid boundaries of state, community, industry, and household, and drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Jennifer A. Stephen illustrates how women's relationships to home, work, and nation were profoundly altered during this period. She demonstrates how federal officials enlisted the help of a new generation of 'experts' to entrench a two-tiered training and employment system that would become an enduring feature of the Canadian state. This engaging study not only adds to the debates about the gendered origins of Canada's welfare state, it also makes an important contribution to Canadian social history, labour and gender studies, sociology, and political science.

Lisa thinks that she has a good agreement with her boyfriend, Mark, to keep them both safe from HIV and AIDS. But then Lisa discovers a love letter written by Mark to another girl called Pearl. Has Mark decided to look for excitement elsewhere?