The Hand that Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender - David Shackleton,

The Hand that Rocks the World: An Inquiry Into Truth, Power and Gender, by Ottawa's well-known men's advocate David Shackleton, is one ambitious undertaking. Shackleton’s goal is to lay the groundwork for a new social science discipline, one that will guide humanity to truth and wisdom. According to Shackleton, once this innovative psychosocial regimen is established and put into practice, it will lead to -- among other previously unattainable accomplishments -- the eradication of the psychological blocks that prevent men and women from understanding and accepting one another other fully. Applied properly, the new social science will ensure both sides learn precisely how the two groups can fit snugly together into the same world, and live happily ever after.

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town - Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer's most recent book, Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, published in 2015, helped this reader (your humble book reviewer) to partially understand the rape culture that has gripped university and college campuses across North America. I first came across the term "rape culture" in 2014 when the University of Ottawa suspended its hockey team after a complaint of sexual assault involving some of its players. The accusation was commenced while the team was playing against Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. A week later, a student union rep got on the radio and started ranting against the "rape culture" in universities across Canada.

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

     Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a gutsy, smart and beautiful woman. Moral, sincere and extremely courageous, she wowed the world in 2007 with the publication of her life story in Infidel: My Life, a New York Times runaway bestseller. Infidel chronicles her extraordinary and terrifying personal experiences from the time she was a child growing up as a Muslim in clan-based, war-torn and impoverished Mogadishu. The victim of female genital mutilation, she survived family beatings, war and famine under several different African and Middle-Eastern dictators. Covered from head to toe, she lived as an ultra-religious young woman in Kenya. Ultimately, she fled to Holland as a refugee to avoid an arranged marriage. And these were her easy trials!

Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths about Marijuana - Kevin Sabet

Published in 2013, it would be a mistake for present day governments to ignore Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths about Marijuana. It was written by Kevin A. Sabet, an assistant professor of psychiatry -- though not a medical doctor, his detractors remind us -- and Director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and of Oxford University, where he received his Doctorate in social policy, Sabet is enemy number one to the frenzied, far-flung and demanding hurry-up-and-legalize-marijuana industry.

Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice - Ann Rule

Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice, a strangely-named book written by the recently deceased and prolific true crime writer Ann Rule, is the tragic and torturous story of an exceedingly unhappy and violent family. Don't expect much of a happy ending, but (spoiler alert) there are a couple of courageous survivors. For this two-doctor family that starts out with so much promise and produces such wonderful, healthy children, it ends up imploding on a scale almost never seen in the suburbs.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

This 2010 New York Times Bestseller is a painful look back at some of humanity's most violent years, precipitated by two of history's most diabolical tyrants.
    Though not ground breaking in terms of revealing new pivotal historical facts, Timothy Snyder's five-hundred page volume is a unique and important study of the overlapping times of Hitler and Stalin from 1933 to 1945. In those twelve short years, in the "Bloodlands" -- the area that extends, Snyder explains, from central Poland to western Russia, through the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States -- murder-by-government took on proportions difficult to imagine, when fourteen million innocents perished, many as a consequence of nothing more sinister than simple government regulation.

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

At first I had to force myself to continue to read The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1926. Over and over again as I ploughed through scenes of the post-war “Lost Generation” drinking too much in Paris nightclubs or, around the middle of the book, fishing in the Pyrenees, I asked myself, and sometimes my friends: “So, what’s the deal with Hemmingway, anyway?”
     Spoiler alert: I ultimately fell madly in love with the book. Here’s an example of the kind of “Iceberg Theory” discussions Hemmingway used in the novel, with some very minor editing, and the teensy amount of non-dialogue phraseology eliminated by me:
     “Hope I gave him the right address.”
     “You probably did.”
     “Go on.”
     “Let’s eat.”
     “Where will we go.”
     “Want to eat on the island?”
     “Sure.”

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

The book War and Peace, when it is talked about at all these days, it seems to me anyway, is referred to because it is so long. It’s often used as a joke to denounce someone’s long-windedness: “Hey, we’re just your lawyers, so you don’t have to give us War and Peace when you summarize your marital problems for these divorce proceedings”, or, “Hey, I’m expecting a brief history of the Nigerian Civil War for this essay assignment; War and Peace has already been written.”