Double Karma

Double Karma
Curiosity about his father’s homeland sends American photographer Min Lin to Burma to immerse himself in its culture and build his portfolio. But it’s 1988 and pro-democracy activists are trying to overthrow the military regime. Min gets caught up in the movement after falling in love with one of its leaders. When she’s arrested, Min flees to the jungle and, joining the rebels, comes face-to-face on the battlefield with a Burmese army captain who looks exactly like him. After an explosion kills his double, Min awakes in a hospital misidentified as a hero of the regime, causing him to pose as the dead soldier for his own survival. Escaping in 1990, he returns to Los Angeles, where he builds a ...
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The Trial of Pope Benedict

The Trial of Pope Benedict
  On February 28, 2013, Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign. In abandoning a role that nearly every one of his predecessors had seen as a calling from God to be heeded until death, Joseph Ratzinger, the man who became Benedict, also relinquished a controversial religious career in which he was largely responsible for the Catholic Church’s prodigious troubles: his scorched-earth assault on modernity and the world of ideas destroyed any hope of progress in the Church while leaving a trail of shattered lives in its wake. Thanks to his antediluvian teachings about human sexuality, bioethics, and Original Sin, Ratzinger helped turn the Church into a reactionary breeding ground for ultra-conservative orthodoxy. Along the ...
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The Rice Queen Diaries

The Rice Queen Diaries
In this moving autobiography, Daniel Gawthrop writes about the politics and pleasures of being a self-identified “rice queen”: a gay man who is attracted to Asians. Navigating through the jungles of western cities like London and Vancouver, the humid streets of Bangkok and Saigon, and the dimly lit recesses of personal memory, Gawthrop explores the multicultural minefields of sexuality and culture as he articulates the manners and contradictions of his desires, and where they take him. Evoking the themes of Edward Said’s Orientalism, The Rice Queen Diaries  is as much an intimate statement about culture and otherness as it is about gay desire. Traversing three continents, these diaries are a personal reckoning, a bold coming to terms with the nuances ...
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Vanishing Halo

Vanishing Halo
Encircling the northern hemisphere like a giant green halo, the boreal forest plays a crucial role in protecting us from global warming. Its peat bogs absorb carbon dioxide and purify the air we breathe. But the forest is disappearing. Veteran journalist and author Daniel Gawthrop reveals the array of wildlife, plants and peoples of the boreal forest. He exposes the logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, and manufacturing that are devastating the forest from Canada to Siberia and turning it from the world’s largest absorber of carbon dioxide into a producer of carbon dioxide. As dire as the situation is, it is not too late. Gawthrop introduces the strategies that are driving sustainable development. As well, he appraises the most ...
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Highwire Act

Highwire Act
Mike Harcourt was determined to put his own moderate stamp on the new NDP government that succeeded Bill VanderZalm’s scandal-ridden, confrontational regime. From his first day in office, Harcourt worked hard to strike a balance between his critics on the left, who pushed for an ambitious program of change, and the party’s traditional enemies on the right, for whom anything the NDP did was too much, too soon. Highwire Act examines the NDP’s record on the economy, the environment, health care, resource issues, and aboriginal land claims—and in the battle for the hearts and minds of B.C.’s voters. Highwire Act contains the most complete and up-to-date account of the Nanaimo Commonwealth Holding Society scandal that brought Harcourt down, as well ...
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Affirmation

Affirmation
“Perhaps you feel there’s enough information about AIDS in the popular press, but we’re going to be approaching this from a different point of view. I’m going to be introducing you to someone with AIDS to help provide a name, a face, and an identity to this disease. The person I’m going to introduce you to is myself. I’m a doctor, but I’m also a patient—a patient with AIDS.” As Peter Jepson-Young introduced himself to the dinner-hour TV news audience, nobody foresaw that his AIDS Diary would become a two-year, 111-episode series that would bring him worldwide recognition, including an Oscar nomination, as ‘Dr. Peter,’ the charming and articulate public educator on AIDS and gay rights. Daniel Gawthrop interviewed Peter ...
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