As Adam Gopnik’s book Winter (and this year’s CBC/Massey Lectures) makes clear, winter is at once a season of struggle and joy. Yes winter is a period of sustained darkness and biting cold. But for Gopnik, who was born in Philadelphia but raised in Montreal, few images resonate more strongly than of kids playing hockey on frozen ponds as dusk falls on a cold December day or of scenes of families huddling by the fire, while frost builds on the windows.

Edmund Russell’s book, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth explores virtually every large scale human endeavour, and the evolutionary impacts not only on humans but on the natural world.

by Brian Fagan • Bloomsbury Press, 2011, 384 pp. This spring’s flooding of the Assiniboine River in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the Richelieu River in Quebec has thrust surrounding communities into crisis.

After a night spent alone in mid-May 1885, Louis Riel emerged from the wilderness and surrendered to Canadian military. He was the leader of the Métis rebellion that the government of Sir John A. McDonald was intent on crushing.

John Vaillant, Knopf Canada, 2010 • 329pp. The region is Primorye, located in Russia’s Far East. On a frigid day in the dead of winter, a man is returning to his cabin in the remote wilderness with his dog. The region is populated with Amur tigers, which have an awesome [...]

Siddhartha Mukherjee • Scribner, Toronto, 2010, 571pp. In 1961, the multi-drug therapy referred to as VAMP initially showed impressive signs of success in treating childhood leukemia. When given to patients, tumours receded, leukemia cells were reduced in the bone marrow and white blood cell counts returned to normal. Within months [...]

Medicine, like so many other features of modern life, has become exceedingly complex. This has far-reaching implications, not only for how we understand the world but also how we most effectively meet challenges such as those encountered in a field like medicine. Any attempt to respond to complexity will be necessarily multifaceted. One potentially effective tool is deceptively simple: a checklist. This is Dr. Atul Gawande’s thesis in The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. The very idea left me wondering if the book would be worth reading. After all, how can checklists help a hospital overwhelmed with desperately sick patients? How can a checklist help a surgeon when performing a delicate surgery?