Take Me Outside: Running Across the Canadian Landscape that Shapes Us (by Colin Harris, Rocky Mountain Books, 2021). Colin Harris, an environmental educator living in Banff, ran across Canada to initiate Take Me Outside, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging youth to explore the outdoors and connect with nature. His book of the same name chronicles the nine-month, 7,600 km journey, in which he visited 80 schools and gave presentations to 20,000 students. “Our land is the common tie that binds us together as Canadians,” he writes, after the trip is done. “If we want the story of our Canadian identity to persist, we must lead the younger generations by example” and find “a balance between time spent in the virtual world and time in our wild spaces.”
Thief of Reason (by Judy J. Johnson, Iguana Books, 2021). Mount Royal University professor emerita of psychology Judy J. Johnson’s non-fiction book What’s So Wrong With Being Absolutely Right focussed on dogmatism, “the arrogant voice of certainty that closes the mind, damages relationships and threatens peaceful coexistence on this planet.” Her debut novel, Thief of Reason, tackles the same subject, but this time from within a dysfunctional family in Calgary. In the novel’s opening scene, the father, Dick, aggressively rants his political opinions during a holiday dinner. It does not go well. Trauma ensues. It’s a familiar scene. As the epigraph by Charles Taylor suggests, from the political realm to the domestic, “understanding the ‘other’ will pose the 21st century’s greatest social challenge.”
