Don Gillmor Bücher

The unbelievable birth of the pharmaceutical industry When Harold “Carload” Ritchie died in 1933, Time magazine’s obituary noted that “he had good claim to the proud title of ‘World’s Greatest Salesman.’” He was one of the richest men in Canada, and owned the largest sales network in the world. Yet little is known about him. He wasn’t part of the Canadian establishment, though the companies he came to own were more profitable than most of the country’s banks. He was born on Manitoulin Island, and in many ways, remaining on an island of his own making. Through Harold’s enigmatic life, we glimpse both the country in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the entertaining birth of the pharmaceutical industry.

The Governor General's Literary award-winning exploration of suicide in which one of Canada's most gifted writers attempts to understand why his brother took his own life. Which leads him to another powerful question: Why are boomers killing themselves at a far greater rate than the Silent Generation before them or the generations that have followed? In the spring of 2006, Don Gillmor travelled to Whitehorse to reconstruct the last days of his brother, David, a talented musician whose truck and cowboy hat had been found at the edge of the Yukon River. David's family, his wife and his friends had different theories about his disappearance. Some thought he had run away; some thought he'd met with foul play; but most believed that David, who at forty-eight was about to give up the night life for a day job, had intentionally walked into the water. Just as Don was about to paddle the river looking for traces, David's body was recovered. And Don's canoe trip turned into an act of remembrance and mourning. Though David could now be laid to rest, there was no rest for his survivors. In this tender, probing, surprising work, Don Gillmor helps those left behind understand why people kill themselves and how to live with the aftermath. And he asks why, for the first time, it's not the teenaged or the elderly who have the highest suicide rate, but the middle aged. Especially men.

In the midst of the hottest summer on record, a woman tests the increasing tension between our social contracts and our selves.At 49, Beatrice Billings is rudderless. Her marriage is stale, her relationship with her son Thomas is limited to text messages—hostile haikus that he sends from university—and she is the primary caregiver for her mother, who is in the early stages of dementia. She has a complicated relationship with her older sister Ariel, with whom she carries on ongoing arguments in her head. Bea laments the loss of momentum she remembers feeling in her thirties, when she and everyone she knew was busy buying houses, having children, and renovating kitchens. Now she is reflecting on her life, worried about her inability to memorize a simple yoga sequence, and about the fact that she enjoys the idea of many things more than the actual things themselves (teaching, reading, sex). When Bea finds that she has both a talent and a passion for picking locks, the sense of anticipation that had been missing from her life returns. Breaking into other people’s houses is something she’s good at: she is a quick study, subtle, discreet, and never greedy. It's a dangerous hobby that makes her feel alive—and so she begins the guilty analysis of other people’s lives, and eventually, her own.