Books 6-10 - DIY Decor - How-To

6 Canadian Art: From Its Beginnings to 2000 by Anne Newlands
(Firefly Books, 2002)
This essential reference guide to Canadian art contains information on 300 Canadian artists, from painters in oil and watercolour to sculptors and photographers. Newlands chose to arrange the artists alphabetically, each with more or less the same amount of space in the book, thereby giving no one artist, style or time period precedence over another. This dictionary-like structure makes the book difficult to sit and read, but ideal as a coffee table book -- consider leaving it open on a different page each day to offer a variety of artistic inspiration to your household and guests.

7 New Zealand: A Natural History by Tui De Roy and Mark Jones
(Firefly Books, 2006)
Due to its millennia-long geographical isolation from other landmasses and its lack of mammalian predators until the first arrival of humans about a thousand years ago, New Zealand contains a wealth of flora and fauna unseen elsewhere on the planet. Though many species -- such as the moa, a giant flightless bird, and the Haast's eagle, with its impressive 10-foot wing span -- have gone extinct since European settlers arrived, countless others remain, such as the kakapo, the world's heaviest parrot (which is also flightless) and the tuatara, a reptile that was a contemporary of the dinosaurs and is now the last of its kind. De Roy and Jones have combined their photographs of New Zealand's remarkable beauty with informative descriptions of its natural environment, creating a book that serves as a reminder of how fragile the planet's ecosystem really is.

8 Old Ontario Houses: Traditions in Local Architecture by Tom Cruickshank, with photographs by John de Visser
(Firefly Books, 2000)
Anyone who doubts that Ontario has its own unique architectural style will be persuaded otherwise after perusing this collection of photographs of more than 150 homes dating from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Addresses are varied -- from downtown Toronto to the shores of Lake Erie -- but what they share is the connection they give us to Ontario's past. The author, the editor of Harrowsmith Country Life magazine, found many of the featured houses through his travels along the province's back roads, and a number of them have never before been seen in print -- a testament to his devotion to the subject.

9 The World of the Polar Bear by Norbert Rosing
(Firefly Books, 2006)
The North is an enigmatic place to most Canadians, even foreign, with its vast, treeless spaces and unforgiving climate. It is also a significant place when it comes to global climate change -- it is the polar regions of the planet that are experiencing the biggest rises in temperature and changes to the landscape, threatening the very survival of the polar bear. Photographer Norbert Rosing has spent almost 20 years visiting the western shores of Hudson Bay and chronicling the lives of its animal inhabitants, not just the bears but also the foxes, hares, muskoxen, walruses and other creatures that share the land. This collection of photographs is an intimate portrayal of their existence through the seasons, from springtime mating to a winter on the Arctic ice, accompanied by explanations of how the bears survive and thrive in one of the harshest climates on Earth.

10 One People Many Journeys
(Lonely Planet, 2005)
This collection of images of everyday life across the globe aims to show, in the words of Lonely Planet co-founder Maureen Wheeler, that "what travel teaches us is that we are all essentially the same. There is not a 'them' and an 'us'; there is really only 'us.'" The stunning photographs capture humanity in all its variations and stages, from newborn babies in Australia and Uzbekistan to funerals in China, Indonesia and Nepal -- and all the events in between -- showing that we are, in fact one people, more similar than we are different.