War in Ukraine has been referred to as a “primer” on the Russia-Ukraine war, and that is the right description for it. Yes, “primer” has connotations of something a bit too basic and boring, but this book is not boring; it is concise, to the point, and the historical material it covers casts serious doubts on the mainstream interpretation of events.

These struggles in the remote corners of our country are consequential and often we in the south hear very little about what actually happened, when we hear anything at all. Thanks to this book the story of the so far successful battle against uranium mining in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut has a compelling container.

Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté’s new book, The Myth of Normal, is a rich examination of the conditions that lead to individual illness and the cultural normalization of stress, alienation, and disenfranchisement. The book questions and dismantles notions of ‘normalcy,’ interrogating the factors behind the rise of what Maté calls trauma-related illnesses.

The Beaver Lake Cree nation’s battle over Treaty rights and industrial overdevelopment is one of the core stories featured in Toronto publisher Between the Lines’ The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. According to the authors, it illustrates both where the climate justice movement needs to go and, at least partially, how we get there.

What is so outrageous about Churchill’s crimes is not simply the crimes themselves, but that they should have almost entirely been forgotten or, by many, not known to begin with. And this seems not to be because of hidden documents or destroyed evidence but rather, ideological hegemony that makes silence on certain well documented things extremely easy.

In his new book, Jonathan Crary’s overarching argument is that the internet complex is undergirded by a globe-spanning system of social, economic, and political organization that he labels “scorched earth capitalism”—essentially the neoliberal, technoscientific model exported around the world during the “globalization” era of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

With Triangle of Sadness, the hierarchies of beauty and their relation to asset-backed power take centre stage. Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning film is a sharp mix of social satire and black comedy set onboard a luxury cruise. The director goes about about blowing up the superyacht his characters inhabit, and seeing what (and who) falls overboard.

The ways in which the Toronto power elite has exploited the cautionary tale of European urban crime and disease as a means of managing the threat of resistance are laid bare in Parastou Saberi’s book, Fearing the Immigrant: Racialization and Urban Policy in Toronto. Saberi is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.

Joe Burns’ new book, Class Struggle Unionism, reads like pamphlet, with a clear call to transform the union movement. The model for change is one that has deep roots in the radical socialist and anarchist traditions of working class movements from early in the 20th century that has continuously raised it head over the past 120 years.

When we imagine sustainable and socially equitable futures, agriculture must be front and centre of the program. It is in the agricultural realm that questions of land and resource distribution are fought, and it is where historical and ongoing battles between advocates of capitalist labour relations and those of independent self-provisioning clash.