After the success of The Music And Your Brain, finalist for the 2019 Prix Hubert-Reeves (Grand Public) and the Prix Opus, Michel Rochon is back with a new book that examines neuroscience and current affairs with fresh eyes. What happens inside our heads when love drives us beyond reason and sense? Or when a sense of heightened animosity pushes a person towards terrorism and delirium? The answer is... pretty much the same thing! How can we counteract the brain’s natural mechanisms—and should we? By seeking to better understand them and banking on our natural empathy, argue recent studies in neuroscience.

MICHEL ROCHON is a science and medical journalist, lecturer, guest speaker and presenter. He has worked for several news teams at CBC/Radio-Canada.

How difficult can it be to separate truth from lies? In the age of misinformation and fake news, when social media can spread rumours at frightening speed, very. To help the public make sense of things, the work of journa- lists is more important than ever. Yet sensationalism, time constraints and competition for clicks have driven media outlets to generate an avalanche of mistakes and misunderstandings. How can we learn to sort the wheat from the chaff? 

More than 80 universal topics, including aluminum and vaccines, GMOs, daily plastic use, climate change, autism and pesticides, the impact of polling on election outcomes, our pets’ carbon footprint and the supposed virtues of omega-3s, all controversial subjects that raise many questions. This book takes the time to deconstruct myths and deliver the necessary nuances to set the record straight. Even if it means confronting notions already well formed in the minds of the public and other journalists.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CLICHE is a journalist and has been a science columnist for the daily newspaper Le Soleil and magazine Québec Science for over ten years. His first book, Science, From Your Base- ment to the Stars, was published with Éditions Multimondes.

Hans Selye is the man who discovered stress. “Everyone looked sick.” Young Hans Selye, a student at the time, makes this naïve—yet obvious—observation as he studies the waiting room of a medical clinic. If the patients aren’t sick for the same reasons, he wonders, then why do symptoms such as joint pain or gastrointestinal issues all seem to overlap? Step into the fraught world of Selye’s research to better understand the bitterness that will result from his fruitless attempts at capturing a Nobel Prize. Watch as laboratory rats are shaken by spasms, listen to the gong that punctuates days of experimentation and attend the meeting with French doctor Henri Laborit.

MATHIEU-ROBERT SAUVÉ is a journalist and essayist. His work has appeared in Forum, L’actualité, Le Devoir and Québec Science. He has also published a dozen titles, including Dr Stanley Vollant, my Innu Journey and Survive : Evolution in a Wink with Éditions MultiMondes.

A powerful, effective plea to reconsider our approach to saving endangered species. The Last Caribou is a return to the roots of evolutionary biology, along-side naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace and geographer Pierre Kropotkine. An urgent, accessible text for our time, it addresses current municipal, regional and national issues of land management. These days, woodland caribou and beluga whales like to keep a low pro- file. When an entire species is wiped out, it takes with it a particular way of using the Earth and disrupts the organization of all living matter it touches. Forever.

MICHEL LEBOEUF is a biologist and spent ten years as editor-in-chief of the Quebec journal Nature sauvage. He has written over a dozen books and was twice awarded the prix Hubert-Reeves for best popular science book in Quebec.

Created for young readers (6 years +), The Atomic Neurons series includes 10 books featuring the endearing characters Charlotte, Alice, Jules, and Léon, who help explain the remarkable answers behind everyday phenomena. Why does my bike rust? Why is there static electricity in my hair? With more than 31,500 copies sold, this award-winning series (Hubert-Reeves 2018 award) is an essential tool for educational development that opens students up to the world and provides an initial contact with science. 

“The books explain many natural events and offer basic science experiments that can be carried out at home or at school. The explanations are brilliant, the characters entertaining.”—Mitsou Magazine