their frustration over North Korea's impenetrability, they still manage to carve a few human moments out of the rigid experience. Whether musing about Kim Il-sung's cult of personality or relating a particularly North Korean response to food poisoning, Bärtås and Ekman are wonderfully entertaining and frequently insightful. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Discover: This account of a trip to North Korea covers a range of topics, including the film industry and the plight of political prisoners.

House of Anansi Press,
$16.95,
paperback, 9781770898806

Children's & Young Adult

Some Kind of Courage

by Dan Gemeinhart

Some Kind of Courage
by
Dan Gemeinhart

Joseph Johnson may be only 12 years old, but he "ain't no boy." He's lost his mother and sister to typhoid fever, his father to a wagon accident, and his beloved pony, Sarah, to a conniving "old cuss"who sold her to a horse dealer. Indeed, "sadness can be a storm that's easy to get lost in." But Sarah is all Joseph has left in the world, and Joseph is determined to get his pony back, even if he has to take on a raging grizzly, white-water rapids and a cold-blooded murderer to do it. Dan Gemeinhart (The Honest Truth) packs nonstop thrills, chills and spills into Some Kind of Courage. Set in 1890, in the post-Gold Rush American West, the novel captures a real and dramatic era, a time of horse thieves and gunslingers, and a time when Chinese laborers were often despised and persecuted.

Joseph joins forces with a Chinese boy named Ah-Kee who is on his own mysterious odyssey--he speaks no English, so can't