A dazzling tour of the fifty best and most important Grateful Dead concerts A Grateful Dead concert, argues Ray Robertson, is life: alternately compelling and lackluster; familiar and foreign; occasionally sublime and sometimes insipid. And usually all in the same show. Although the Grateful Dead stopped the same day Jerry Garcia’s heart did, what the band left behind is the next best thing to being there in the third row. Courtesy of their unorthodox early decision to record every one of their concerts, it's now possible to follow the band’s evolution (and devolution) through nearly thirty years of shows, from the R&B-based garage band at the beginning, to the jazz-rock conjurers at their creative peak, to the lumbering, MIDI-manacled monolith of their decline. In All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, Robertson listens to and writes about fifty of the band’s ’s most important and memorable concerts in order to better understand who the Grateful Dead were, what they became, and what they meant—and what they continue to mean. 

A radical revaluation of how contemporary society perceives death-and an argument for how it can make us happy. "He who would teach men to die would teach them to live," writes Montaigne in Essais, and in How to Die: A Book about Being Alive, Ray Robertson takes up the challenge. Though contemporary society avoids the subject and often values the mere continuation of existence over its quality, Robertson argues that the active and intentional consideration of death is neither morbid nor frivolous, but instead essential to our ability to fully value life. How to Die is both an absorbing excursion through some of Western literature's most compelling works on the subject of death as well as an anecdote-driven argument for cultivating a better understanding of death in the belief that, if we do, we'll know more about what it means to live a meaningful life.

Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man's reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life. What decades of rent increases and declining readership couldn't do, a pandemic finally did: Phil Cooper has reluctantly closed his secondhand bookstore and moved his business online. Smoking too much pot and listening to too much Grateful Dead, he suspects that he's overdue when it comes to understanding the bigger picture of who he is and what we're all doing here. So he's made another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Thankfully, he meets Caroline, a fellow book lover who agrees to join him on his trek through the best of what's been thought and said. But Caroline is on her own path, one that compels Phil to rethink what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century. In Estates Large and Small Ray Robertson renders one man's reckoning with both wry humour and tender joy, reminding us of what it means to live, love, and, when the time comes, say goodbye.

"God and whiskey have got me where I am. Too little of the one, too much of the other." David King, Chatham, Canada, 1895.

Born a slave in 1847, but raised as a free man on the world-renowned, African-American Elgin Settlement near present-day Chatham, Ontario, David King is a man whose life has been defined by his violent rebellion against the very person who freed him the Reverend William King.

Far from the pulpit he was intended to fill as the Reverend King's anointed successor, David has lost his faith in God and humanity. He has also turned his back on both his past and his own people by abandoning the Elgin Settlement for nearby Chatham after a final, shattering confrontation with the Reverend King. Undoubtedly, the most unconventional man in town, David is also thanks to his illegal after-hours tavern, Sophia's, and his highly lucrative grave robbing business one of Chatham's richest citizens, white or black, and certainly its best read. Triggered by the news of the elderly Reverend King's death, the middle-aged David is compelled to revisit a past he thought he left behind, but which as evidenced by his inability to embrace the happiness he so dearly earned he clearly has not.

Ranging over the early years of the pioneering Elgin Settlement, David's wild, whiskey-fueled early years in Chatham as a factory worker and apprentice grave-robber, and his day-to-day life with his ex-prostitute German lover in present-day, 1895 Chatham, "David" is a portal to a fascinating, if mostly unknown piece of Canadian history, as well as, the story of one man's search for wisdom, peace, and forgiveness."

The "heart and soul" of almost all relational database programs is the B-Tree algorithm. In fact may programmers describe a relational database as a B-Tree program with supporting code that simply delivers the query to the B-Tree or displays the results from the B-Tree. The beauty of this book is that it describes in great detail with lots of diagrams and charts exactly how a B-Tree works. It is one of the clearest explanations on the subject existing and is extremely useful for any person or classroom that is investigating databases. The number of illustrations in this book are too numerous to list. Diagrams are given showing every major step taken in writing a B-Tree. The diagrams also show exactly how searches are done. Flow charts are also presented showing how the B-Tree algorithm works. Tables are presented showing the performance of the B-Tree. Code is listed for an entire B-Tree program written in simple DOS based BASIC and it is inspected and laboriously explained line-by-line.