When Richard Stursberg took over as head of English services at the CBC in July 2004, he was determined to set a new course for the Mother Corp’s television operations. As far as he was concerned, CBC TV was plagued by elitism, mediocrity and, worst of all, indifference to its audience. Stursberg launched a new strategy to attract viewers by providing programming that was above all else entertaining. “There would be only one measure for success: audiences,” he writes in his new memoir, The Tower of Babble: Sins, Secrets and Successes Inside the CBC. “Everything would be pinned on rebuilding the audiences.”

Tree planting is so much more than just a profession. It is an identity, a lifestyle and a responsibility. A select few people are built for tree planting life, which requires the physical and mental stamina to endure the elements, work long hours of monotonous labour, face insects and wildlife of all sizes and numbers, leave home for long periods of time and live with the bare necessities. Perceived as a bad dream to many, it is the unique and coveted life of tree planters, of which author Charlotte Gill is one.

Eating Dirt is the veteran tree planter's homage to not only planting life, but to the larger context in which deforestation and reforestation take place. It is also a journey through her planting career as it comes near to its bitter-sweet end.

There's a grassroots campaign under way to move copies of Tony Blair's memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, from the biography to the crime sections of bookstores. I trust that's true crime and not mystery, because the 700-page reflections of the former British PM who infamously stood "shoulder-to-shoulder" with George W. Bush contain precious few twists or unexpected insights. No mea culpa here.

Considering that Blair's journey begins with the whole-scale rebranding of the Labour Party and its landslide 1997 victory, then declines slowly and steadily through the Iraq War disaster, the duel for power with Gordon Brown, and finally the bursting of the neoliberal bubble, the book is remarkably strident and unapologetic.

The day was ending softly, a light breeze was blowing, which refreshed us after the suffocating midday heat. I spread a small kilim on the veranda at the back of the garden and sat there with the children, watching the magnificent colours of the sky. Houd was crawling after a toy, trying to grasp it. Barâa was playing with a collection of little plastic dinosaurs. Their names were a mystery to me, but she knew every one of them by their shape. When I was her age, dinosaurs didn't even have a place in my imagination. Instead, my brother and I played with paper airplanes or balls, or spent hours playing "school." My brother, Mourad, was now living in Hammamet, a small tourist town sixty kilometres from Tunis. He was a mathematics professor at a preparatory school for engineers.