Come Walk With Me
Publisher: John Kitchen$9.50This book is a descriptive and informative account the author’s backpacking experiences, complemented by nearly 300 coloured photographs.Walk with the author around Newfoundland visiting outport settlement; photographing caribou in wilderness areas; and hiking the 909 kilometers accross the province.Experience, also his adventures in England as ge wanders the designated trails and and pathways all the way from the Scottish border, sotuyh to the English Channel.His trips to aboriginal areas of Nprthern Ontario and Manitoba, too, will give you viewings of some amazing scenery.A quick flip through the book will show you what to expect and enjoy. Happy reading!
Women Who Care
Nili Kaplan-Myrth, MD, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and physician. She has expertise in determinants of health, women’s health, disability studies and Indigenous self-determination in health, with a strong commitment to action-based qualitative research, feminism and social justice. Her three wonderful children, her friends and family haven’t let her quit medicine yet.
Lori Hanson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan with interests in community activism, gender and development, health equity, sexual and reproductive health, health promotion, and transformative education. In her spare time, she raises her two sets of twins and works with a great group of community and university women involved in the Saskatoon Women’s Community Coalition.
Patricia Thille, BSc (PT), MA, is a former physical therapist and health services researcher. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Calgary and balances her academic work with community outreach as a healthy sexuality educator with Venus Envy.
Embedded on the Home Front
Publisher: Heritage Group Distribution$19.95Home front. It’s hard to separate that expression from war. In the First and Second World Wars, the home front was a clear entity and location: if you weren’t on the frontlines, you were on the home front. But during current times of peacekeeping, peacemaking and armed interventions, the notion of home front seems to comprise only those who are in some way directly affected by the military: family and friends of soldiers, returning soldiers or ex-soldiers—an invisible group camouflaged by everyday jobs and activities.
Editors Barb Howard and Joan Dixon have compiled insightful essays and reflections from 14 writers, including Melanie Murray, Scott Waters, Ryan Flavelle and Chris Turner. All have found themselves, at one time or another, embedded on the home front. And even though each experience is unique and comes from a single perspective, common motifs surface: family, fate, death and memory. This anthology captures triumphs, incredible fortitude and humour, often in the face of grief, as well as the complicated logic, fears, anger and other everyday realities that are part of home-front life.
The Fisher Queen
Publisher: Heritage Group Distribution$17.95It’s 1981, and Sylvia Taylor has signed on as rookie deckhand on a wallowy 40-foot salmon troller. Looking forward to making money for university, she is determined to master the ins and outs of fishing some of the most dangerous waters in the world: the Graveyard of the Pacific. For four months, she helps navigate the waters off northern Vancouver Island, learning the ways of fisherfolk and the habitat in which they breathe, sleep and survive.
The politics of selling fish, the basics of tying gear, near-death experiences, endless boat troubles, the emotional perils of sharing cramped quarters—all are part of a steep and unforgiving learning curve. Taylor’s story captures the reality of life on a fishboat and documents the end of an era, a time when the fishing industry wasn’t yet marred by unchecked overfishing or hyper-regulation. Her lyrical, simple prose explores the tight-knit relationship of fishers with the west coast’s wild, untamed waters. Her memoir bursts with all the humour and hell, peace and upheaval that is the Pacific Ocean.
Premier Steven McNeil
$19.95The McNeils and Mombourquettes established a joint heritage that began in Cape Breton, then to Spryfield and continues in Upper Granville, in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.
Stephen, our present Premier and the twelfth of seventeen siblings, was a mere eight years old when his father died suddenly. It thrust the family, led by his mother, into some challenging yet rewarding times. Older brothers and sisters took on new roles and created a bond that continues to this day.
One Strong Girl
$21.95One Strong Girl is a mother’s vivid account of what it is like to lose her daughter, India, to a rare debilitating disease. The story is a bold description of what it means to deal with deep sorrow and still find balance and beauty in an age steeped in the denial of death. At ten, India climbed the highest on the rope at gymnastics, yet by sixteen was so weak she was unable to even dress herself. The narrative follows the six-year fight for answers from the medical community. Finally, after the genetic testing of India’s DNA, it was discovered there were two mutations on her ASAH1 gene, a deadly combination. Today her cells are alive in a research lab at the University of Ottawa. This is a legacy that cuts both ways, a point of pride and pain. One Strong Girl is a story of what it’s like to outlive an only child. It describes the intensity of loving a dying child and most importantly, the joy to be found, even amidst the sorrow.
Dancing on a Powder Keg
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$39.95Ilse Weber’s letters document the life of a young Jewish author of children’s book, as she and her family were gradually trapped and persecuted in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. Her poems, written and performed in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, have become an international symbol of the camp and ghetto poetry. Ilse saved her older son, but she and her younger son were gassed in Auschwitz.
The Case of Paul Kammerer The Most Controversial Biologist of His Time
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$27.99The Case of Paul Kammerer is a well-researched and highly readable historical account of one of the biggest, till today unsolved scientific scandals. Paul Kammerer, ‘the father of epigenetic,’ was a talented and idealistic biologist, whose ground-breaking research made headlines worldwide. Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, where Kammerer lived and worked, was at its creative peak yet already declining toward Nazism. The book that reads like a detective story, provides new evidence for the events that led to Kammerer’s tragic end while exposing the implicit yet dangerous links between science and politics.
Show Me The Way To Go Home
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$18.95With near total recall, the author recreates what it was like, from a child’s point of view, to be tied to a charming, naïve single mother. The years are 1936 to 1948; the milieu, the New Jersey Oranges. Navigating the hardships of the Great Depression and the mysteries of world conflict, young Dorothy Jane asks one teacher if a war is ever ‘off.’ Show Me The Way To Go Home follows the unanchored, at times rakish, existence of a feckless mother and innocent daughter who rarely spending more than a few seasons at one address. It is a tale of resiliency and courage, of a child’s growing awareness of her predicament, and her gradually achieved maturity.
Hermit of Gully Lake
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95The Hermit of Gully Lake is a thought-provoking, intimate and respectful look at the life and times of American-born but Nova Scotia-raised Willard Kitchener MacDonald (1916-2003), better known as the Hermit of Gully Lake. For sixty years, MacDonald endured hardship and extreme isolation, living as recluse in a cave-like shelter six feet by nine feet in the deep woods wilderness of northern Nova Scotia.
He moved far into the woods after jumping from a troop train that would have taken him to Halifax and on to Europe for World War II. In the past thirty years, as his legend grew, many people began to seek him out, squeezing into his tiny shelter to play fiddles and guitars with the man they call Kitchener, marvelling at his wisdom, his wit and his intriguing views of events in the wider world, which he chose not to be part of. Even when his friends urged him to sign up for his old age pension in the 1980s, he steadfastly refused to sign his name to any document, even a government cheque. He was reluctant to speak about his past, saying only that he had refused to go and fight in World War II because the Bible told him, “Thou shalt not kill.” When he died, however, there was enough national interest in this unique individual that both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star sent reporters to cover the event.
Joan Baxter is an award-winning Nova Scotian author who has written extensively about Africa. She is now living in northern Nova Scotia where she has turned her attention to this incredible story of a man of enormous strength and character who became a legend. She is back home after two decades of living in and reporting from Africa for the BBC World Service and Associated Press. Her most recent book, A Serious Pair of Shoes, won the Evelyn Richardson Award.
The Last Canadian Knight
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95From a small-town law office in Nova Scotia to the boardrooms of London, England, where he was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “privatization ace,” lawyer and businessman Sir Graham Day has established a sterling international reputation as a tough-minded but charming negotiator. In The Last Canadian Knight, award-winning business journalist Gordon Pitts chronicles Day’s meteoric rise and explores the valuable lessons Day has gleaned from a lifetime of global business experience.
The Last Canadian Knight
$27.95From a small-town law office in Nova Scotia to the pressure-cooker boardrooms of London, England, where he was Margaret Thatcher’s “privatization ace,” lawyer and businessman Sir Graham Day has earned an international reputation as a tough-minded but charming negotiator.
After a rocky educational start in Halifax, Day found his motivation at Dalhousie Law School and established the contacts and experiences that would guide him through the world of global business. With an impressive resume including troubleshooting roles for large companies (Canadian Pacific Limited, British Shipbuilders, Cadbury Schweppes) around the world, often during controversial times, Day solidified his position as an internationally sought-after change-maker.
In The Last Canadian Knight, award-winning business journalist Gordon Pitts chronicles Day’s meteoric rise and explores the lessons Day gleaned from a lifetime spent in and out of the world’s boardrooms.
New Brunswick Was His Country
$24.95Regularly described as New Brunswick’s greatest scholar, William Francis Ganong (1864-1941) wrote more than many people have ever read. His range of interests is reflected in his vast body of work: botany, zoology, physiography, cartography, and native languages were all within his reach. But his greatest interest, subsuming all others, was New Brunswick.
Ganong endeavoured to write even his most scholarly papers for the general reader, and that is what historian Ronald Rees had done with New Brunswick Was His Country. An appreciation of Ganong’s work and a biography of the man behind it, rather than an exhaustive critical assessment, this fascinating overview will appeal to any reader interested in the natural and settlement history of New Brunswick and the working life of its most extraordinary scholar, from his summers conducting field research in Passamaquoddy Bay to his pivotal role in founding the New Brunswick Museum.
Richly illustrated with historical photographs, Ganong’s own maps and drawings, and contemporary images, New Brunswick Was His Country is an essential addition to Atlantic Canada’s historical canon.
The Sea Was in Their Blood
$22.95The Sea Was in Their Blood explores two key questions: who were the men aboard the Miss Ally, and why were they battered and sunk by a storm forecasted days in advance? Through interviews with the crew’s families and friends, rescue personnel, and members of the tight-knit fishing communities of Woods Harbour and Cape Sable Island, award-winning journalist Quentin Casey pieces together the tragic sinking—including important case details not previously reported—and weaves in the backstories of the Miss Ally‘s crew and the lingering effects of their disappearance.
Mabel Bell
$18.95Married to an Englishman in the late 1930s, Lilias Toward spent most of the war years in England, often in danger. She raised a son who is now an able and successful man in Canada. After her marriage dissolved, she returned to Nova Scotia, studied law, practiced it, and became a Q.C. She also planned and built a most unusual motel in the village of Baddeck and called it “The Silver Dart
