Westray
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Vernon Theriault was off shift when the Westray mine exploded in 1992, killing twenty-six men in Plymouth, Nova Scotia. Theriault took part in the perilous rescue operation that followed. As the magnitude of Westray took hold, Theriault found himself struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares. When he tried to re-educate himself for another line of work, he discovered that he was both illiterate and dyslexic. Theriault found new purpose when he became part of a labour movement that successfully lobbied the federal government to bring in a worker-safety law that became known as the Westray Bill.
Theriault openly discusses his complicated journey in this straightforward, simply written memoir, which begins with the promise of a good job with good pay at Westray.
In the Great Days of Sail
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Archibald MacMechan revelled in the tales of worldwide adventure, pirates, storms, fires, rescues, and tragedies. MacMechan’s collections, all popular successes in their day, have been out of print for several years. Now In the Great Days of Sail brings fourteen stories together for a new generation of readers. Edited and with an introduction by Halifax author Elizabeth Peirce, the book displays the very best of this master chronicler’s work.
On South Mountain The Dark Secrets of the Goler Clan
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$27.95Stories of South Mountain and its notorious Goler Clan are often told in whispers–or not at all.
For over a century, a gruesome pattern of sexual and physical abuse, incest, and psychological torture defined the isolated mountain community, and residents of the nearby Annapolis Valley turned a blind eye. But when a fourteen-year-old South Mountain girl finally spoke up, the story and its ensuing investigation captivated the country.
In this twentieth-anniversary edition of the bestselling book The Vancouver Sun called “a terrible story, beautifully told,” acclaimed authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths return to South Mountain with a new Preface and the original, startling text.
100 Things You Don’t Know About Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Inspired by the success of her popular Halifax Magazine column, “50 Things You Don’t Know about Halifax,” Sawler has expanded her focus to include interesting anecdotes and facts about the social, political, economic, and cultural history of Nova Scotia.
Flight 111 A Year in the Life of a Tragedy
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$27.95Fifteen years later, the crash of Swissair Flight 111 remains one of the largest aviation accidents ever recorded. The crash claimed over two hundred victims, and changed the course of countless lives, from the victims’s friends and relatives, the dedicated individuals who helped with the search and investigation, and the residents who welcomed the victims’ families into their homes. Award-winning writer Steven Kimber has collected their stories, starting with the seemingly innocent events leading up to the fatal day on September 2, 1998, the search for survivors, and failing that, the pursuit for answers. Kimber successfully combines these accounts in a lively, heart-wrenching style to give a human face to one of the worst tragedies in Canadian history. This new edition includes an afterword with updated information from the investigation.
Strange Nova Scotia
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$14.95Strange Nova Scotia is a fun and, yes, STRANGE romp through this strange land. From Nova Scotia’s connection to why the White House is painted white, to the famed Shag Harbour UFO incident and the possible landing of Prince Henry Sinclair at Chedabucto Bay on June 2, 1398, this book will amuse and intrigue you on every page. From one of the province’s best-known folklorists and the wit of a budding young illustrator comes this instant classic. Welcome to Strange Nova Scotia.
Irish
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$10.95Part of the series about the people who have come to the Maritimes. Their origins, settlement and cultural heritage which have given much to our Maritime life.
Daring, Devious and Deadly True Tales of Crime and Justice from Nova Scotia’s Past
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Welcome to a rogues’ gallery of murderers and pirates, a pair of brazen bank robbers and a fraud artist who fooled Halifax’s elite. A supporting cast includes a wise-cracking Cape Breton judge, legendary journalist-turned-politician Joseph Howe, circus showman P.T. Barnum, and future prime minister John Thompson. Daring, Devious and Deadly is a collection of fifteen true tales of crime and justice that spans more than 150 years of Nova Scotia’s history, from a triple murder in 1791 at a farm near Lunenburg to 1947, when Angus Walters, skipper of the racing schooner Bluenose, was attacked in the pages of an American magazine.
The stories are drawn from communities across the province, from Sydney and Amherst to Halifax, from the rugged coast of the Eastern Shore to the historic town of Annapolis Royal. Filled with surprising twists and courtroom drama, these stories of greed, murder and vengeance offer a window on the past. But justice can be far from blind. Religious hatred, partisan rivalry, social status, ethnicity, or political corruption sometimes invaded the courtroom, threatening to upset the delicate balance between guilt and innocence. Was justice done in each of these cases? You be the judge.
Rum Tales Down Home Yarns Around a Pot-Bellied Stove
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Welcome to The Shop.
Arthur Benjamin Lohnes was proprietor of a small country store known locally as The Shop in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, from 1919 through 1957. AB, as he was called, provided a welcoming haven to people eager to indulge in the venerable art of loafing and storytelling. The yarns were spun by some of the most colourful characters of the first half of the twentieth century.
With the blessing of their wives, menfolk met there regularly around the warmth of AB?s pot-bellied stove, a cozy forum in which to relate experiences and share their concerns of the day. The practice was carried out almost to the point of ceremony. Starring actors in this pageant of patriarchs ranged from grizzled old blue water sea captains through ordinary seamen to shore fishermen, a preacher, store owner, and a part-time postmaster. The tales are spliced with a biographical narrative – glimpses of adventures and misadventures ? of a gentle, kindly woman, once a child, to whom the book is dedicated.
The tales recounted within the walls of AB?s store take the reader back to a bygone era of daily poverty and everyday adventures in a coastal Nova Scotian community. Thanks to these storytellers, the past survives and comes alive for the modern reader.
Where Duty Lies A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Frank Grimmer did not set out to earn honours on the field of battle nor did he readily choose to go to war. World powers were shifting. The future of nations was deemed dependant on their armies. It was left to the young men to face the gunfire of other young men who could have been friends under the right circumstances and in times of peace. Where Duty Lies tells the story of how a 23-year-old St. Andrews, New Brunswick, man ended up in the quicksand-like mud of Passchendaele labouring under heavy artillery fire helping construct supply lines that supported the Canadian advance during the Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the most horrific in a war of horrific battles.
The Mill Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95The Mill –Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest explores the power that a single industry can wield. For fifty years, the pulp mill near Pictou in northern Nova Scotia has buoyed the local economy and found support from governments at all levels. But it has also pulped millions of acres of forests, spewed millions of tonnes of noxious emissions into the air, consumed quadrillions of litres of fresh water and then pumped them out again as toxic effluent into nearby Boat Harbour, and eventually into the Northumberland Strait.
From the day it began operation in 1967, the mill has fomented protest and created deep divisions and tensions in northern Nova Scotia. This story is about people whose livelihoods depend on the pulp mill and who are willing to live with the “smell of money.” It’s about people whose well-being, health, homes, water, air, and businesses have been harmed by the mill’s emissions and effluent. It’s about the heartache such divisions cause and about people who, for the sake of peace, keep their thoughts about the mill to themselves.
But it’s also about hope, giving voice to those who led the successive groups that have protested and campaigned for a cleaner mill–First Nations, fishers, doctors, local councillors, tourism operators, artists and musicians, teachers and woodlot owners. Their personal stories are interwoven into a historical arc that traces the mill’s origins and the persistent environmental and social problems it causes to this day.
Baxter weaves a rich tapestry of storytelling, relevant to everyone who is concerned about how we can start to renegotiate the relationship between economy, jobs, and profits on one hand, and human well-being, health, and the environment on the other. The Mill tells a local story with global relevance and appeal.
The Legacy Letters How Trauma Affects Our Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Halifax author and journalist Janice Landry returns to her roots, as she revisits high-profile Canadian police investigations she covered as a novice television reporter during the 1980s and 1990s. One story involves the unsolved murder of British Columbia teenager Andrea King, whose remains were found in 1992, in Nova Scotia woods, nearly a year after she disappeared. Landry also discusses the 1989 disappearance of Nova Scotia teenager Kimberly McAndrew, who was last seen leaving a Halifax Canadian Tire store where she worked. McAndrew remains missing.
The victims and families have had a major impact on Landry and the public. She hopes this book leads to a break in both cases, as well as other unsolved crimes. It will also shed light on the pain the families continue to endure.
Landry also speaks with Canadians from five provinces, including first responders and front-line workers. These men and women bravely discuss how trauma, in and out of their work, has profoundly affected their lives, loved ones, and outlook.
The author and her guests each have written a “Legacy Letter” for the public. Each letter is deeply personal and conveys a heartfelt message of loss and hope. This book is Landry’s attempt to help them regain some of what has been lost.
Rescue at Moose River
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On Easter weekend in 1936, three men went down into an old rundown gold mine at Moose River in a remote area of Nova Scotia. While below, they became trapped by a massive cave-in at the 141-foot level. One man was a pediatrician, the second a young lawyer, and the third the mining company timekeeper. They had entered the mine to assess its potential for possible sale to an unnamed United States interest.
With the heroic efforts of more than 150 men and women volunteers, including local miners, hard rock miners from Ontario, draegermen from Pictou County, and a tenacious young diamond drill operator from Pictou County, two of the men were recovered alive. The third man died underground on the eighth day of their entombment.
Halifax broadcaster J. Frank Willis made history with his live reports from the mine head that were broadcast on more than 700 radio stations around the world, including the major U.S. networks and the BBC. It marked the beginning of a new era in broadcasting and in journalism. Until then, radio was known chiefly as a music and entertainment medium; news gathering and reporting had been the bailiwick of newspapers and newswire services.
Little did Willis know when he filed his first report from the site that he was making broadcast history by pioneering live on-the-spot reporting. It would change the face of broadcasting forever. Rescue at Moose River is the story of how these two events, one tragic, one historic, came together in the backwoods of Nova Scotia more than 80 years ago.
Seven Grains of Paradise A Culinary Journey in Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Seven Grains of Paradise tells the fascinating and much neglected story about many kinds of food in Africa, a continent with a rich farming tradition, intricate cuisines, and a multitude of food cultures.
Here is the story of Baxter’s personal quest to learn about some fascinating and new (to her) foods in a handful of countries in sub-Sahara Africa as she visits African farms, markets, restaurants, and kitchens. The people who grow, sell, buy, prepare, and serve the foods help her explore the riddles of a continent better known for hunger than for its plentiful food resources. The author draws on stories and research conducted over the more than thirty years she has lived and worked in Africa.
From the fabled city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert to the rainforests of Central Africa, readers are invited along on a delightful journey of learning and eating–and some drinking too, of invigorating indigenous beverages, brews, and palm wine straight from the trees. The culinary journey takes the reader down garden paths, into forests that double as farms, through the chaos of markets, and into modest little roadside eateries.
Much Madness, Divinest Sense Women’s Stories of Mental Health and Health Care
Editor: Lori Hanson, Nili Kaplan - MyrthPublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is time to shed some light on the dark halls and windowless rooms where women’s mental health has been hidden from view. Where are the stories? Where are their voices? In historical and psychiatric records, women’s mental health is reduced to verifiable symptoms and causes, devoid of the subjective, absent of the lived experience. When confronted with their protestations and self-representations, our medical system and our societal institutions further pathologize, retrauamtize or silence women. Much Madness, Divinest Sense is a collection of women’s stories and essays about mental health and health care. These women–physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, community activists, health researchers, Indigenous women, transgender women, our neighbors, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers who are the recipients, providers and critics of care–break the silence to talk about the polluted, heart-wrenching, stigmatized, messy subject that is mental illness today. As with their first collection, Women Who Care: Women’s stories of health care and caring, the stories, essays and poems of women receiving, accompanying, critiquing or giving mental health care are again in this compilation as raw as they are real.
Frontier Town: Bear River, Nova Scotia A Snapshot in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$26.95Bear River photographer Ralph Nelson Harris captured the village’s waning days of sail and lumber through his camera lens in the early 1900s. Drawing upon hundreds of recently discovered Ralph Harris images, historian and author Mike Parker puts a newfound face to Bear River’s past while utilizing painstakingly researched excerpts from The Telephone, Bear River’s newspaper of the day, to add an informative and entertaining voice to the story. Includes 470 images.
Winds of Change Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95Calvin Woodrow Ruck, born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Bajan immigrants, saw roadblocks not as barriers, but as hurdles that he would eventually leap over.
From working in the steel plant and as a sleeping car porter to being awarded the Order of Canada and appointed to the Senate of Canada, Calvin worked diligently to ensure that his children, and his children’s children, wouldn’t have to go through the same things he went through. Although he was turned away from many opportunities, he was determined to provide for his family and took on a heavy workload in the Halifax community.
An Ordinary Hero Story of David Goldberg, WWII Canadian Spitfire Pilot
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Imagine you are a pilot, shot from the sky, alone in enemy territory where no one speaks your language. It is winter, and soon will be dark. You could freeze to death, starve or be captured by the Nazis. And you are a Jew. This is David Goldberg’s predicament on March 8, 1944. An Ordinary Hero is Goldberg’s account of how, assisted by the French Underground, he made his way through occupied France and Spain and evaded capture by the enemy. He returned to combat in ground support as a dive-bomber to become the decorated (Distinguished Flying Cross) commander of the only Canadian fighter squadron in Italy.
From Nova Scotia to North Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95When Canada went to war in 1939, the life of twenty-year-old Clayton Graham changed in a heartbeat. From a small rural community, he never expected he would travel the world so extensively or under such circumstances.
From Nova Scotia to North Africa is a largely first-person account of Clayton’s experiences and adventures as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He recounts in detail the sometimes exhilarating but often terrifying process of learning to fly fighter aircraft, training first in Canada, then in England and later flying with #250 Squadron in Africa and the Middle East: performing spins and loops, becoming adept with Hurricanes and Spitfires, evading enemy aircraft, flying on dangerous missions. He survives bombings on the ground and dogfights in the air. He sees comrades die in service to their country and the devastation war brings to ordinary people swept up in historic events.
Along the way, Clayton manages to get engaged, carrying the engagement ring around with him before he mails it back to his sweetheart in Canada. Shot down while serving in North Africa, it seems Clayton may not get back to marry the woman he loves.
Told with humour and insight, and packed with historical information about places, public figures, and events, From Nova Scotia to North Africa chronicles an important part of Nova Scotia, Canadian, and world history, capturing in a veteran’s own words the experience of war.
Cornwallis The Violent Birth of Halifax
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In June of 1749, Edward Cornwallis set into motion events that would determine the destiny of tens of thousands of people across half a continent. His actions in the following three years would also determine the future of not only Nova Scotia, but of the vast land that would become Canada.To the Mi’kmaq people, the British governor stood on their ancestral home of “Mi’kma’ki” – the millennial-old name for the Seven Districts that comprised the main Mi’kmaq government in what is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Maine. For France, Cornwallis was entering “Acadie,” heartland of their territorialambitions on the New World. For Cornwallis, and for the British crown he represented, it was Nova Scotia – territory France had ceded to Britain on paper in 1713 and a land heintended to claim in the flesh with his massive influx of soldiers and settlers.Steeped in a brutal militaristic philosophy he learned in the bloody fields of Scotland’s Battle of Culloden, Cornwallis devised a plan to force the Acadians and Mi’kmaq to swear loyalty to his king, be forced off the land, or face massacre. His conquest of Nova Scotia laid the groundwork for the Expulsion of the Acadians and createdthe conditions that allowed his close colleague, James Wolfe, to claim a final British victory over France on thePlains of Abraham a decade later. His conquest also pushed the Mi’kmaq toward the brink of extinction.But who was Edward Cornwallis? He remains an elusive, controversial figure to this day, but his full story hasnever been told. This in-depth biography makes use of Cornwallis’s own words to tell his story. It also draws ona range of sources to provide a detailed account of his life, with rare first-hand accounts of his childhood growingup with the future king of Britain; his rise in the military; the formative Pacification mission he led to successfully suppress Scotland’s Highland rebellion; his central role in the birth of Halifax; the military disasters that saw himface the threat of execution by his own government and that compelled Voltaire to write of “a million regimentedassassins” tormenting Europe; and Cornwallis’s death in exile on Gibraltar.Whether you see Cornwallis as the heroic founder of Halifax or a genocidaltyrant who ruthlessly destroyed those who dared stand against him, you cannotdeny his crucial role in Canadian history. This book presents the evidence ofhis life: it is up to the reader to make the final judgment.
Age of Heroes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Age of Heroes documents one of Nova Scotia’s greatest sea tales. It comes from the golden age of fighting sail, the so called “age of heroes” which has long drawn audiences to books like Master and Commander and the Horatio Hornblower genre of nautical fiction. France’s La Tribune frigate fell to Britain’s HMS Unicorn after a moonlit sea battle fought off Ireland’s coast. The humbled warship was added to the Royal Navy lists when admirals like John Jervis and Horatio Nelson were defending England’s shores from invasion and her sea lanes from attack by revolutionary France. Tribune was ushered into British service during the turmoil of the Spithead and Nore mutinies, her crew a collection of young English, Irish and Scots eager to fight for King and Country, as well as for their own glory. Unfortunately, HMS Tribune was mistakenly run aground by her sailing master while entering Halifax Harbour on November 23, 1797. During the attempt to escape from her rocky prison, Tribune was caught in a horrendous storm and ultimately sank at night with the loss of more than 240 souls. Only a thirteen-year old orphan fisher boy from nearby Herring Cove dared to row his tiny skiff into the jaws of the tempest to save British sailors stranded on the wreck. Impressed by his selfless act, Prince Edward, the future father of Queen Victoria who was residing in Halifax at the time, rewarded the young boy for his brave deed. In this true tale of valour, the legend of the hero fisher boy lives on more than two centuries after his part in one of Canada’s most compelling sea stories.
Ocean of Storms, Sea of Disaster
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Here are over sixty stories of piracy, fire, explosions, disappearances, rum running, shipboard mutiny and murder. There are also stories of collisions with whales, icebergs and other ships, as well as wrecks on rocks, islands and sand bars. Vessels, large and small, were struck by lightning, shelled or torpedoed by enemy vessels, crushed by Arctic ice, and even swallowed up whole by unexpected intense gales and hurricanes. These true tales of shipwrecks delve into strange and curious marine disasters. The setting, primarily the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, was the main trading route for passenger steamers and treading schooners plying their way to and from Europe and also the site of the much frequented fishing grounds. It is said to be the “stormiest ocean on earth.” The time range in Ocean of Storms, Sea of Disaster is one hundred years, between the 1850s and the 1950s but the stories themselves are timeless.
« Merci de nous avoir choisis » K.C. Irving, Arthur Irving et l’histoire d’Irving Oil
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95Est-ce qu’on naît entrepreneur ou est-ce qu’on apprend à le devenir? « Merci de nous avoir choisis » cherche à répondre à cette fameuse question en examinant l’histoire fascinante des magnats des affaires Arthur Irving et K.C. Irving, et celle d’Irving Oil.
Un observateur aguerri a écrit au sujet des Irving : « Qu’on les aime ou qu’on les haïsse, on se doit de les respecter. » S’appuyant sur d’innombrables entrevues et des recherches approfondies, l’auteur primé Donald J. Savoie (Se débrouiller par ses propres moyens) examine en détail le succès d’une entreprise qui a vu le jour à Bouctouche et qui a grandi à Saint John, au Nouveau-Brunswick, et qui exploite maintenant la plus grande raffinerie de pétrole au Canada, ainsi que plus d’un millier de stations-service réparties dans l’Est du Canada, la Nouvelle-Angleterre et l’Irlande. L’entreprise a également des bureaux à Amsterdam et à Londres et exploite la seule raffinerie en Irlande.
Comme l’a dit K.C. Irving, on n’est jamais assuré de garder les clients; il faut gagner leur fidélité une personne à la fois. « Merci de nous avoir choisis » retrace l’histoire de la famille Irving depuis ses origines en Écosse, couvre la création et les premières années de l’entreprise et étudie la façon dont Irving Oil fait face aux défis actuels. Cette biographie exhaustive fournit des enseignements précieux pour les aspirants entrepreneurs, les écoles de commerce, les politiques publiques et, en particulier, le Canada atlantique.
Nova Scotia and the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1920 A Remembrance of the Dead and an Archive for the Living
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$32.95The definitive academic resource on the Great Influenza at the beginning of the twentieth century threaded with the human stories of the people that lived and died in the three year pandemic in Nova Scotia.
“Thanks for the Business” K.C. Irving, Arthur Irving, and the Story of Irving Oil
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95As K. C. Irving said, business is never given—it has to be earned, one customer at a time. “Thanks for the Business” traces the Irving family back to its roots in Scotland, covers the establishment and early years of the company, and looks at how Irving Oil is confronting current challenges. This comprehensive biography holds important lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs, for business schools, for public policy, and particularly for Atlantic Canada.
Oak Island Mystery: Solved The Final Chapter
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$25.95For more than two centuries, Oak Island, Nova Scotia, has been studied, searched, probed and cursed all the while failing to give up its secrets. Joy Steele’s ground-breaking historical research into the island’s true history is no less intriguing. In this second edition, Ms. Steele is joined by professional geologist Gordon Fader to not only solidify her theory, but to expand on it, including a thorough explanation of the area’s geology.
