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Buddy MacMaster The Judique Fiddler
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95The renowned Cape Breton fiddler Buddy MacMaster grew up in Judique, Inverness County, influenced by musical giants including Bill Lamey, “Little Jack” MacDonald, Angus Chisholm and Mary MacDonald. By 1949, Buddy performed for local square dances, and by the 1960s he played across Canada, the U.S. and Scotland, sustaining old-time music and the dance tradition. A master fiddler, his awards include the Order of Canada, the Order of Nova Scotia, and honorary degrees from ST.F.X.University and Cape Breton University. Buddy adhered to the Gaelic fiddle tradition that he cherished as much as life itself.
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A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Narrative Obituary Verse and Song in Northern Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95This rare book is about community, caring and pioneer survival. It brings to life Andrew Dunphy— a man who roamed northern Cape Breton, carried the news, nursed his neighbours—and wrote magnificent obituary poems that told their stories, comforted them in disaster, and helped their communities survive. Over one hundred years later, Ronald Caplan captured this story in its final hours. Told with the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy — A Stone for Andrew Dunphy reveals the robust rural life that flourished as the 20th century dawned.
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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book 5 A Treasury of Stories and Memories
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95Now an annual holiday tradition, this fifth collection of Cape Breton’s Christmas delivers a batch of memories and rich holiday stories rooted in a beloved island. Here are the moments that take you back, the stories that encourage us to be all we can be. From family gatherings to loneliness to the joy of getting home in time—from parents who give even when they seem to have nothing—this is a generous book that will last.
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Dignity, Democracy, Development A Citizen’s Reader
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95With these 61 readable essays, Cape Breton’s Tom Urbaniak brings a courageous, critical and constructive eye to problems of our time. Whether it’s revitalizing struggling communities, harnessing the power of small investors, reforming tired institutions or protecting parliamentary democracy, he is able to point to workable solutions. This is a practical and thought-provoking reader, challenging everyone to engage with their region and with the world.
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The Innocent And Other Stories
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95Including Sheldon Currie’s guide and thoughtful introduction, The Innocent and Other Writings is another in a series of Breton Books by and about Legendary Cape Bretoners. Tessie Gillis ranks as the Godmother of Cape Breton Fiction–the first woman to dare write about the darker side of rural Cape Breton and the challenges and strategies for surviving and creating a compassionate and enduring community. Tenderness and insight are fundamental threads through all her writings.
This new collection is an essential sampler of Tessie Gillis’s writing, including “The Innocentt”, “The Day the Men Went to Town,” a beautiful portion of “The Last Chapter But One,” and much more. These are lasting stories for today.
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Highland Settler The Classic Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95At the core of Charles W. Dunn’s pioneering work with the Canadian Gaelic-speaking community in the twentieth century, Highland Settler is the story of immigration, rural settlement, and the later dispersion to the industrial world–a thoughtful and entertaining history of an extraordinary people.
Dunn’s extensive interviews and the informed warmth of his approach make Highland Settler an essential book in the discovery of Cape Breton Island. Drawing on delightful storytelling, and local songs and poetry that settlers composed and loved, Dunn achieves a Gaelic settlers’ self-portrait as well as the historian and folklorist’s insight into the culture.
A fresh new edition of an elegant and accessible classic about folk ways vibrant in the 1940s and alive today in Cape Breton Island, with the details and historical perspective of this expert researcher.
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Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes
Editor: Michael Taft, Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95These are the folk tales from Dr. Helen Creighton’s life journey through the Maritime Provinces, collecting songs and ghost stories and old cures–and folk tales. Helen serves as our guide, introducing us to storytellers, setting the scene of the telling–and then she lets the person tell the story just as it was told to her.
The feel of the kitchen and the fish shed still cling to these stories. Some are long, really miraculous folk tales–miraculous in detail and in that they have managed to survive. Others are the brief riddle or the tantalizing quick-telling that a folklorist can expect along the way. Helen kept it all. And taken as a whole, the reality and intensity of those rare smaller pieces reveal their value in among the more finished, well-told tales.
Both Helen Creighton and A Folk Tale Journey Through the Maritimes are Atlantic treasures. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Taft and Ronald Caplan, and a Motif Index by Michael Taft.
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Great Cape Breton Storytelling
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95From a lifetime of collecting, Ron Caplan offers tales from the rare complex of Cape Breton Island. From a grim sealing trek to a mother’s courage in a windstorm, to memories of drunken hens, to a shark attack. Mackerel fishermen bag a huge tuna, and an itinerant butcher chases a wild cow. The book includes fables from the island’s Czech, Pakistani, and Lebanese heritage in among stories from the Gaelic, French and Mi’kmaq traditions. Good solid reading in one lasting collection!
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Great Cape Breton Shipwreck Stories
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95One lasting value of any shipwreck is the marvelous stories that come out of those terrible events. Ronald Caplan has collected a terrific batch of stories ranging from the gut-wrenching 1761 winter trek of survivors of the Auguste to John Angus Fraser’s hilarious 1955 adventures aboard the abandoned Kismet II. Walter Boudreau delivers his harrowing account adrift in a lifeboat while his companions died around him, and survivors of the Marine Atlantic Caribou ferry tell of being torpedoed by a Nazi submarine between Cape Breton and Newfoundland.
Filled with courage and humanity–stories of people determined to live, told by people determined to keep these stories alive.
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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book 4
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95The Cape Breton’s Christmas series has become an annual holiday joy! This fourth collection continues to mine the memories and stories of Christmas experiences on this remarkable island. From humorous events to heartbreaking memories, these stories from the heart of Cape Breton keep Christmas alive all year long. And once again, ten percent of all sales from Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book 4 will be donated to Feed Nova Scotia. An extra reason to enjoy this long-lasting gift for home and friends.
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Women of Courage 15 Cape Breton Lives, In Their Own Words
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95Women’s lives and accomplishments are so often private and rarely shared. Women of Courage offers intimate interviews with fifteen ordinary women whose lives leap with energy, humour, pathos, and power. Hard work, high spirits and abiding love are the threads through their unforgettable lives. Rita Joe, Clara Buffett, Katie Margaret Gillis, Hattie Carmichael, Lexie O’Hare and many more. These spoken lives are reminders of the thousands of women who have been the fundamental underpinning of Cape Breton Island.
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Dieppe Canada’s Forgotten Heroes
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95Gripping in its intensity, this 75th Anniversary edition of the 1942 Canadian raid on a well-fortified German-held French town with fairness, eloquence, and compassionate detail. Mellor fought at Dieppe, and puts the reader in landing craft and on the beaches with individual Canadians who formed the bulk of the attackers. He follows survivors into P.O.W. camps, where courageous leadership and successful tunnel escapes sustained men for three long years. Terrific reading!
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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book Three A Treasury of Stories and Memories
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95Once again, the heart of Cape Breton radiates through in the all-new Book Three of Cape Breton’s Christmas — another lasting collection of Cape Breton memories and stories, including tales of compassion, hilarious events, touching family gatherings and Christmas far from home — plus memories of the sacrifices that made the holidays work. For anyone who loves wit, celebration and the generosity of Maritimes life — these are stories to be read again and again.
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Local Hero 20 New Short Stories from Cape Breton Island
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95This superb collection introduces Carmel Mikol and Hector MacNeil and Sue McKay Miller within a solid blend of noted writers including Carol Bruneau, Clive Doucet and Maureen Hull. From country life to city, on Cape Breton Island and away, here are Tim Vassallo and Leacock Award winner Bill Conall, Teresa O’Brien, Ellison Robertson and the comic genius of Julie Curwin and Larry Gibbons. Victor Sakalauskas and Dave Doucette portray children in harrowing, breathtaking circumstances, and the realism of D.C. Troicuk, Joyce Rankin, Ruth Schneider, David Muise, and Jigs Gardner deliver exquisite stories from life. Poignant, comic, powerful and heart-wrenching, Local Hero is marvelous evidence of Cape Breton’s place inlasting Canadian literature.
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The Blind Man’s Eyes
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95With over 100 of her best poems plus George Elliott Clarke’s essay on the achievement of Rita Joe, The Blind Man’s Eyes confirms Joe’s place in Canadian literature.
From a homeless child who led a blind beggar door-to-door, Rita Joe emerged as spokesperson for her nation and for the individual’s heart. Her much anthologized poems and rare autobiography have riveted her message to the Canadian conscience, revealing both the Mi’kmaq people and the universal artist’s heart of this Elder.
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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book 2
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95On the heels of the best-selling Book One, Cape Breton’s Christmas — Book Two is a rich collection of stories and memories from nearly fifty Cape Bretoners, including Clive Doucet, Jess Bond and Sheldon Currie. From a Christmas tree in the coal mine to Christmas on the battlefield, from joyous memories to reminders that break the heart, celebrations in Cape Breton and far from home — Cape Breton’s Christmas—Book Two is a gift of the season’s renewal and the island’s generosity and strength.
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Cape Bretoners in the First World War In Their Own Words
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95IN THEIR OWN WORDS, rare conversations with survivors of World War One are the heart of these stories, letters, and vivid news accounts of Cape Breton’s participation. From enlistment and training to trench warfare, an intimate account from soldiers and nurses who dared to serve. Much more than Cape Breton, it speaks for Canada’s Great War soldiers — their patriotism and desire for adventure, victories and tragedies, and their scars — beautifully shared in this remarkable compilation.
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Cape Breton Book of the Night (Expanded Edition) Tales of Tenderness and Terror
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95THE EXPANDED EDITION from over 25 years of Cape Breton’s Magazine. This book offers a tough, caring presentation of extraordinary experience.
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God’s Country Cape Breton Stories, Classic and Rare
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95Cape Breton Island continues to earn its place at the table of Canadian literature. God’s Country offers an essential collection of classic stories that helped build that award-winning reputation, as well as several rare and harder-to-find stories that maintain the growing respect while pointing toward future literary achievements. This is a lasting book that works for both bedside reading and the high school and university classroom. In God’s Country you’ll find stories by Alistair MacLeod, Joan Clark, Lynn Coady, D.R. MacDonald, Silver Donald Cameron, D.C. Troicuk, Sheldon Currie and many more — gathered under one rich and attractive roof. And these classic writers are only some of the authors this new volume has to share.
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Yankees at Louisbourg The Story of the First Siege, 1745
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95“The best and fullest account of the first siege of Louisbourg,” wrote historian W.S. MacNutt. The reader is there for the planning and the rabble-rousing and the day-by-day details of this essential event in Canadian history and in Americanconsciousness. L.E. DeForest called “the capture of Louisbourg in 1745 the most important military achievement of the American Colonists prior to the War of the Revolution.” Told in considerable depth and detail, this extremely readable book accounts for and describes that colonial achievement, and George Rawlyk’s telling is considered the most complete and best book on the subject.“An excellent, fair, comprehensive history of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg.” — Goodreads
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Wake of the Aspy A Novel of Northern Cape Breton
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95Teeming with life and remembrance, Wake of the Aspy is a novel of family, passion, and the beauty of memory’s heart.The coastal steamer Aspy connected northern Cape Breton to the world. It was a lifeline, an escape route, and a threat to the old ways. Rooted in a woman’s hard-won independence, Stewart Donovan’s terrific, often hilarious storytelling—the sounds and rhythm and acid wit of daily life—faces with vitality the local life and its encounters with government and a tourism future. Despite expropriations, war, cutbacks and social injustice aimed at driving them out, these are survivors you still might be lucky enough to meet Down North.
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Little One A Novel
Publisher: Breton Books$16.95A moment of compassion in the anthill means that Little One will live — a life of new ideas that will challenge the colony’s traditional world. Beautifully written and difficult to classify, Phil Organ’s novel holds up a rare, compelling mirror to human life. Little One demonstrates integrity and commitment to her colony, but eventually, with extraordinary courage, she dares to live out her own vision. Little One possesses kernels of terror and kernels kernels of exquisite light.
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Company Store J.B.McLachlan and the Cape Breton Miners, 1900-1925
Publisher: Breton Books$24.95With all the passion and forward thrust of a terrific novel, The Company Store is John Mellor’s winning story of Labour’s Wars in Cape Breton Island. A much sought after book, it has been too long out of print, and it remains a good place for the general reader to start in digging into this essential story in the making of the character of industrial Cape Breton. The company store itself stands as a powerful symbol for the entire system against which the miners fought-a system wherein the company owned the mines, the homes, the stores and often even the ministers and priests-all with the goal of profits for shareholders and of keeping the workers indebted and in line. And when all these failed, the governments sent in the troops against the workers!
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Song of Rita Joe Autobiography of a Mi’kmaw Poet
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95Song of Rita Joe is a book of exceptional courage and insight, the words of a gentle woman who fought for her family, justice, and her own independent voice. She faced intolerance, ignorance, and abuse, searched her inheritance for strength, and wrote poems of clarity and encouragement that continue to inspire not only her people but all people.
Finally, she was a humble woman, an honoured Mi’Kmaw elder, poet, and member of the Order of Canada.
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The Keys
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95Theresa O’Brien was born in Ireland and writes in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. This compelling first collection presents O’Brien as an accomplished storyteller.
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Magnificent Obsessions
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$17.9514 provocative chapters by writers who go a little further out, a little deeper, and bring back treasures for the rest of us. Each chapter stands on its own and each on is part of the portrait of Cape Breton Island. Magnificent Obsessions is essential and utterly enjoyable bedside reader.
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Sister to Courage
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95In Sister to Courage, Wanda takes us inside the world she shared with Viola and ten other brothers and sisters. Through touching and often hilarious stories, she traces the roots of courage and ambition, good fun and dignity, of the household that produced Viola Desmond.
Tough and compassionate, Viola shines through beyond the moment she was carried out of Roseland movie theatre for refusing to sit I the blacks-only section. Viola emerges as a defender of family and a successful entrepreneur whose momentum was blocked by racism.
With honesty and wit, Wanda Robson Tells her own brave story, giving new life to two remarkable women and the family the loved.
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Canada’s Forgotten Arctic Hero
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95This is the terrific true adventure of an unjustly forgotten Cape Bretoner, Canada’s first photographer of the High Arctic. George Rice emerged as a leader on an American Arctic expedition and died a herosearching for food for his starving comrades. This gripping and painful story is told through George Rice’s previously unpublished diaries. Packed with humour, pathos, and magnificent description, this book is a powerful historic and literary event, masterfully presented by Jim Lotz who, seventy-five years later on Operation Hazen, served in the footsteps of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.
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Rise Again Book Two
Publisher: Breton Books$23.95Robert J. Morgan has been Senior Historian at the Fortress of Louisbourg and Professor of History at Cape Breton University.
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For the Children
Artist: Burland MurphyPublisher: Breton Books$19.95Born in 1932, in Whycocomagh, RITA JOE lived a hardscrabble existence, from foster home to foster home, experiences that helped her decide to admit herself to Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, a place most Mi’kmaq people had come to dread. It was a rare example of the child choosing Shubie, “to better myself,” to get an education. That same determination compelled her to write about her personal combination of traditional Mi’kmaw spiritualism and Catholic faith, carrying forward her ‘gentle war’. Her last poem, unfinished, was found in her typewriter when she died in March 2007.
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Rise Again
Publisher: Breton Books$21.95The first full-scale history of Cape Breton Island in nearly 150 years!
RISE AGAIN! Is the story of Cape Breton Island told by beloved historian, archivist, and teacher Robert Morgan. From the geological roots to Mi’kmaw life before discovery, the planting of French Louisbourg, and the island’s first economic boom, this is a rich and accessible new book.
Morgan takes us from the battle for control of the island and Britain’s deliberate schemes to withhold opportunities for significant growth, through the opening of Cape Breton to provide a new home for the Loyalists, the forced marriage of the Colony of Cape Breton to the Colony of Nova Scotia and with it the birth of the never-ending Separatist movement. Book One takes the reader through the 19th century and sees Cape Breton as a new home for the Acadians, the Irish, and the Scottish, preparing the ground for the second economic boom as world markets were found for Cape Breton’s coal and then steel. A marvellous book, built to last. -
Archie the Pit Rat Hero
Artist: Louise Brooking-McDowPublisher: Breton Books$16.00This is the story of the friendship between a Miner named Milton and a Pit Rat named Archie—and how Archie became a hero.
Based on the stories miners tell about rats in the coal mines, Dave Muise, a miner’s son, tells the story of Archie the Pit Rat.
Louise Brooking-McDow’s paintings bring Archie’s underground world to life.
An Enchanting book for early readers, and those lucky enough to read with them.
