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Wild Nova Scotia (pb)
Photographer: Len WaggPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Nova Scotia has designated thirty-three Crown-owned areas as Wilderness Areas, consisting of about five percent of the provincial land-mass. The wilderness area designation means no mining or logging is allowed, but people are free to hunt, fish, hike, and camp as they have for generations. These Wilderness Areas- from the massive Tobeatic Wilderness Area that covers five counties to tiny McGill Lake- showcase the best of natural Nova Scotia, and Len Wagg has photographed them all for Wild Nova Scotia. Over the last year and a half, Wagg spent close to a hundred days in the province’s wilderness, logging over fifteen thousand kilometres and taking beautiful, telling portraits of the province’s most secret and lovely places. Photos of important areas not designated Wilderness Areas are included as well- like the shores of the Northumberland Strait, where herds of seals find places along the shores to have their young; the Bay of Fundy, where world-class tides erode massive cliffs; Keji National Park, where the sounds campers hear are all natural; and Nova Scotia’s “barren” Sable Island, home to birds, plants, seals and a herd of wild horses. Each area has distinctive characteristics that make it unique. Wild Nova Scotia showcases the special places, protected or not, allowing people to bring home some of the amazing natural beauty of this province.
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Somebody’s Daughter
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95First released in 1996, Somebody’s Daughter takes us inside the lives of real players in Canada’s prostitution game. This book is about what we don’t know about prostitution and perhaps what we don’t want to know; what goes on inside that violent underworld know as The Game, and who the girls in the tight skirts really are. Author and reporter Phonse Jessome traces the short careers of several young girls actively recruited by pimps and describes the anti-pimping efforts of law enforcers who work to get teenage girls out the The Games and off the streets.
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Prince Edward Island True Colours
Photographer: Anne MacKay, Wayne BarrettPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Wayne Barrett and Anne MacKay are a professional photographic team that have published numerous books including True Colors A Writer’s Garden, and the award winning Spirit of Place. They live in St. Catherines, Prince Edward Island.
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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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Acadian Lives in Cape Breton Island
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$21.95The Cape Breton Acadian comes alive in this new collection of conversations with remarkable people in an extraordinary place-Acadians of Cape Breton Island. In their own words, this book is a marvelous introduction to their humour, passion, work life and heritage. From fishing life to the cooperative movement, from daily life to sorcery and celebrations-their words and photographs open a door to an intimate portrait of this unique, little-known world. Acadian Lives is a tribute to the tenacity, pride, ingenuity and wit of one of Cape Breton Island’s undeniable treasures. In English, with some French tales and songs.
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Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
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Historic Sussex
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95First a settlement for the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq peoples and later a safe haven for American Loyalist immigrants in the eighteenth century, Sussex was not incorporated as a town until after the establishment of a railway station in 1895. In Historic Sussex, author Elaine Ingalls Hogg has collected over 150 historical images from Sussex’s beginnings up to the Second World War, including photos of the town’s famed agricultural producers, its businesses, and its military encampment, Camp Sussex. Named as Canada’s “typical small town” by the CBC in 1956, Sussex has a rich history that comes alive in this new entry in the popular Images of Our Past series.
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Captains, Mansions and Millionaires
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95Today is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the prosperity that Maitland enjoyed as a shipbuilding and trading centre during the late 1800s. Fortunes were made in the timber trade, in mining gypsum, and selling Maitland ships. In one summer, nineteen ships were built for a revenue of nearly one million dollars. A thousand men worked in the shipyards of this town on the shores of Cobequid Bay, requiring hotels, boarding houses, taverns, clothing stores, hardware stores and a bank.
Maitland sea captains like W.D Lawrence sailed the globe in huge schooners. A railway was built; there was a telegraph, professional photographer, and eventually a six-car ferry. There were tennis courts, and glorious mansions furnished with the finest articles money can buy.
And then it ended. The golden age of wooden ships and iron men was over, and the economic engine that generated such wealth faltered. The halcyon days of Maitland disappeared but its heritage not forgotten. Much of the town, including its great homes, still stands as it did in the glory days. Maitland has been declared a heritage conservation site, to be preserved for future generations.
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Historic St Andrews
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95St.Andrews-by-the-Sea is a much photographed little town, beloved by visitors and residents.The visual heritage of the town and the surrounding community has been documented by many photographers and reproduced here with historical context.
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One Potato Two Potato
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95The definitive book about potatoes, from growing them to eating them and everything in between. A cookbook and more with special emphasis on Prince Edward Island’s unique role in Canada’s potato industry.
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My Grandfather’s Cape Breton (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95This is the timeless story of a young boy and his grandfather. It is a voyage of discovery that starts for both of them when young Clive arrives one summer at his grandfather’s farm in Cape Breton. Clive, with all the uncertainty of approaching adolescence, has only the vaguest impression of what a cow looks like and what is expected of him. Under the gentle guidance and wry wit of his Acadian grandfather he learns how to gallop a horse without falling off, how to save the hay crop from from an approaching storm, and how to assist with the birth of a calf. This is a story of Grand Étang, a humorous, sensuous vibrant place, and of a boy growing up wise one summer in Cape Breton.
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Nova Scotia Book of Lists
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95Humans love lists. As humourist writer H. Allen Smith once wrote, “The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.” That infatuation with lists continues here. From Nova Scotia’s great collector comes a masterful collection of lists that will start family arguments, provoke a wry smile, or just generally entertain on a cold winter night or in the dog days of summer.
In The Nova Scotia Book of Lists find out:
•Joe Canada’s Top10 qualities that define a “real” Nova Scotian.
• Natalie MacMaster’s wish list of the Top 10 Nova Scotians she would like to perform for.
•Jimmy Rankin’s 10 favourite songs ever performed by a Nova Scotian.
•JC Douglas’ list to Top 10 bands or performers to ever come out of Nova Scotia.
•Dan Soucoup’s list of Nova Scotia’s 10 best books.
•Darryll Walsh’s Top 10 haunted places in Nova Scotia.
•Len Wagg’s 10 best places in Nova Scotia to photograph.
•Joan Dawson’s 10 most memorable back roads she’s ever travelled in Nova Scotia.
•Michael de Adder’s list of the top Nova Scotians that a political cartoonist likes to draw.
•Michael Haynes’ list of Nova Scotia’s best trails.
•Pete Luckett’s 10 top choices of Nova Scotian products he likes to see on a menu when he dies out.
•Gerry Doucet’s top 10 fishing holes in Nova Scotia. -
Ole Larsen’s Miramichi
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95This book uncovers remarkable images of New Brunswick’s Miramichi taken by photographer Olaf (Ole) Larsen who jumped ship in Newcastle after leaving his native Norway in the 1860s. As well as running his studio portrait business, Larson also documented dramatic scenes of logging along the Miramichi, the bustle of rivers ports, the area’s street celebrations, events, historic structures, and family homes.
Much of Larsen’s breathtaking photography has been left hidden in archives, out of the public view, or has been published with-out credit. This first-ever collection of his pictures reveals the diverse array of the area’s activities and people. It is an unrivalled look at the Miramichi of yesterday.
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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book 6 A Treasury of Stories and Memories
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$19.95A CHRISTMAS TRADITION IN BOOK FORM, Book 6 of Cape Breton’s Christmas is a fresh annual gathering of warmth, joy, and family love—50 well-told memories and stories shot through with sparks of humour, tears of longing, and small flames of faith. Good reading year-round, this Christmas tradition brings together Cape Breton writers—both well-known and lately inspired—presenting sparkling seasonal gems for readers of all ages. A rare collection that preserves some of the best of what it is to be human. This generous book will last.
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We Keep a Light – Nimbus Classic
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$19.95In We Keep A Light, Evelyn M. Richardson describes how she and her husband bought tiny Bon Portage Island and built a happy life there for themselves and their three children. On an isolated lighthouse station off the southern tip of Nova Scotia, the Richardsons shared the responsibilities and pleasures of island living, from carrying water and collecting firewood to making preserves and studying at home. The close-knit family didn’t mind their isolation, and found delight in the variety and beauty of island life.
We Keep A Light is much more than a memoir. It is an exquisitely written, engrossing record of family life set against a glowing lighthouse, the enduring shores of Nova Scotia, and the ever-changing sea.
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You Might Still Be From Nova Scotia If…
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95MICHAEL DE ADDER is back! Six years and multiple national and regional newspaper awards later, Michael de Adder is back home where he belongs. If you thought you laughed and sighed with recognition in the original, get ready for a rip roaring snorter of a treat with You Might Still Be From Nova Scotia If…. As de Adder proves again, this is a province that is proud of who it is and likes nothing better than a good laugh, especially at itself.
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Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret-a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.
Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton- back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.
Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can. -
Kiss the Joy as it Flies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95With all the wisdom, humour, and joy we’ve come to expect from Sheree Fitch, Kiss the Joy As It Flies marks the well-loved author’s move from children’s literature to adult fiction. Set in the fictional Maritime town of Odell, with a cast of exasperating but lovable characters, Kiss the Joy As It Flies promises to be a remarkable debut and a reader’s favourite.Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental “to do” list and sets about putting her messy life in order. Among other things (hide the vibrator!), she’s determined to finally uncover the identity of her secret admirer; reconnect with a lost friend and rival Teen Gaudet; and, most importantly, get her hands on the note her father left her before committing suicide all those years ago.But tidying up the edges of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to do’s. Between fits of weeping and laughter, ranting and bliss, Mercy must contemplate the meaning of life in the face of her own death. In a week filled with the riot of an entire life, nothing turns out the way she’d expected.
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My Nova Scotia Home Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home
Editor: Vernon OicklePublisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95In this no-holds barred look at the province, writers captivate and capture the true essence of Nova Scotia. From these personal accounts of life here, the writers reveal the great joys and small pleasures but also the schisms, foibles, and missed opportunities of a life made in Nova Scotia. By revealing themselves, they make the province larger, more welcoming, more interesting, and certainly more colourful. This book is proof positive that life really is a search for home.
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The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen Down Home on a Nova Scotia Beach
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“Everyone remembers the famous food at Gladee’s Canteen, especially Gladee’s fish and chips and her coconut cream pie.” — Calvin Trillin
Gladee’s Canteen, several times voted as one of the ten best restaurants in Canada, was a special example of co-operative and communal spirit. At the centre of the operation were Gladee and her sister Flossie, supported by the extended Hirtle family. They offered a warm welcome and a memorable menu, in a setting brashly open to the forces of nature.
The Legend of Gladee’s Canteen tells the story of a popular Nova Scotia beach and a pioneer family who, against the odds, constructed a simple canteen at Hirtle’s Beach in1951 and ran it for forty years. The book draws on the author’s family associations, personal memory, and the outlying stockpile of collective recollections — a tapestry of events woven through the evolutionary fabric of a small, relatively isolated Maritime coastal community.
The era of Gladee’s Canteen is remarkable story that takes place in a small coastal Nova Scotia community blessed with a spectacularly dynamic living beach. In its time, the Hirtle family and its sparkling enterprise thrived in spite of relative isolation, uncertain funding, and domestic demons. As a Nova Scotia epic, the success story of Gladee’s Canteen mirrors the recent history of Hirtle’s Beach, exemplifying the twists and turns locked up in legend.
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The Peddlers The Fuller Brush Man, the Lords of Liniment and Door to Door Heroes in Nova Scotia and Beyond
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95The Peddlers is the story of the leading roles some Nova Scotians played in the North American door-to-door sales profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It starts with the life of Nova Scotia-born Alfred C. Fuller, the Fuller Brush Man, whose humble upbringing in the Annapolis Valley laid the foundation for what became one of the biggest businesses of its type in the world.
It also follows the career of Yarmouth County’s Frank Stanley Beveridge, who co-founded the highly successful Stanley Home Products company. From the tough times of the 1920s and 1930s, the story showcases the Lebanese immigrant backpack peddler Herman Rofihe who established a quality men’s wear store that served three generations.
The Peddlers takes you on a door-to-door tour of the origins of household brands like Minard’s and Sloan’s Liniment, JR Watkins and Rawleigh Products, Fraser’s Liniment, Gates Little Gem Pills, Buckley Cough Syrups, Muskol, and other medicinal enterprises founded by peddlers, many of them Nova Scotians. It also chronicles a century-old Hants County murder case involving two young peddlers — one the victim, the other the perpetrator.
Filled with these fascinating stories of Nova Scotia’s history in the door-to-door trade, The Peddlers is a tribute to the men and women of a bygone era in merchandising, the likes of which will never be seen again.
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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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Island at the Centre of the World The Geological Heritage of Prince Edward Island
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Prince Edward Island has a history. But its story begins far, far beyond the birth of the nation, the arrival of European settlers, the Mi’kmaq, or even the first humans. Its story is older than the Island itself, which was born of climate change and rising seas just 7,000 years ago.
The red cliffs of the Island have their origins in a world before the dinosaurs, in a time some 290 million years ago. Its red soils, and the sands and dunes of its shores, are reborn from the rocks of this primeval world. The rocks of the island province were deposited as rivers coursed their way through the tropical heart of Pangea, a giant landmass formed by moving continents. The part of the Earth that would one day become Prince Edward Island lay at the centre of this world, and felt the heat of the tropical sun, its intense monsoon rains and withering dry seasons. This was the beginning of the Age of Reptiles that preceded the dinosaurs, and the landscapes, dryland forests, and animal life of that time are all recorded here across Prince Edward Island, from Tignish through Malpeque Bay and Hillsborough Bay to Annandale. Consider too, that people—the L’Nu’k, or Mi’kmaq, witnessed the birth of this Island thousands of years ago. All of this has been our best kept secret. Until now.
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Through Sunlight and Shadows
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Through Sunlight and Shadows is an autobiographical novel about a young boy set in the small New Brunswick town of Bannonbridge in the 1940s and 1950s. The story is told from the perspective of an older man, Walt Macbride, a character well known to readers of other Raymond Fraser novels.
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Halifax A Literary Portrait
Editor: John BellPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Halifax: A Literary Portrait is a lively anthology of thirty-one selected writings about this colourful Nova Scotian port city dating from the early eighteenth century to the present. Included are works by such varied writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, L.M. Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, Will R. Bird, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, bill bissett and Spider Robinson.
Halifax is captured in its many moods, and the selections, while not always complimentary, are sure to entertain and illuminate.
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Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Steven Laffoley has been a writer, teacher, and dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me, the award-nominated Hunting Halifax: In Search of History, Mystery and Murder, and Death Ship of Halifax Harbour.
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Sidney Crosby, Hat Trick Edition The Story of a Champion
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Sidney Crosby: The Story of a Champion follows the young Cole Harbour hockey phenomenon through his early years in minor hockey, his dominating run through the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, his recordÂbreaking play with the Pittsburgh Penguins, and his spectacular contributions to Team Canada at international competitions. With colour photographs of Crosby in action and featuring interviews from coaches, teammates, and hockey insiders like Pierre McGuire, this accessible, visual book is the account of a onceÂinÂaÂgeneration hockey talent and his path to greatness.
This new edition features updates and a new chapter and photos showcasing Crosby’s recent achievements.
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Nova Scotia Visions of the Future
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the summer of 2008, Pottersfield editor Lesley Choyce sent a letter to a select and varied list of Nova Scotians to contribute to a book about this province’s future. He invited some of the best minds (and hearts) around the province to present their vision of this possible province of the future.
Contributors would write about the environment, technology, immigration, social aspects, urban life, rural life, energy, politics, government, family, economics, forests, the ocean and much more. The bolder the vision, the better. Stories, personal opinions and controversial ideas were encouraged. Which future? Anything beyond ten years and up to a thousand.Â
The results of that request were varied, ambitious and surprising. This most insightful book may set in motion some serious action that can help Nova Scotia live up to its full future potential. The writing is personal, provocative, reflective, proactive, and thoroughly captivating by over forty contributors from many divers fields of expertise.Â
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Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador
Publisher: Downhomer$19.95This unique reference book combines definitions with illustrations, pronunciations and clever turns of phrases that reflect the colour and rhythm of the style of English commonly used in Newfoundland and Labrador. It includes 3,496 words, meanings, pronunciations and possible origins of words; 564 saying and expressions; folklore; weatherlore; a guide to celebrations and customs; and much more.
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Reeling Roosters and Dancing Ducks: Celtic Mouth Music
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95Though puirt-a-beul are popular with both Gaelic-speaking and non-Gaelic speaking audiences, this book offers the first comprehensive study of the genre. Heather Sparling considers how puirt-a-beul compare to other forms of global mouth music and examines its origins, its musical and lyrical characteristics, and its functions.
Sparling brings together years of research, including an array of historical references to puirt-a-beul, interviews with Gaelic singers in both Scotland and Nova Scotia, observations of puirt-a-beul performances on both sides of the Atlantic as well as on recordings, and analysis of melodies and lyrics. Her Nova Scotia viewpoint allows her to consider puirt-a-beul in both its Scottish and diaspora contexts, a perspective that is too often absent in studies of Gaelic song.
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Language of this Land Mi’kma’ki
Artist: Trudy SablePublisher: Cape Breton University Press$19.95The ancient landscapes of Eastern North America are reflected in the language and cultural expressions of its Indigenous peoples, the Mi’kmaq. The rhythms, sounds and patterns of their language are inextricably bound with the seasonal cycles of the animals, plants, winds, skies, waterways and trade routes. The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki is an exploration of Mi’kmaw world view as expressed in language, legends, song and dance. Using imagery as codes, these include not only place names and geologic history, but act as maps of the landscape. Sable and Francis illustrate the fluid nature of reality inherent in its expression – its embodiment in networks of relationships with the landscape integral to the cultural psyche and spirituality of the Mi’kmaq. Language has sustained the Mi’kmaq to the present day, a product of a lineage of Elders who spoke it, who danced the dances and walked this land,Mi’kma’ki, carrying its traditions forward despite centuries of cultural disruption, discrimination and degradation.