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Righting the Wrongs Gus Wedderburn’s Quest for Social Justice in Nova Scotia
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Mary Riley was born and brought up in Nova Scotia. After graduating from Mount Saint Vincent and Carleton universities she worked as a journalist for the Calgary Herald and for the Canadian Press in Ottawa. In 1970 she went to West Africa with CUSO where she taught at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and the University of Ghana. Following graduate work at Simon Fraser University, she taught in the public relations program at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax until her retirement in 2008.
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From Old Hollywood to New Brunswick Memories of a Wonderful Life
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Imagine receiving a mysterious invitation from Charlie Chaplin, doing jigsaw puzzles with Marilyn Monroe, having a heart-to-heart with Jack Kennedy, or being kissed by Greta Garbo. All of these and more are the sensational memories of UK-born, honorary Maritimer Charles Foster. After an unlikely childhood, his adventurous spirit brought him in 1943 to RAF pilot training school in Calgary. Through a series of incredible circumstances and fortunate friendships, Foster went on to become a Hollywood writer and publicist.Now writing from New Brunswick as a regular columnist for Senior’s Advocate, Foster shares his most tantalizing stories as a collection for the first time. With tales from the golden age of film, radio, theatre, and music, including international adventures from Moscow to Berlin and beyond, From Old Hollywood to New Brunswick shows just how far an RAF uniform, a little bit of luck, and whole lot of charm could take you in mid-twentieth century show business.Includes a 20-page insert of original photographs.
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When You Look For Me
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Here is the true story of a parent’s worst nightmare come true. Kevin Bonang’s family learns that their oldest daughter, Tiffany Tanner, has suddenly gone missing while kayaking on an inner city canal in the northern industrial city of Hamm, Germany. Kevin and his wife Lisa immediately make the journey from Nova Scotia to Germany to help in the search. Once at the site, the true reality of their daughter’s fate becomes obvious. No matter how optimistic local search officials try to be, Kevin and his wife assume the worst.
When You Look For Me takes the reader through seventeen days of the massive search including encounters with the police, search dogs, an unkind media but much kinder everyday Germans who share their compassion for Tiffany’s parents. After many grim conversations with search officials, the Bonangs begin to realize that they are not able to bring their daughter back home to Nova Scotia alive even though there had been some small glimmer of hope.
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Paddy Boy
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Paddy Boy is Patrick O’Flaherty’s lively memoir of childhood in a small secluded Newfoundland community, covering the years 1939-54. This time is most unique because it is a bridge between the old Newfoundland with its curious links to England, Ireland, and Scotland, and its new status, after 1949, as a province of Canada. O’Flaherty reimagines just what that lost world was like, how children figured into it, how his family and other families functioned and what part religion played.
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Brad Marchand The Unlikely Star
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95He was too small to make it to the National Hockey League, they decided. Brad Marchand has proven them wrong, helping to lead the Boston Bruins to their first Stanley Cup in thirty-nine years, and scoring the winning goal for Canada in the deciding game of the 2016 World Cup final, which made Marchand—a player fans loved to hate—a hero.
This full-colour book features personal interviews with “The Little Ball of Hate,” who has matured since his days with the Halifax Mooseheads, as well as interviews with family and coaches, and over 40 photos of the star, including some previously unpublished.
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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.
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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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Black and Bluenose The Contemporary History of a Community
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95Black and Bluenose documents the recent history of Canada’s oldest and largest indigenous black community. Saunders writes with passion and insight about issues that are close to his heart and an understanding of the historical forces that shape the headlines of today.
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Celtic Colours
Artist: Murdock SmithPublisher: Breton Books$18.95The first book about celtic colours, 10 Nights Without Sleep is an insider’s years of adventure with the Cape Breton’s festival that has won the world’s praise. Both a history and an intense personal memoir, the reader rides on Dave Mahalik’s shoulder as he discovers the joy of driving some of the finest Celtic musicians around Cape Breton through full-blown autumn colours. One huge musical party, year after year, both onstage and at the nightly Festival Club where the music that stretchses to dawn and beyond — into days that end thrilled, exhausted and with breakfas before bedt. And Dave really takes you along.
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Through the Eyes of Mary The Mary Morehouse Diaries (1920-1958)
Publisher: Chocolate River Publishing$18.95The Mary Morehouse diaries give the reader a vivid picture of life in rural New Brunswick in early twentieth century. Through Mary, the reader can follow the highs and lows of village life during the throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and the war years of the 1940s. Bird has researched this time period for her other books and her annotations and introductory sections give context to the individual diary entries.
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The Alpine Path
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Lucy Maud Montgomery, the creator of Anne of Green Gables and many other popular children’s stories penned this memoir during World War I and it is often considered the best account of her childhood on Prince Edward Island and her first years as a writer. The Alpine Path references her long and difficult journey to become a full-fledged writer and describes, in charming detail, her childhood in rural Prince Edward Island during the closing years of the 1800s.
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Years Before Anne (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Francis W. P. Bolger, who teaches history at the University of Prince Edward Island, has compiled an informative and complete picture of the fascinating life and brilliant career of Lucy Maud Montgomery, drawing on her scrapbooks, letters, diaries, photos and conversations with family members.
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Lessons Learned Upside the Head
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95Lessons Learned Upside the Head is a book with the potential to help you make positive changes in your life and the lives you touch each day — if you are willing to listen to your heart and are open to change. Carol Ann draws on her life’s experiences laced with examples of how the simplest tasks in life can bring you the most happiness and success. Having learned to communicate, celebrate, lighten up, share, care and dare to go it alone, Carol Ann will guide you as you revisit your own personal skills. What works for this Valley girl from rural Nova Scotia might also work for you.
The author writes compellingly about her work and in personal life as she takes you through lessons learned from her small town upbringing in Wilmot, Nova Scotia to the boardrooms of Bell Canada during her heady executive days. Less than two years following her own experience with cancer, Carol Ann walked away from what she executive career and boldly walked through the doorways that cancer blew wide open. In telling her story from the heart, Carol Ann serves up the opportunity for the reader to take a fresh look at one’s own life.
Carol Ann refocused her energies on what is really important: family, friends and finding a way to contribute while leading a more meaningful life. Here story includes:
-Leaving home at the tender age of eighteen armed with a high school diploma and a single goal — to find that “big job” and make her mark in what seemed to be a man’s world;
-Life as a single parent after marriage, motherhood and divorce all in her early twenties;
-Climbing (and sometimes stumbling on) that slippery corporate ladder;
-Battling breast cancer while watching it take her mother’s life at the same time;
-Learning to become a new and better person as the result of sickness and hardship. -
Watchman Against the World
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95The story of Reverend Norman McLeod and his people.
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Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Growing Up With Julie is the story of Gerry Steele’s childhood with a French-speaking mother in an English-speaking community. Set in Miscouche, near Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in the early part of the 20th century, the story is an historical snapshot of a life heavily influenced by the Catholic church, poverty and the Depression, alcoholism, and cultural tensions between the Acadians and the Scots. At the head of the family is Steele’s grandmother, a woman unwavering in her beliefs—regardless of their merit, validity, or tendency to offend. It is also a story of one woman’s determination to educate her children in a hard-living rural society coming to terms with modernity.
Gifted with an excellent memory for detail, Gerry Steele delivers a story that is rich in integrity and precision, with a good dose of humour to brighten up the dark corners.
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Mud, Sweat and Tears
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Mud, Sweat and Tears tells the story of Bud Ings’ adventures as a rural veterinarian in the 1950s. As one of Prince Edward Island’s first professionally trained veterinarians, Ings set up his practice in the eastern town of Souris before moving to Montague.
Farms were rarely close at hand, however, and the sight of Bud Ings behind the wheel of his Volkswagen Bug became a familiar one on the Island’s highways and muddy back roads. And whether he was helping to deliver a calf, giving shots of penicillin to a pig, or putting down a beloved horse, Ings treated each animal- and each farmer- with dignity and respect.
Ings’ memoir is a rich, often humorous account of his first decade as a vet, at time when there were few vacations, no modern tools of the trade, and no request too strange to attend to. It’s also the story of a past era, when PEI’s farms flourished and the animals were not only the backbone of the economy, but part of the family.
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Vet Behind the Years
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Bud Ings was born in 1926 on Prince Edward Island and graduated from the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph, ON. He practised in rural King’s County, was a Liberal member of the legislative assembly, and served as agriculture and health ministers. A long-time member of the Queens County Fiddlers, Bud lives in Montague.
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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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By The Sweat of My Brow The Life of a Newfoundland Logger
Publisher: John Kitchen$19.95This is the story of a young outport Newfoundlander who went into the lumberwoods at an early age to harvest trees to feed the paper mill at Grand Falls. It tells of his experiences at various phases of wood’s work: cutting trees, transporting them to the waterways, driving them to the mill, cooking meals, building dams, teaming horses, driving tractors, trucks, and other wood’s machinery.It tells of lumbermen’s living and working conditions-the hard-ships of working in all weathers, enduring heat, rain, snow, frost and flies. The camaraderie of camp life, the food served, the bunkhouse and beds they had to sleep on, the lice, the smells, and the changes brought about by the I.W.A strike.It chronicles the history of the log harvest of the Paper Company’s Millertown Division, from the start-up in the first decade of the 1900’s to the present.
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Northern Nurse
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Set in the late 1920s, this is the true story of an Australian-born nurse who comes to Labrador to work.
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Passion for Survival
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Marie Anne and Louis Payzant had high hopes for a new future as they left a comfortable life on the island of Jersey and sailed with their children across the Atlantic to a new settlement on the shores of Nova Scotia in June 1753. Both had already fled religious persecution in their native France. In this fascinating and true account of Louis & Marie Anne Payzant, author Linda Layton has pieced together the couple’s heartbreaking sense of loss, their struggles and deaths set against the backdrop of one of the most chaotic times in the history of Europe and North America.
The author is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Marie Anne and Louis. She has spent years researching and traveling in a quest for facts about her ancestors The book will appeal to enthusiasts of early Canadian history of Nova Scotia, Quebec and Acadia as well as readers who love a great adventure story as it focuses on one woman caught in the religious struggle between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and the colonial struggle between our two founding cultures. -
The Great Maritime Detective
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95He was a sailor a miner, a bounty hunter, a prospector, a ghost hunter, and a railway guard, just to name a few. Whether sinner or saint, Peter Owen Carroll, a.k.a. Peachie Carroll, is best remembered as the infamous Maritime police detective of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Although his methods were sometimes unscrupulous, and he was often considered a mercenary, Peachie Carroll was a formidable investigator. Peachie was fired, re-hired, and quit many times, but as a police officer Peachie solved some of the Maritimes’ best-known crimes, such as the murder of Moncton police officer Joseph E. Stedman. He arrested moonshine-makers and embezzlers, petty thieves, rum-runners, bank robbers, and murderers. In 1896, Peachie gained fame again, solving the New Brunswick murders of Eliza Dutcher and her son.
In The Great Maritime Detective, author Monica Graham profiles this long-standing hero of Pictou County and one of the region’s ultimate characters. -
A Hard Chance
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Tom and Melissa Gallant sat in their car at an intersection outside Lunenburg one early summer evening in 1992. After a decade of romance and adventure, they were at a crossroads in their lives. Melissa wanted to settle down and start a business. Tom wanted to sail their schooner around the world. They had decided to go their separate ways. As they entered the intersection, one notorious for brutal accidents, their car was hit by a bus. When Tom woke up in the Fisherman’s Memorial Hospital and asked about Melissa, all anyone could say was, “It doesn’t look good.” She was in intensive care in Halifax. She was in a coma, being kept alive by machines.
This is the story of what happened in the months that followed. It is also the story of a love affair full of high seas adventure and romance, of life lived far from the conventions of polite society. It is the tale of two lives shattered in an instant, forever changed by an unmerciful twist of fate. Melissa’s brain had suffered a catastrophic trauma. When she woke from the coma, she would not know who she was, or who Tom was. She would be unable to talk, walk or feed herself.
Theirs was a love facing the greatest of challenges. This is a book about redemption conferred by accepting the hardest things in life with an open heart.
Tom Gallant is a playwright, musician, scriptwriter and journalist. Tom’s poetry and prose has been included in magazines and anthologies. Tom has logged fifty thousand miles of deep water sailing in his Nova Scotian schooner. For a decade he has been a caregiver to his injured wife.
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Driving Minnie’s Piano
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Novelist Lesley Choyce weaves together his real-life adventures living by the sea at Lawrencetown Beach on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. He writes of his love for the rugged coast and tells tales of the ordinary and the extraordinary. His story includes accounts of what it’s like surfing in the Canadian North Atlantic through all four seasons including the frigid depths of winter.
Also threading its way through this narrative is the story of Minnie’s piano. There is music here in word and spirit along with the lessons learned from the old and the young. Driving Minnie’s Piano is an eloquent personal memoir about the precious and fateful moments that change our lives. It is an exploration of what makes us tick and prompts us to be both heroes and fools in the daily enterprise of living. -
Life and Times of Joe Casey
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Joe Casey’s quick wit and indomitable spirit have enabled him to take risks in every job he ever undertook. Born in Annapolis County in1918 and still going strong, he will make you laugh your way through the many dramatic events if his active life. As a boy, he delivered his mother’s loaves of bread up and down the Victoria Beach Road and later in life he would break bread with the rich and famous. As a third-generation harbour pilot, he faced many dangers piloting munitions-laden ships through Digby Gap during the war and piloting ships of all kinds in the most severe weather.
Joe’s life story, filled with anecdotes and humour, mirrors the history of Nova Scotia in the twentieth century. It shows how that history shaped the man and how the man shaped history –as harbour pilot, fisherman, fish plant owner, lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, hotel owner as well as member and Deputy Speaker of Nova Scotia Legislature.
Joe has pitted his storytelling skills against some of the best, including American actor James Cagney. On another occasion, a sailing trip down the East Coast, Joe’s spirit of competition led him to trade tales with Robert Ripley of Believe it or not fame. In this volume, his rich stories bring the past alive.
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Anchorman
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Stewart Donovan is professor of English at St. Thomas University. His recent book The Forgotten World of R.J. MacSween: a life, was shortlisted for two Atlantic Book Awards.
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Island Year
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95As they neared retirement, Greg Brown and his wife Anne gave up their life in the U.S. to settle on a windswept Nova Scotia island inhabited by wild sheep and deer, where harbour seals sing in the fog and an old lighthouse still keeps watch over the North Atlantic. Island Year: Finding Nova Scotia tells the story of the surprises, challenges and discoveries of their first year alone on an island as they restored an old fisherman’s house, explored the island, and began to learn how to live a Nova Scotia way of life.
This is a story for anyone who dreams of exchanging a fast-paced, high-tech life for something slower and just maybe more meaningful. This is a story about the night sky and the dawn chorus, lobsters and wild raspberries, a famous pirate, the kindness of others, and getting in touch with yourself again. Funny and inspiring, this book redefines what a rich life can mean. -
Radio Talk
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Rick Howe has been a reporter, a newscaster, a news director, a commentator and a talk show host. For several years he also wrote a column for the Halifax Daily News, and he has made numerous appearances on CTV and CBC television as a political analyst. With family roots in New Brunswick, Howe has worked in radio in Campbellton, Newcastle, Saint John and over thirty years in Halifax. Currently living in Fall River, Nova Scotia, Howe is married to former ATV/ ASN television journalist Yvonne Colbert.
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Long Ago and Far Away
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Wayne Curtis was born and raised in the rural Miramichi community of Keenan. A high school dropout, he has worked at many jobs in the woods and in factories, including six years with General Motors. He has also been a storekeeper and a river guide. Returning to school during his adult years, he took night courses to get his high school diploma, followed by three years of university, eventually earning an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas University. Wayne has written for The Globe and Mail and The National Post and is the author of three novels, four books of short stories and a screenplay for the CBC. Long Ago and Far Away is his thirteenth book.
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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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Hermit of Africville
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Jon Tattrie is a journalist and writer. After a decade in Europe, he took a job on the Halifax Daily News in 2006. When the paper closed in 2008, he became a full-time freelancer, writing for Metro Canada, Transcontinental Media, the Chronicle-Herald, Halifax and Progress magazines, and other publications. He’s sweated in a Mi’kmaq lodge, sailed a tall ship, explored a nuclear bunker and spent Christmas at the Halifax Stanfield International Airport. Black Snow, his first novel, is a love story set during the Halifax Explosion. He lives with his fiancée in Halifax.
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The Porridge is Up ! Stories from My Childhood Stories from My Childhood
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95The Porridge is Up! Stories from My Childhood is a collection of stories from those years–from a time when a secondhand bike or a brand new pair of pants were a big deal. But this is not the story of angels–as McIsaac hilariously recounts, he and his siblings courted their share of trouble. The Porridge is Up! is charming and laugh-out-loud funny; the tale of McIsaac’s strong desire for a box of Wagon Wheel cakes will make you laugh until you cry.
