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How to Cook a Moose
Publisher: Islandport PressInspired by her move from Brooklyn to Maine, as well as the slow-food, buy-local movement that has re-energized sustainable farming, bestselling author Kate Christensen turns her blockbuster talent to telling the story of the hardship and happiness that has sustained her adopted home through thick and thin, as demonstrated through the staple foods of the region. Using a candid blend of humour, insight, culinary knowledge, and taste for rugged adventure, Christensen shares personal insights and takes readers on a journey into the lives and landscapes of the farmers, fishermen, hunters, chefs, and families who harvest or produce delicious, healthful food. She also details the history of food in the region and the secrets to cultivating her own sources of joy. The result is a mouthwatering literary stew that combines the magic ingredients of love, personal appetites, hard labour, history, and original recipes.
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Ghost Buck One man’s Family and its Hunting Traditions
Publisher: Islandport PressCelebrated author, illustrator, environmentalist, and hunting enthusiast Dean B. Bennett writes a book that is half-memoir, half-history of a waning Maine tradition. In Ghost Buck: One Man’s Family and Its Hunting Traditions, Dean Bennett adds personal depth and poignancy to a multi-generational tale that explores the erosion of public land use, the degradation of the environment, and the changing rural culture in the Northeast since the 1800s.
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How to Cook a Moose
Artist: Kate ChristensenPublisher: Islandport PressInspired by her new home in New England and the slow food movement re-energizing sustainable farming, Kate Christensen picks up where she left off in her last memoir, Blue Plate Special. Christensen creates a tempting, modern stew that will delight readers as only she can, using the ingredients of true love, personal appetite, humor, history, and original recipes.
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Backtrack
Publisher: Islandport PressFormer naval officer, avid outdoorsman, sportsman, and award-winning journalist V. Paul Reynolds journeys back along the path of his life to revisit and share with readers many of his outdoor experiences. In the 1940s, Paul’s father took him to favorite hunting and fishing spots, helping give birth to his son’s lifelong love affair with the outdoors. Later, Harvard eventually took his son to his first smoke-filled hunting camp, where amber liquid flowed and profanity filled the room. Reynolds would soon understand how the outdoors could bestow both the love of nature and the joy of friendship.
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Suddenly, the Cider Didn’t Taste So Good Adventures of a Game Warden in Maine
Publisher: Islandport PressRetired Maine Game Warden John Ford has seen it all. He’s been shot at by desperate prison escapees, been outwittedby wily trappers, and rescued scores of animals. As a tenacious and successful warden, he was always willing tospend the time needed to nab violators of the state’s fish and game laws. At the same time, though, he wasn’t a cold,heartless, go-by-the-book enforcer; he usually had a good quip ready when he slipped the handcuffs on a violator,and he wasn’t above accepting a lesson learned as sufficient penalty for breaking the law. Ford is also a very giftedstoryteller and he writes of his adventures in Suddenly, the Cider Didn’t Taste So Good, a collection of true tales, bothhumorous and serious, from the trenches of law enforcement, and also includes heartwarming accounts of his rescueof hurt or abandoned animals.
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Shoutin’ into the Fog
Publisher: Islandport Press“Shoutin’ Into the Fog” is a gritty Depression-era memoir of life in Midcoast Maine. Author Thomas Hanna, a long-time resident of Bath, grew up in the village of Five Islands on Georgetown Island, in a small, crowded bungalow pieced together on the edge of a swamp with second-hand wood and cardboard. He was the eldest son and the second of eight children born to his young mother and his father, a World War I veteran big on dreams, but low on luck. Drawing on insight gleaned from his eighty years, this is a book written with sensitivity, humour, and subtle emotion about a hardscrabble way of life, old-time Maine, and the meaning of both family and forgiveness. His personal tale casts an honest light not only on his own family, but helps illuminate a way of life common to the coast in the 1920s and 1930s that is slowly fading from memory.
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Nine Mile Bridge
Publisher: Islandport PressIn this critically acclaimed Maine classic, first published in 1945, Helen Hamlin writes of her adventures teaching school at a remote Maine lumber camp and then of living deep in the Maine wilderness with her game warden husband. Her experiences are a must-read for anyone who loves the untamed nature and wondrous beauty of Maine’s north woods and the unique spirit of those who lived there. In the 1930s, in spite of being warned that remote Churchill Depot was ‘no place for a woman’, the remarkable Helen Hamlin set off at age twenty to teach school at the isolated lumber camp at the headwaters of the Allagash River. She eventually married a game warden and moved deeper into the wilderness. In her book, Hamlin captures that time in her life, complete with the trappers, foresters, lumbermen, woods folk, wild animals, and natural splendour that she found at Umsaskis Lake and then at Nine Mile Bridge on the St. John River.
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Vittorio’s Journey
Vittorio Rappini was born in Bologna in 1921. At the start of World War II, he survives the sinking of his submarine in the Mediterranean Sea and, for six years, suffers the degradation, drudgery and hardships of life in Allied prisoner of war camps. Finally able to return home, Vittorio confronts the aftermath of war in Italy, which sets him on the road to emigration to Canada. Vittorio’s Journey fits into the broader historical memory of all those who fought, suffered or perished on both sides during this tragic period of modern history.
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The Birth and the Babyhood of the Telephone A Talk to Telephone Pioneers by The Other Man on the Line
Publisher: Breton BooksWhile Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas A. Watson was the craftsman who gave the telephone life. Model after model, night and day, together they battled disappointment, and were spurred on by hints of success. Then in 1875, Watson’s hands created the first telephone that actually carried the human voice.
Yet the world barely remembers Thomas Watson beyond the first sentence transmitted over the telephone: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want you.”
In this classic book, restored and expanded, The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone delivers both a detailed record of the development of the first telephone as it also reveals the very human story of the relationship between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson. We see the younger Watson grow up through the guidance of the better educated and more sophisticated A. G. Bell, as Watson receives books, and lessons in elocution and even table manners.
This moving first-person account keeps alive the story of a relationship between two brilliant, impassioned men who changed the world.
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Father Greg – A Life The Cabbage Patch Priest
Publisher: Breton BooksCape Breton’s renowned social activist and priest comes alive in this warm, personal biography. Crafted from Greg MacLeod’s diaries and letters, plus Doucet’s years as his traveling companion, Father Greg displays the incredible range and vigour of MacLeod’s ideas and their down-to-earth application. Through his daring range of proposals, Fr. Greg relentlessly advocated for the public good. Includes a terrific batch of photographs.
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Watchman Against the World
Publisher: Breton BooksThe story of Reverend Norman McLeod and his people.
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10 Nights Without Sleep
Artist: Murdock SmithPublisher: Breton BooksThe 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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Stud Horse Boy
Publisher: Breton BooksFrom the truck’s horn and the stallion’s whinny, The Stud Horse Boy is called from school for adventures breeding horses that made farm life and woods work possible in Eastern Nova Scotia. The boy is torn between boiling anger and admiration for his one-eyed, alcoholic father. Will he become his father? How do you act amidst the eroticism and smutty jokes? How do you find the courage to live? A wonderful storyteller, Darryll Taylor remembers with great good humour, shockingly realistic scenes, and passionate respect. The Stud Horse Boy is today’s story-a teenager coming of age in difficult and changing times.
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Talk Back
Publisher: Breton BooksIt’s been 10 long years since TALKBACK was shuffled off the airwaves, although it was the most popular and highest earning radio show in Cape Breton’s history. For thirteen years, Dave Wilson hosted TALKBACK. This book is his chance to help us all remember, and to sign off on his own terms.
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George Orwell’s Friend
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton BooksBorn in British Columbia, Paul Potts (1911-1990) lived most of his life based in London’s Soho district, a friend and confidant of many ultimately famous writers. His circle included Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Smart and Sean O’Casey–and of course George Orwell, a constant friend. George Orwell’s Friend includes autobiography and poetry, an intimate portrait of George Orwell, and the classic anguished memoir of love and vulnerability?elements that rarely find words, and even more rarely find the words of a man. Along with Potts’ intimate essay about George Orwell, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle,’ editor Ronald Caplan reclaims the thoughtful work of a passionate, unusual Canadian.
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Acadian Lives
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton BooksThe 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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Listen to the Wind
Publisher: Breton BooksA rare and fascinating story of a life with schizophrenia. With the power of a novel, and laced with her small, strong poems, this book is a pleasure as well as art.
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Cape Breton Captain
Publisher: Breton BooksThis is the true rough-and-tumble story of the life of David McLeod, a robust autobiography of saltwater and guts and passionate romance. Well-told story by the man himself.
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Archie Neil
Publisher: Breton BooksBorn in 1943 in Plattsburg, New York, Mary Anne Ducharme came to Cape Breton in 1979, with her husband Richard and their children, Richard and Kathryn. For the past twelve years she has edited Participaper, produced through the Inverness County Department of Recreation. Mary Anne has a Master’s Degree in English, and has been a schoolteacher and a playwright and director. With her husband, she raises acres of strawberries in Whycocomagh
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Mrs. Beaton’s Question My Nine Years at the Halifax School for the Blind
Publisher: Acorn PressRobert Mercer’s life could have been very different. He was born with very low vision and, as a youngster, struggled in school. But through the intervention of a caring teacher and the support of his family, he found his way to the Halifax School for the Blind and into the classroom of Mrs. Beaton. It was there that he discovered his voice, a voice he uses to recount his remarkable journey from a shy little boy to a community leader.
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Deep Water Pearls A Collection of Women’s Memoir
Editor: Kathleen HamiltonPublisher: Acorn PressThirteen writers dive into the deep emotional waters of their lives to write their most personal, honest stories. In doing so they transform the grit of female experience into pearls of truth and beauty.
Guided by memoir coach and editor Kathleen Hamilton, the writers reveal the most intimate turning points in their lives, memories deeply charged with meaning, moments after which their lives were never the same.
The stories are diverse: we meet a PEI farm girl exploring her early intuitive knowings, a tattooed millennial struggling with PTSD, a mature academic rebounding from the betrayal of her marriage, and a bride whose wedding day is a triumph over a treacherous past.
In The Strength it Took to Ditch You, a woman reveals her years in an abusive same-sex relationship. High School Reunion is set in Unit 9, a psych ward in Charlottetown. In The Waiting Place, a young mother from western PEI explores the meaning of home.
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Minding the House Volume II 1993-2017
Publisher: Acorn PressThis follow-up collection of biographies of Prince Edward Island MLAs provides an important resource for political buffs or anyone who is interested in policies that shape the province. It records a part of Island history that is not often told—the stories of those who have dedicated a portion of their career to public life. This second volume of Minding the House will be of interest to all Islanders and those who wish to learn the recent history of Prince Edward Island.
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This Navy Doctor Came Ashore
Publisher: Acorn PressDr. Read entered the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and worked for three years as a flight surgeon. When the war was winding down, he realized that his career as a flight surgeon was also over. But he remembered how much he had enjoyed the three weeks he spent in Charlottetown when he relieved the medical officer at HMCS Queen Charlotte. This city of 20,000, in which this landship was ‘moored’, was much to his liking partly because he had grown up in Amherst, Nova Scotia, just across the Northumberland Strait, where he thought the culture was very similar. He also knew that as the only medical officer there would be independence, significant responsibility and virtual freedom from naval protocol and politics. One couldn’t ask for more.  But this was during prohibition on the Island and little did he know that a great deal of his time would be spent writing “prescriptions” for alcohol so that the officers could be allowed to drink. Nor did he know that because of the lack of family physicians on the Island, he would be asked to open a general practice in a rural area of the province. For a flight surgeon who had little experience in family medicine, this would be a whole new adventure. This book chronicles some of the noteworthy events of the time he spent spent as a country doctor.
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Right Place, Right Time
Publisher: Acorn PressWith over 25 years of broadcasting experience, Bruce Rainnie has collected stories from every arena He has worked intimately with PEI’s legendary broadcaster “Boomer” Gallant as well as many other well known characters from across the country. Bruce did the first TV interview with Sidney Crosby back in 1996 and has remained in contact with him ever since. He also worked closely with Olympic Gold Medalist, Heather Moyse. The book will include these anecdotes and stories from his work as a news and sports broadcaster.
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Mud, Sweat and Tears
Publisher: Acorn PressMud, 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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Growing Up With Julie
Publisher: Acorn PressGrowing 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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By The Sweat of My Brow The Life of a Newfoundland Logger
Publisher: John KitchenThis 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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Come Walk With Me
Publisher: John KitchenThis book is a descriptive and informative account the author’s backpacking experiences, complemented by nearly 300 coloured photographs.Walk with the author around Newfoundland visiting outport settlement; photographing caribou in wilderness areas; and hiking the 909 kilometers accross the province.Experience, also his adventures in England as ge wanders the designated trails and and pathways all the way from the Scottish border, sotuyh to the English Channel.His trips to aboriginal areas of Nprthern Ontario and Manitoba, too, will give you viewings of some amazing scenery.A quick flip through the book will show you what to expect and enjoy. Happy reading!
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Women Who Care
Nili Kaplan-Myrth, MD, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and physician. She has expertise in determinants of health, women’s health, disability studies and Indigenous self-determination in health, with a strong commitment to action-based qualitative research, feminism and social justice. Her three wonderful children, her friends and family haven’t let her quit medicine yet.
Lori Hanson, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan with interests in community activism, gender and development, health equity, sexual and reproductive health, health promotion, and transformative education. In her spare time, she raises her two sets of twins and works with a great group of community and university women involved in the Saskatoon Women’s Community Coalition.
Patricia Thille, BSc (PT), MA, is a former physical therapist and health services researcher. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Calgary and balances her academic work with community outreach as a healthy sexuality educator with Venus Envy. -
The Fisher Queen
Publisher: Heritage Group DistributionIt’s 1981, and Sylvia Taylor has signed on as rookie deckhand on a wallowy 40-foot salmon troller. Looking forward to making money for university, she is determined to master the ins and outs of fishing some of the most dangerous waters in the world: the Graveyard of the Pacific. For four months, she helps navigate the waters off northern Vancouver Island, learning the ways of fisherfolk and the habitat in which they breathe, sleep and survive.
The politics of selling fish, the basics of tying gear, near-death experiences, endless boat troubles, the emotional perils of sharing cramped quarters—all are part of a steep and unforgiving learning curve. Taylor’s story captures the reality of life on a fishboat and documents the end of an era, a time when the fishing industry wasn’t yet marred by unchecked overfishing or hyper-regulation. Her lyrical, simple prose explores the tight-knit relationship of fishers with the west coast’s wild, untamed waters. Her memoir bursts with all the humour and hell, peace and upheaval that is the Pacific Ocean.