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One Strong Girl
$21.95One Strong Girl is a mother’s vivid account of what it is like to lose her daughter, India, to a rare debilitating disease. The story is a bold description of what it means to deal with deep sorrow and still find balance and beauty in an age steeped in the denial of death. At ten, India climbed the highest on the rope at gymnastics, yet by sixteen was so weak she was unable to even dress herself. The narrative follows the six-year fight for answers from the medical community. Finally, after the genetic testing of India’s DNA, it was discovered there were two mutations on her ASAH1 gene, a deadly combination. Today her cells are alive in a research lab at the University of Ottawa. This is a legacy that cuts both ways, a point of pride and pain. One Strong Girl is a story of what it’s like to outlive an only child. It describes the intensity of loving a dying child and most importantly, the joy to be found, even amidst the sorrow.
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Lure of the Labrador Wild
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95The improbable collaboration between an ambitious young writer, Leonidas Hubbard, and a forty-year-old New York attorney, Dillon Wallace. They set off in the spring of 1903 with George Elson, an Aboriginal guide with no first-hand knowledge of their destination—the incompletely mapped Lake Michikamau region of interior Labrador. Beset by delays, the men paddle past their intended route, the Naskaupi River, and head up the dreadful Susan River instead. When in early September they finally glimpse the vast waters of Michikamau from atop an unknown mountain, the cold winds have already begun. With almost no food left the three begin a desperate struggle against starvation and the quickening pace of a cruel winter, heading homeward in a race for their lives.
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The Sea Was in Their Blood
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The Sea Was in Their Blood explores two key questions: who were the men aboard the Miss Ally, and why were they battered and sunk by a storm forecasted days in advance? Through interviews with the crew’s families and friends, rescue personnel, and members of the tight-knit fishing communities of Woods Harbour and Cape Sable Island, award-winning journalist Quentin Casey pieces together the tragic sinking—including important case details not previously reported—and weaves in the backstories of the Miss Ally‘s crew and the lingering effects of their disappearance.
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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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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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Country Roads Memoirs from Rural Canada
Editor: Pam ChamberlainPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Rural people, places, and communities vary greatly in a country as geographically vast and culturally diverse as Canada. For some, the country was a place of happiness and belonging; for others, it was a source of hardship and sorrow. For many, it was both. Some writers grew up loving their rural homes, never wanting to leave. Others couldn’t wait to escape to the city.
From Victoria, British Columbia, to St. John’s, Newfoundland, three generations of Canadians tell their stories of growing up in rural communities in Country Roads. The writers–including journalist Pamela Wallin, NHL coach Brent Sutter, and award-winning authors Sharon Butala and Rudy Wiebe–share one thing in common: they were all country kids whose upbringing profoundly impacted their identities. The thirty-two memoirs in Country Roads are sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, but always engaging. -
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 Nova Scotia Book of Fathers
Editor: Julia Swan, Lesley ChoycePublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this poignant, often funny, and heartfelt collection, Nova Scotia authors and artists put to the page their thoughts and emotions about their fathers, who raised, inspired, loved, and taught them–and occasionally drove them crazy. As well as MacLeod, Bruneau, and Murray, The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers includes stories by Harry Thurston, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Frank Cameron, Joan Baxter, Jon Tattrie, Bruce Graham, Lesley Choyce, Lenore Zann, David Mossman, Janice Landry, Lindsay Ruck, Ian Colford, Julia Swan, Craig Flinn, and Daniel Paul.
Here are fathers of all kinds: quiet, thoughtful, wise men; stubborn and headstrong men; and men whose careers and circumstances called forth public bravery and heroism. Included too are fathers whose mark on the world is more private but just as compelling, just as fearless, just as noteworthy. They embody the strength everyone needs to weather the storms of life, the humour that helps us to laugh at crucial moments, and the stalwart vision it takes to raise daughters and sons and send them out into the world.
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Deep Water Pearls A Collection of Women’s Memoir
Editor: Kathleen HamiltonPublisher: Acorn Press$22.95Thirteen 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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In the Pit A Cape Breton Coal Miner
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95A RARE, EXCITING INSIDER STORY of coal mine life in Cape Breton, filled with humour, pride, terror, and humanity.
From shoveling at the coal face and hand-lifting tons of shaker pans, to hurtling through low narrow tunnels testing a diesel during early mechanization—you are not spared the details—or the laughs!
Here are the gripping drama and rich good humour of one man’s daily work underground—a rare, personal account that opens up the culture of coal, from a man who worked 15 years in Number 12 and 18 Collieries, New Waterford.
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Women Who Care
Editor: Lori Hanson, Nili Kaplan - MyrthPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Nili 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. -
Finding Forgiveness
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95Adrian Smith was raised in what seemed to be a very traditional, Roman Catholic upbringing. His father, Adrian Smith Sr, was very religious. He had studied to be a priest and left the seminary only 6 months before his ordination. After he left the seminary, Adrian Sr then worked for 30 years as a child psychologist for PEI’s Department of Education. He died at the age of 58 from a brain tumor. A week later after his death, Adrian Jr discovered that his father had been living a lie and that he was homosexual; he had kept it hidden his whole life.
Adrian kept his father’s sexuality a secret until his mother died. At that time, he decided to make a conscious effort to face his and his father’s story. He ended up having travel away from PEI to get counselling to help him get over the lies of his past. He was finally making progress when allegations of sexual abuse against my father surfaced.
The book details a son’s experience with coming to terms with the secrecy and betrayal. But it is also a story of redemption as after years of hard work Smith could finally find forgiveness.
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Prophet of the Wilderness Abraham Gesner
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Shipwreck and arrest were common setbacks in the early nineteenth century, but neither slowed the rise of scientist and inventor Abraham Gesner (1797–1864). He possessed a curious mind and a dynamic speaking style, enlivened by his many fact-finding travels throughout the Maritime provinces and beyond. Of his innovative experiments, the most famous led to a refining method for a new fuel named kerosene, an invention that would change the world.
This biography depicts a man far ahead of his time, as interested in social problems—such as lighting cities at night and establishing decent immigrant settlements—as he was in advancing science and industry. A fascinating and meticulously research account of a man too often not given the credit he deserved.
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Thelma A Life in Pictures
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$24.95Thelma Stevens Pepper was born in 1920. A century later—from her adoptive home in Saskatoon—she reflects on a hundred years of life, love, and pictures.
At 60, it was creativity and passion that rescued Thelma Pepper from the depths of depression. With her kids grown and gone, she was floundering, wondering who she was, and what she was meant to do. In photography, she found what her father and grandfather before her had found and that was a capacity to peer into other lives and to find in them a celebration of the human spirit.
It was that commitment to capturing the human condition that led to her work not only being celebrated here in Canada but around the world. In these noble lives, she found herself.
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Mona Parsons
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Even as a young girl growing up in Nova Scotia, Mona Louise Parsons stood out for her elegance and theatrical flair. But the life of this Wolfville native has always overshadowed her stage roles. From a Nova Scotian childhood, she became a 1920s New York chorus girl, a Depression-era nurse, a prisoner of the Nazis, and an escaped, emaciated fugitive who walked across Nazi Germany in the dying months of World War II.
The process of uncovering the story of Mona Parsons took almost as many twists and turns as the life it was piecing together. This book traces the author’s own journey as she follows clues from Wolfville to New York to Europe and back, leaping across oceans and decades with imagination and grace.
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Percy Willmot: A Cape Bretoner at War
Publisher: Cape Breton University Press$23.95When Britain went to war with Germany in August 1914, Canada and the rest of the British empire followed without question and without being asked. By the time the Great War finally ground to an end in November 1918, 619,636 Canadians had enlisted in the struggle. One of them was Percy Willmot.Percy wrote frequently to his sister, no matter where he was or what was going on and he was a gifted writer, whose sparkling personality still clearly emerges more than eighty years later.Willmot’s letters tell us much about the experiences of thousands of soldiers: progress of the war and daily experiences of the men, sometimes pointing out the contrast between the beauties of nature and the unspeakable horrors of modern warfare. They remind us of the intense intimacy of the shared experience of the trenches, perhaps especially for someone like Percy, serving in a unit with many comrades from his own community.
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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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Right Place, Right Time
Publisher: Acorn Press$27.95With 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 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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Cape Breton Captain
Publisher: Breton Books$9.95This 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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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. -
If I Knew Then What I Know Now
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carol Ann Cole is an author, a professional speaker and the founder of the Comfort Heart Initiative. She is a member of the Order of Canada and has received numerous additional awards including the Golden Jubilee Medal, the elite Maclean’s Honour Role and the Terry Fox Citation of Honour to name a few.
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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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This Navy Doctor Came Ashore
Publisher: Acorn Press$17.95Dr. 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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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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Talk Back
Publisher: Breton Books$14.95It’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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Lighthouse Legacies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Imagine living your life perched on a tiny island, without electricity, exposed to the fury of the sea, and always at the service of the mariner. This is how lightkeepers and their families spent their lives, even up until the 1960s. We are very close to losing the last of the people who lived this isolated life and experienced the heyday of lightkeeping in Canada. Lighthouse Legacies lets us share in the memories of those who kept the lights.
These stories are presented largely in the words of the people, with context and history by author Chris Mills. Each chapter deals with an element of lighthouse life and is complemented by photos from lighthouse family collections, the Coast Guard and Mills’ own collection.
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Molly Kool First Female Captain of the Atlantic
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95Born and raised in Alma, New Brunswick, Molly Kool started her life at sea helping her father sail the lumber scow the Jean K through some of the most challenging waters in the world, including the changing tides of the Bay of Fundy and the Reversing Falls in Saint John. When it came time for Molly to choose her own career, her first instinct was to get her captain’s licence, but doing so would involve more than just hard work—it would also mean changing some of Canada’s oldest laws. But thanks to her inspiring example and the tireless efforts of contemporaries in the 1930s and ’40s, the Shipping Act of Canada was changed and Molly became the first female sea captain in North America. With interviews, colour photos, and background on other women pioneers and shipping practices in the early twentieth century, Molly Kool: Captain of the Atlantic also includes an interview with the first woman to command a Canadian warship, Commander Josee Kurtz.
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Travels With Farley
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95After living in a remote Newfoundland outport and returning to Port Hope, Ontario, Claire and Farley Mowat abandoned the comforts of the mainland to live in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They moved into a small isolated community and eventually bought a home there.
Claire Mowat writes of the ups and downs of being outsiders on their island but also of their love affair with the Magdalens, with its windswept dunes, endless beaches and raw beauty. It was a rugged life by the sea for the Mowats and sometimes a life of isolation, but they attracted visitors from far and wide, including Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, who arrived by helicopter from Charlottetown. The Mowats eventually gave the Trudeaus one of the puppies they raised. The Trudeaus, fittingly, named the dog Farley. He lived at 24 Sussex with the prime minister’s family, enjoying the comforts of civilization his namesake often eschewed.
Travels With Farley picks up where Claire’s best-selling The Outport People left off. It gives insight into her own writing life as well as Farley’s during the time when he was crafting A Whale for the Killing and researching Sea of Slaughter.
This is a warm and haunting tale of two writers whose lives were woven together by love, adversity and adventure. The book will appeal to both those already familiar with Farley Mowat, one of Canada’s iconic literary figures, and to those who have yet to meet this legendary and often controversial environmentalist.
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Helen Creighton
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Helen Creighton was born at the turn of the nineteenth century and until her death in 1989, she made a remarkable contribution towards retrieving the stories, songs, and legends that have shaped the culture and the people of the Maritimes. Written by her protégé and fellow folklorist, Clary Croft, this intimate biography offers both an intriguing portrait of a woman whose life was destined to become woven into the fabric of Canadian folklore, and a fascinating glimpse into the social mores of her time.
