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Destination White Point
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95White Point Beach Lodge has been in operation since 1928, persevering through early bankruptcy, the Great Depression, World War II, and a sometimes unforgiving climate in the hospitality industry. The resort is situated on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where authors Zane Grey and Albert Bigelow Paine once travelled to write about the charms of the undisturbed wilderness.The evolution of tourism in southwest Nova Scotia owes much of its early progress to well-connected foreign anglers and hunters, who used their own pipelines to broadcast this Canadian destination as a bountiful game reserve and a gem for tourists to discover. This book depicts the contribution of some of these foreigners, notably Philip Hooper Moore, the creator of White Point. His conception was a vacation haven where discerning sportsmen could hunt and fish while their families enjoyed the state-of-the-art amenities at the resort. The Lodge remained a seasonal destination for several decades until the 1980s heralded a shift to year-round operations. A convention centre and more accommodations were added, all designed to blend with the original rustic log buildings.Destination White Point draws on the oral history of former and current staff and guests, some whose experiences date back to the 1930s, to paint authentic pictures of work and play at White Point. The descendants of a number of guests have perpetuated the White Point vacation tradition, travelling from New England as well as Upper and Lower Canada on an annual basis. Multi-generational connections are commonplace at White Point with a half-dozen or more family members employed at the resort across several decades.For the last thirty years or so, stories of ghostly sightings and manifestations have been circulating around the property. One of the supernatural visitors is believed to be Ivy Elliot, who co-managed White Point with her husband Howard for over forty years. These events recently attracted a group of paranormal investigators, who paid a visit to White Point. Since the 1980s, colourful rabbits have delighted children and adults alike. Today, the lodge remains a popular destination for both Canadians and foreigners and a vital link to our storied past.
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Genealogical Research in Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Revised and updated this popular resource for amateur genealogists and history buffs is the best package for finding out more about the people who populate the province.
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Kiss the Joy As It Flies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour. A new smaller format of Fitch’s critically acclaimed adult novel.
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. But tidying up the edge of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to-dos. 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 expected.
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A Stone for Andrew Dunphy Narrative Obituary Verse and Song in Northern Cape Breton Island
Publisher: Breton Books$17.95This rare book is about community, caring and pioneer survival. It brings to life Andrew Dunphy— a man who roamed northern Cape Breton, carried the news, nursed his neighbours—and wrote magnificent obituary poems that told their stories, comforted them in disaster, and helped their communities survive. Over one hundred years later, Ronald Caplan captured this story in its final hours. Told with the words of those who knew Andrew Dunphy — A Stone for Andrew Dunphy reveals the robust rural life that flourished as the 20th century dawned.
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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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Magnificent Obsessions
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$17.9514 provocative chapters by writers who go a little further out, a little deeper, and bring back treasures for the rest of us. Each chapter stands on its own and each on is part of the portrait of Cape Breton Island. Magnificent Obsessions is essential and utterly enjoyable bedside reader.
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Historic House Names of Nova Scotia
$17.95Mount Uniacke, Acacia Grove, Winckworth, Saint’s Rest, Spruce Tree Cottage. Ever wonder how Nova Scotia houses got their names? The better-known names are largely connected with prominent historical figures who resided in commodious homes with sprawling grounds, but the naming tradition was far more prevalent than that. Historic House Names of Nova Scotia provides a fascinating look at the house-naming tradition in Nova Scotia. What sorts of names did Bluenoses create, and what did the names mean? Author and historian Joe Ballard has amassed a wealth of historical information and photos on the subject.
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Black Battalion
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Black military heritage in Canada is still generally unknown and unwritten. Most Canadians have no idea that Blacks served, fought, and died on European battlefields, all in the name of freedom. The story of the overt racist treatment of Black volunteers is a shameful chapter in Canadian history. It does, however, represent an important part of the Black legacy and the Black experience. It is a story worth reporting and worth sharing.
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Pearleen Oliver Canada’s Black Crusader for Civil Rights
Editor: Ronald CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.00In a winning new book, Pearleen Oliver: Canada’s Black Crusader for Civil Rights brings to life a compassionate and passionate African Nova Scotian, the story of her growth and activism—a book that shows how one woman’s voice changed the course of Nova Scotia’s history.
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The Beothuk Way Living With Nature
Publisher: John Kitchen$18.85A story about the Beothuk way of life in Newfoundland before the coming of settlement by “White” people in early 1700s Notre Dame Bay. Told through the eyes of a young Beothuk boy, it tells of his people, hunting, ceremonies,trapping, cooking, shelters, weapons, tools, canoes and of their nomadic ways.
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North Shore of Home
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Since it was first published in 1986, Frank Ledwell’s The North Shore of Home has had an enduring place in Island literature. In warm-hearted prose and poetry, in a voice keenly tuned to the music of Prince Edward Island English, Ledwell explores the Island’s North Shore, and especially the richly historied community of St. Peter’s Bay. Taken together, his poems and stories create a portrait of a community surviving through the Depression and the Second World War – a community at the Island’s edge and at the very cusp of the dramatic changes that would affect all small Prince Edward Island communities in the postwar years.
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What Really Happened is This A Poetry Memoir
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95This collection of moving poetry puts into words the heartbreak and triumphs of looking after ailing parents.What Really Happened is This is a poetry memoir that focuses on the ten-year journey of an adult “only child” as her beloved parents face declining health and death. The wry, poignant, humorous, and sometimes heartbreaking, poems chronicle the poet’s struggle to find balance in her life, as she juggles the needs of her family with her own work and creative life. The poems touch on the universal in specific experiences, as the poet faces the death of each parent, and realizes she is now next in line.
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Glace Bay Miner’s Museum
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95In a colliery town, sirens from the mine can mean cave-ins, explosions, or, as in the Westray disaster, sudden death.Sheldon Currie, author of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum was born in Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, and judging by the headlong intensity of this novel, he still hears those sirens.The story begins as shy, awkward Margaret MacNeil meets a strapping miner named Neil Currie. She’s already had her father and a brother die in the coalpits, but she hopes that Neil will be more lucky.
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Cape Breton Book of the Night (Expanded Edition) Tales of Tenderness and Terror
Editor: Ron CaplanPublisher: Breton Books$18.95THE EXPANDED EDITION from over 25 years of Cape Breton’s Magazine. This book offers a tough, caring presentation of extraordinary experience.
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Highland Settler The Classic Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Cape Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95At the core of Charles W. Dunn’s pioneering work with the Canadian Gaelic-speaking community in the twentieth century, Highland Settler is the story of immigration, rural settlement, and the later dispersion to the industrial world–a thoughtful and entertaining history of an extraordinary people.
Dunn’s extensive interviews and the informed warmth of his approach make Highland Settler an essential book in the discovery of Cape Breton Island. Drawing on delightful storytelling, and local songs and poetry that settlers composed and loved, Dunn achieves a Gaelic settlers’ self-portrait as well as the historian and folklorist’s insight into the culture.
A fresh new edition of an elegant and accessible classic about folk ways vibrant in the 1940s and alive today in Cape Breton Island, with the details and historical perspective of this expert researcher.
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Nymph and the Lamp
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95A Nova Scotia classic, The Nymph and the Lamp is the story of Isabel Jardin, a strong and sensitive woman, and the men in her life—the stoic Matthew Carney, a living legend, the passionate Gregory Skane, and the innocent but infatuated Jim Sargent. Set in the 1920s, the story unfolds against the wild desolation of Marina, a wind-swept island off the coast of Nova Scotia, as the characters come to terms with their personal contradictions and the demands of isolated island life.
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Big Town A Novel of Africville
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Seventeen-year-old Early Okander lives with his father in a shack, a white family on the outskirts of the Halifax community of Africville. It is the early 1960s, and Early and his young friends, Toby and Chub, start to hear whispers that the city wants to move the residents of Africville out of their homes. As the three try to sort out what relocation might mean for the community, they also struggle to come to terms with their own problems: Early’s abuse at the hands of his father, Toby’s illness, Chub’s family breakdown.
Written from Early’s unique perspetive, Big Town is an unforgettable account of a community in crisis and the remarkable spirit that persists in the face of adversity.
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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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Green Shutters Cookbook
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95The Green Shutters Cookbook, with its hearty, simple, downhome recipes, has been a Nova Scotia favourite for over 50 years. Featuring recipes from Hilda Zinck’s Green Shutters Inn, now closed, the book includes timeless favourites like hot cross buns, fish chowder, meatloaf and banana bread.
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Cape Breton Highlands National Park
Publisher: Breton Books$18.9544 EXCELLENT HIKES! NEW TRAILS! Adventures in hiking, skiing, kayaking-quirks of wildlife-affectionate appreciation of our National Park’s natural beauty-all make for entertaining and informative reading from a legendary outdoorsman, who has rewalked and updated all 44 trails. A good storyteller and retired Park warden, he weaves his adventures into facts about flora and fauna, geology and weather-and where along the road to see the evidence. Much more than a guide-for both hikers and armchair travellers!
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Nature & Hiking Guide To Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Complete with easy-to-use maps, plant lists, glossary, and index, and illustrated with line drawings and woodcuts, A Nature and Hiking Guide to Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail is your complete guide to this natural treasure trove.
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Medicine Walk (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Medicine Walk explores the benefits of “special places,” and includes notes and exercises as aids to control stress, overcome fear, and foster the ability to concentrate and meditate. It opens up avenues of self-discovery and enables the reader to experience the natural, therapeutic value of the healing world of nature. Medicine Walk also includes a section on the spiritual nature of plants and their medicinal value.
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Richard Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$18.95Richard Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather is a compendium of fascinating weather facts, myths, climatological oddities, weather science, folklore and observations of the diverse and oftentimes frustrating topic of Canadian Maritime weather. Whether you just like to watch the clouds go by or if you are a serious student of meteorology, there is plenty to entertain you in this volume.
There’s virtually everything here you’d like to know about the how and why of our regional weather. What makes our weather the way it is? What drives this ceaseless cycle of hot and cold, dry and wet? Zurawski brings the reader up to date on the modern science of forecasting but also includes historical perspectives about the weather before people made the study of weather into a science. Folklore, myths and anecdotes from days past are included with the modern facts and records of our climate. Weather sayings are not only presented, but scrutinized for their basis and value. Before the days of the super-computer and Environment Canada, the sea-bound skipper was the forecaster of his era and his innate and intimate knowledge of Maritime weather shifts could mean the difference between life and death.
Even with the aid of computers, satellites and ultra modern communications, the weather is still as much an art as it is a science. Zurawski’s Book of Maritime Weather taps the wisdom of the past and the present to give a holistic view of the fascinating and sometimes bizarre world of Maritime weather. -
Acadian Legends, Folktales and Songs
Publisher: Acorn Press$18.95Island historian and folklorist Georges Arsenault has been collecting songs and stories from Acadian Prince Edward Island since his student days in the 1970s: words gathered by lamplight in the early part of the 20th century, when the local men and women would pass on what they’d learned from elders long gone. His 17 informants were mostly hard-working parents of very large families, some well-educated and some not. Included in this collection are 8 stories, 13 legends and 23 songs with lyrics and musical notation, mainly reproduced from taped interviews. Originally published as Contes, legendes et chansons de l’Île-du-Prince-Edouard, this English translation by Sally Ross includes footnotes and a bibliography, as well as photos of his informants
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Harvest Train
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95One of Canada’s great adventure stories, when young men went west to work on the booming grain farms of the Prairies. Here are some of the stories and tales
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Canada’s Forgotten Arctic Hero
Publisher: Breton Books$18.95This is the terrific true adventure of an unjustly forgotten Cape Bretoner, Canada’s first photographer of the High Arctic. George Rice emerged as a leader on an American Arctic expedition and died a herosearching for food for his starving comrades. This gripping and painful story is told through George Rice’s previously unpublished diaries. Packed with humour, pathos, and magnificent description, this book is a powerful historic and literary event, masterfully presented by Jim Lotz who, seventy-five years later on Operation Hazen, served in the footsteps of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.
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Reflections of Care
Editor: Donna Anderson Currie, Tom AyersPublisher: Cape Breton University Press$18.95Down the hall, across the street, around the corner an around the world, the education, experience and care of Cape Breton’s nurses are testimony to that capacity–in hospitals, clinics, neighbourhoods and on foreign soil.
The need to capture their experiences has resulted in these reflections spanning 100 years–from the opening of the first nursing school on the Island in 1905. By car, on foot, on horseback, by boat, snowmobile, small aircraft and helicopter, Cape Breton’s nurses have distinguished themselves as caregivers, observers, listeners and advocates. These are just some their stories.
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The Newfoundland Beothuk Termination of a Tribe
Publisher: John Kitchen$18.95This is an account of the final 100 years of Beothuks in Newfoundland during the years of increasing settlement of Notre Dame Bay, their last place of refuge from the Europeans’ advancement. It chronicles the conflict between the two races that led to the eventual end of the Beothuks–through the killing of their people, diseases, and denial of food.
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Historic Dartmouth
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Historic Dartmouth is a fascinating glimpse of this charming city’s social, economic, and cultural life over the last two centuries. From its beginning as a settlement of British immigrants on an Aboriginal campsite in 1750, Dartmouth’s growth was uncertain and sporadic. In 1759, it was used as a temporary billet for Wolfe’s troops before his attack on Quebec; in 1785 it was, briefly, the home of the influential Nantucket Whaling Company; and in 1826 the building of the Shubenacadie Canal gave it new life until the coming of the railway in 1870.
Finally incorporated as a town in 1873, Dartmouth’s location on the east side of Chebucto Harbour, and its thousands of inland lakes and rivers, made it an ideal place for thriving communities, and a destination for leisure and pleasure seekers. Its “golden era” at the turn of the nineteenth century is the focus of this book.
