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Acadian Christmas Traditions
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Based on written sources and interviews with Acadians throughout the Maritimes, Acadian Christmas Traditions offers a fascinating look at the evolution of Christmas. This very readable book shows how customs, both spiritual and secular, take hold in families, in villages, and in a culture as a whole. Georges Arsenault, the well-known historian and folklorist, examines all the aspects of the feast of Christmas, from midnight mass to holiday foods. As he chronicles the cultural changes that have taken place over the centuries, he proves that Acadian Christmas today is the result of a wonderful blending of old, new, and borrowed traditions.
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Along Lot Seven Shore
Publisher: Acorn Press$14.95Often, folksongs are left to stand alone, with no record as to the events, visions and principles that inspired them. Rarely do we get a glimpse of the poet’s view of the community and people he or she writes about. However, Donnie Doyle, in wanting to give something back to his community, has done just that. Along Lot Seven Shore is a fascinating combination of memoir, anecdote, narrative song and poetry, created by someone who has experienced that which he has written. In so doing, he shares glimpses of a way of life that makes and defines “community”; this particular community happens to be along Lot Seven Shore of Prince Edward Island (named so when the Island was divided into 67 lots and given in a Land Lottery to the English King’s patrons in 1767), but it could be anywhere in rural Canada.
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A Long Way From the Road
Publisher: Acorn Press$13.95A collection of 77 anecdotes, this book is humorous and sardonic, insightful and witty, with the warmth and charm for which Atlantic Canada has become famous. Subjects that come under the microscope include politics, religion, sex, human foibles, and insularity that can come from living on a small island.
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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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Island Sketchbook
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95With characteristic warmth, generosity, and humour, Frank Ledwell seamlessly weaves personal memoir and communal folk wisdom into 60 prose sketches of Island characters, anecdotes, and traditions. The stories are based on real people or incidents; others are fictionalized, evoking the true, remembered landscape of Ledwell’s childhood at St. Peter’s Bay on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island, his experience as a student, teacher, and professor at St. Dunstan’s University, and his later life as a professor, husband, and parent in rural Queen’s County. The sketches also evoke the author’s love of people and place and mark his point of view as that of an inveterate Islander.
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Jean Pierre Roma
Publisher: Acorn Press$9.95During the four years poet Jill MacLean lived in Prince Edward Island, she researched Jean Pierre Roma’s settlement at Trois Rivières. Her first collection, The Brevity of Red, was published in 2003. She now lives in Bedford, Nova Scotia.
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Who Departed This Life
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95George Wright has had a long history of interest in the Burying Ground, with at least nine direct ancestors buried there (great-great-great- and great-great-grandparents). The launch of the book coincides with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the City of Charlottetown.
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Kindred Spirits
Publisher: Acorn Press$24.95Who is your kindred spirit? Who kindles the fire in your soul?
Driven by curiosity about her own intense friendships and soul-to-soul connections, Dianne Hicks Morrow devoted the last 10 years to asking Atlantic Canadians these questions.
In Kindred Spirits, people as diverse as composer Norman Campbell, lyricist Elaine Campbell, country doctor Jim Bowen, author Sheree Fitch, photographer Freeman Patterson, comedian dentist Marina Sexton, theatre director Duncan McIntosh, minister Elizabeth Stevenson, university president Wade MacLauchlan, and actor Deb Allen reveal their passionate connections to the people, places, and animals that inspire their deepest trust, their most intimate contact, and their unconditional love.
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Bridging Islands
Editor: Godfrey BaldacchinoPublisher: Acorn Press$29.95An island is a piece of land surrounded by water. But: what happens when bridges, causeways, tunnels- “fixed links”- irrevocably connect islands to mainlands? Is insularity, and its way of life, threatened? Or is it saved by virtue of a stronger integration with the world at large?Bridging Islands is a critical, interdisciplinary scoreboard of the pros and cons of bridging islands to mainlands. Internationally recognized scholars review the assorted socio-cultural, economic and political impacts of fixed links on small island communities. Included are chapters on Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Bridge (celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2007), Cape Breton’s Canso Causeway, islands in Quebec and Newfoundland, the Florida Keys, Ireland, France, Scotland, Sweden, and Singapore.
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Taste of Water
Publisher: Acorn Press$15.95The taste of water is something we all know but need to be reminded of once in a while: how it tastes of shared memory, and of what it means to be human, and of the earth.Prince Edward Island’s second Poet Laureate, Frank Ledwell, invites us to enter his words and world, seeking to share a sense of our common humanity and our interdependent fates, and to recognize communal experience in the particularities of personal experience.The traditional role of the Poet Laureate is to mark occasions, and Ledwell’s poems masterfully make quotidian Island events and lives into special occasions that sing with the “spirit of the spoken word taking hold.”
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The Life of Boston King
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing Limited$14.95In the summer of 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, several thousand Black men, women and children left New York City with the British Army, bound by ship for Nova Scotia. Now uniformly called “Black Loyalists”, regardless of their status at leaving New York, theirs is a rich and fascinating history. One of the most well-documented of these Black Loyalists was a man named Boston King, born a slave to Richard Waring, a rice-planter in South Carolina.
King experienced a religious revelation while in Nova Scotia, and became a Methodist preacher; he went to Sierra Leone in 1792 to spread the Gospel; and from there was invited to England to study at a Methodist school. While there, he wrote the story of his life and conversion. This was published in the Methodist Magazine of the times.
Thus survived one of only three autobiographies of a Black Loyalist, full of details of the Loyalist settlement of Nova Scotia. It is reprinted here as “Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher,” edited by Ruth Holmes Whitehead and Carmelita Robertson. An introduction by Ruth Holmes Whitehead presents new research findings about King’s life, and her Afterword examines particularly his life as a slave on the Waring Plantation, near Charleston, SC. Whitehead and Robertson revisited the ruins of two Waring plantations, where King would have worked as a child and young man, and photographed the dirt road, still running through one plantation, down which he would have ridden away to freedom.
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Bluenose Cookbook
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The Bluenose Cookbook includes famous Yarmouth recipes with a strong emphasis on seafood. Most are traditional recipes from the southernmost part of Nova Scotia. Originally published in 1965, this 4th edition has been reprinted many times.
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Trees of Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$16.95An informative guide to 45 native and exotic species of trees and shrubs that inhabit Nova Scotia.
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Atlantic Schooners
Publisher: Brunswick Press$6.95Noted marine artist and historic illustrator L.B. Jenson has produced a number of publications that feature the history and heritage of Nova Scotia’s ocean-going traditions including his most ambitious work, Bluenose 11, Sage of the Great Fishing Schooners.
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Mi’kmaq
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$12.95Another in the series of books detailing the culture of the many people who make up the population of the Maritimes. A history of origins, settlement and contribution to Maritime life.
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End of the Line The Dominion Atlantic Railway – A Trip Back in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$25.95There was a time when railways criss-crossed Nova Scotia, carrying passengers and delivering mail, moving freight and produce, hauling timber, coal, gypsum, and iron ore. But those days have passed thanks in large measure to the advent of the automobile, improved highways, long-haul trucking, and the vagaries of market demands and resource extraction. The number of railways operating today in the province can be tallied on one hand, with fingers left over.
Vestiges of Nova Scotia’s railway heritage are disappearing. Tracks are now Rails to Trails; trestle bridges have deteriorated to decrepitude; and train stations, once the arterial pulse for so many communities, have, for the most part, disappeared. Most poignant, perhaps, is the silencing of that magical, haunting train whistle.
Mike Parker’s latest book End of the Line follows a similar track as three of his earlier best-selling books about ghost towns and deserted island settlements. Presented in Mike’s popular storytelling style, and drawing upon more than 430 images, many of them in colour, End of the Line opens another window to the past, taking the reader for a nostalgic trip back in time on the abandoned Dominion Atlantic Railway along the once-famous Land of Evangeline route from Yarmouth to Halifax through the heart of the Annapolis Valley.
Twenty-five years have passed since the demise of the Dominion Atlantic Railway (1894-1994), which closed just one month and five days short of its one hundredth birthday. There have been many railways but none more storied than the D.A.R., considered to be “one of the more important pages out of Nova Scotia history.”
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Halifax A Literary Portrait
Editor: John BellPublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Halifax: A Literary Portrait is a lively anthology of thirty-one selected writings about this colourful Nova Scotian port city dating from the early eighteenth century to the present. Included are works by such varied writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Joseph Howe, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, L.M. Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, Thomas Raddall, Will R. Bird, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, bill bissett and Spider Robinson.
Halifax is captured in its many moods, and the selections, while not always complimentary, are sure to entertain and illuminate.
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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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Cold Clear Morning (revised edition) New Revised Edition
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Taylor Colby grew up in the tiny Nova Scotia fishing village of Nickerson Harbour, but his guitar-playing skill led him to become a much sought-after studio musician in Los Angeles. Along with him went Laura, his childhood sweetheart and soulmate. In L.A., Laura becomes enamoured with the dark side of rock and roll life, leaving Taylor lost, distraught and deeply damaged. Taylor realizes he has to go back home to Nickerson Harbour, to confront Laura’s parents, to reunite with his father and to understand the truth of his own dysfunctional family.
Back in Nova Scotia, Taylor learns that his mother, who had abandoned him as a child, wants to come home to reconcile with her own past. Taylor is haunted by his loss and grief but must also come to terms with some hidden truths about Laura. As he begins to make sense of his past, he befriends an American feminist professor who is trying to start life anew in Canada with her troubled twelve-year-old son.
Cold Clear Morning is a novel about dreams realized and dreams shattered. It is about love and loss, hunting and healing, grief and forgiving. Taylor Colby speaks his story of what it takes to pick up the remains of a shattered life and find renewed purpose and hope. It is the story of going back to the home that you thought you could never return to. In his odyssey from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and back home, he attempts to find real meaning to his life of adventure and despair.
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Otto Strasser in Paradise
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95H. Millard Wright was born and grew up in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. He had a successful business career, becoming a vice-president and board member of L.E. Shaw Ltd. And president of Clayton Developments. He is a past president of the Halifax Board of Trade, a past director of the Maritime Chamber of Commerce, past director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and past director of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. He formed his own company, Colonial Scientific Ltd., in 1971 and retired in 1992. He has published eight books.
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Diligent River Daughter
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster, who for many years was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. Bruce and his wife Helen live in their hometown of Parrsboro. Diligent River Daughter is his fifth book. The Ship’s Company Theatre adapted two of his previous novels – The Parrsboro Boxing Club and Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours, both published by Pottersfield – for the stage.
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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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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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Buried in the Woods
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95Born and raised in Bear River, Nova Scotia, Mike Parker has been called Nova Scotia’s Storyteller, a reference to the diversity of themes covered in his many books of popular history. The best-selling author has been researching and writing about his native province for more than twenty years. This is his thirteenth book. Mike is affiliated with the Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University as a research associate. He is a graduate of Acadia University and a long-time resident of Dartmouth.
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Death Ship of Halifax Harbour
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“On an uncomfortably muggy morning in early autumn, I found myself standing at the far end of a wide, battered wharf in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia, looking for a man in knee-high, white rubber boots answering to the name of Captain Red Beard..I’d come in search of a death ship, or at least the historical whispers of a death ship — an elegant old steamer that limped into Halifax harbour during the early hours of April 9, 1866, with more than a thousand Irish and German emigrants squeezed into its cramped, creaking holds. And I’d come in search of what travelled with them and, in fact, inside many of them: Asiatic cholera. And, finally, I’d come in search of the intertwining tales of those lives inexorably changed by history’s worst cholera epidemic, which killed tens of thousands from Mecca to Manhattan to McNab’s Island in the mouth of Halifax harbour.” So begins another strange and surprising adventure of writer Steven Laffoley as he explores historic McNab’s Island in search of Halifax during its time of cholera. As he investigates the rich history of the island and searches for clues to the many dark, cholera-ship tales, Steven confronts the nature of fear and the fear of nature, including fetid marshes, abandoned buildings, a berry-mad bear, a love-starved beaver, a gaggle of naked maidens, and two drunken revolutionaries just looking for some fun. Death Ship of Halifax Harbour is a fascinating and engaging tale of fate, fear and hope.
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Nova Scotia Visions of the Future
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the summer of 2008, Pottersfield editor Lesley Choyce sent a letter to a select and varied list of Nova Scotians to contribute to a book about this province’s future. He invited some of the best minds (and hearts) around the province to present their vision of this possible province of the future.
Contributors would write about the environment, technology, immigration, social aspects, urban life, rural life, energy, politics, government, family, economics, forests, the ocean and much more. The bolder the vision, the better. Stories, personal opinions and controversial ideas were encouraged. Which future? Anything beyond ten years and up to a thousand.
The results of that request were varied, ambitious and surprising. This most insightful book may set in motion some serious action that can help Nova Scotia live up to its full future potential. The writing is personal, provocative, reflective, proactive, and thoroughly captivating by over forty contributors from many divers fields of expertise.
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Pardon My Frenchy’s
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95Pardon My Frenchy’s is a definitive relationship manual for all those who haunt Frenchy’s, Value Village, The Sally Ann and the hundreds of used clothing stores at the Maritimes. Unlike a how-to book, Pardon My Frenchy’s is what-to-do compendium of ideas, quizzes, games and stories all aimed at keeping the Frenchy’s fires burning, the used clothing passion alive and the superbargain excitement as high as it was during that first root in the bins.
The book is like a dose of good old-fashioned relationship counseling, helping Frenchy’s fans rekindle the romance with their favourite stores. It addresses some of these burning questions. Do you still feel that tingle of anticipation as your eyes sweep the bins? Does a superbargain find still make your heart beat faster? And, the ultimate relationship question: do you find yourself casting a roving eye on Wal-Mart or The Bay?
Readers of Pardon My Frenchy’s can rely on a wealth of ideas such as Six Bring-Back-the-Thrill Techniques, Ten Surefire Ways to Pull Out all the Stops, Four Ideas to Put You in the Frenchy’s Mood, Three Ways to Add Zest to the Experience, Four Tips for Initiation Virgin Frenchy’s Shoppers, plus the Ultimate Definitive State-of-the-Art Frenchy’s Self Quiz. There’s even a Frenchy’s song lyrics that are perfect for a shopping crawl with the gang.
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Hunting Halifax
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“I was walking into an air-conditioned Halifax tavern on a hot summer afternoon in search of a dark mystery. I was on the trail of a cold-case murder—a murder case 150 years cold. Clearly, I needed a beer.”
So beings the strange and surprising adventure of Hunting Halifax, the true tale of writer Steven Edwin Laffoley as he investigates the mean streets and narrow alleys of historic Halifax, Nova Scotia, in search of clues to a murder, a mystery and a black hole in history.
In the early hours of September 8, 1853, in the shadow of Citadel Hill, a sailor with a crushed skull lies slumped against the staircase of a notorious tavern on Barrack Street. The death is said to be an accident—a fall from a window—until two tavern prostitutes tell Nova Scotia’s famous son, Joseph Howe, that it was murder.
Prepared to do what it takes to find justice for the murdered sailor, the author sleeps in old graveyards, drinks in rough taverns, concerses in trendy coffee shops, pokes about staid Province House, ponders Victorian Age philosophy, and somehow just manages to avoid arrest. Humorous and engaging, Hunting Halifax is an entertaining tale of history, mystery and murder.
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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. -
Shipwrecks of New Brunswick
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In the past 20 years, Robert Parsons has become one of Atlantic Canada’s most popular and prolific writers, specializing in the stories of shipwreck, rescue and survival. He devotes much of his time to researching, writing and promoting the sea-going history of Canada’s eastern provinces, their ships and the people who sailed them. His books include Ocean of Storms, Sea of Disaster, In Peril on the Sea and The Edge of Yesterday: Sea Disasters of Nova Scotia.
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Fighting for Change
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95This book is about Black social workers breaking barriers and fighting for change, not only for themselves as professionals, but also for their clients and communities. These workers tell their own unique stories in this volume, from gaining entry to social work education to their experiences in social work. They also write about the strategies that made a difference in their lives and the lives of the people they work with.
The first section tells the story of Black Social Workers’ entry into the profession and chronicles the poignant story of the life, and eventual death, of the Association of Black Social Workers in Montreal from where it spread to Halifax. In the second section, seasoned Black social workers, each trailblazers in their own right, tell their narratives of studying social work and beginning practice in Halifax in the late 1970s to early 1990s.
The third section spotlights current students who relate stories of their reasons for entering the social work profession and the barriers they face as they pursue their future career goals. The fourth section focuses on Africentric perspectives and puts forward some findings from exploratory research in this area. The final section explores experiences in a social work program which uses the media to expose students to cultures different from their own as well as some of the students’ experiences in interrogating the media itself.