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Organic Gardening in Cold Climates
Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing$12.00If you live in the north country, you don’t have to settle for anemic tomatoes on your grocer’s shelves. Organic Gardening in Cold Climates can teach you how to reap a vegetable bounty despite a short growing season.
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Pumpkin People
Artist: Ron LightburnPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$13.95Every autumn, strange figures start appearing around Kentville, Nova Scotia. Sauntering down the sidewalk, sitting in a tree, cavorting on a lawn—who are these peculiar people?
They’re the Pumpkin People! Made of cornstalks, straw, and, of course, pumpkins, these folkloric figures arrive every year to celebrate the harvest in a most creative way.
The immensely popular Pumpkin People tells the magical secrets of Kentville’s famous residents. Sandra Lightburn’s verse reveals the nighttime revelry of the half-funny, half-spooky figures; Ron Lightburn’s colourful illustations bring their wild Ceilidhs to life. And a special section in the back teaches pumpkin fans young and old how to build their own pumpkin person!
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Elizabeth Bishop Nova Scotia’s “Home-made” Poet
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$15.95Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is best known as an American author, but she spent formative years in Great Village, Nova Scotia, and in fact called herself “3/4ths Canadian.” In recent decades there has been a growing movement in Nova Scotia to reconnect appreciation of Bishop with the landscape of her childood. This pictorial biography highlights the early influence of Bishop’s maternal family and the cultural community of Great Village, and the poet’s lifelong ties to Nova Scotia.
Author Sandra Barry takes readers through the significant chapters in Bishop’s life, from her ancestry and early years in Great Village to her first publications, her extended stays in Florida and Brazil, and her final years teaching at Harvard University. The book concludes with an overview of some of the Bishop-inspired work made since her death, and the commemorative efforts undertaken in Nova Scotia and around the world.
With photos throughout, sidebar features on historic events, Bishop’s publications and travels, and background on her awards and other achievements, the book provides a fascinating introduction and important new angle on one of the best-loved poets of the twentieth century.
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New England Masts and The King’s Broad Arrow
Publisher: WoodenBoat Books$10.95Author/illustrator Sam Manning has brought to life a period in history which makes this book valuable, but not simply because you will understand how the shipbuilding industry worked from the 1600s – 1800s. Manning shows what governments were doing, why, and how it directly parallels the twentieth- and twenty-first century policies of nations to spend blood and treasure to ensure they can control the supply of natural resources for their national security. With 1600s Europe unable to supply the big tall masts needed for their navies, Great Britain established a policy of marking trees in New England which were specifically the Crown’s, to be cut, processed, and shipped back to England. Without proper masts, the navy could not carry sails to propel their ships–much like the need for oil today.
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Algonquians, Hurons and Iroquois Champlain Explores America 1603-1616
Editor: Edward BournePublisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95“If we compare him with the other explorers and founders of that age he stands above them all in the range of achievement” –Edward Gaylord Bourne, Introduction As the first explorer to provide an accurate and detailed account of Nova Scotia and New England, Samuel de Chaplain is synonymous with early observations of North American Aboriginal peoples, interactions between New World inhabitants and European colonial powers, and the founding of New France. Chaplain’s meticulous and fascinating historical records of his seventeenth-century explorations continue to illuminate early life in North America, hundreds of years later.
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Vancouver Book of Everything Everything You Wanted to Know About Vancouver and Were Going to Ask Anyway
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$14.95From “Gassy” Jack Deighton and the Klondike Gold Rush to the Chinese Head Tax to Japanese Internment, the Strathcona Protest, Vancouver Canucks and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games to profiles of the original ‘Dominic Da Vinci,’ Larry Campbell, famed author Douglas Coupland, and environmentalist David Suzuki, no book is more comprehensive than the Vancouver Book of Everything. No book is more fun. Well-known Vancouverites weigh in on every aspect of their beloved city. Historian Chuck Davis gives us his top five events that shaped its history; author Jen Sookfong Lee gives us her top five best things about living in Vancouver; Vancouver Sun restaurant critic Mia Stainsby gives us the city’s top five cheap eats and Global TV’s meteorologist, Mark Madryga, offers up his top five Vancouver weather events. From the city’s First People and infamous weather to its slang, heinous crimes, and the ubiquitous Japa dog, it’s all here. Whether you are a lifelong resident or visiting for the first time, there is no better resource about the city of Vancouver. If you love Vancouver – and who doesn’t – you’ll love the Vancouver Book of Everything.
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Beyond Silence
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Beyond Silence: Voices of Child Sexual Abuse is a collection of stories, poems, and images by twelve Island women. In these deeply personal accounts, the women tell about the abuse they suffered as children, the profound effect it has had on their lives, and the reasons why people need to join the fight to stop it. A prevention chapter, written by the group as a whole, focuses on five key areas that need to be addressed in order to end child sexual abuse. These include abusers taking responsibility for their actions and parents taking action to protect their children.Beyond Silence takes a fresh approach to the ongoing work of child sexual abuse prevention by focusing on the knowledge and wisdom of adult survivors. This book has the potential to dramatically change the ways communities respond to child sexual abuse. The stories are raw and real, honest and terrifying. The women dig into the darkness of the past so that others may see the light. They refuse to be silenced and they’re determined to make a difference.
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Quacko Académie
Artist: Dano LeBlancPublisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$9.95Quacko is feeling blue. He has friends, but no voice. That’s embarrassing for a duck! And how in the world will he get Fine Plume’s attention? The big singing contest is coming up soon; Quacko is afraid he’ll look bad. However, his instinct to help a competitor ends up helping him learn to sing in his own voice, and win over his sweetheart!
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Vittorio’s Journey
$25.00Vittorio 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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Old Man Told Us (new edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$26.95The Mi’kmaq people have been living in what is now Atlantic Canada for two thousand years or more, yet written history has largely ignored them, presenting them merely as a homogeneous mass or as statistics. Renowned Micmac specialist Ruth Holmes Whitehead, formerly staff ethnologist and assistant curator in history at the Nova Scotia Museum, tries to redress that omission by restoring to the collective memory a true sense of the Mi’kmaq. In this rich collection, oral and written, Mi’kmaq accounts juxtapose contemporary European perceptions of native peoples, as documented in letters, journals, court cases, and much more. Above all, The Old Man Told Us is a historical jigsaw puzzle, a display of fragments of broken mirror in which one can capture moments in the lives of particular people. It is a book of excerpts from whatever scattered documentation has survived over the centuries.
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Nova Scotia and the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1920 A Remembrance of the Dead and an Archive for the Living
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$32.95The definitive academic resource on the Great Influenza at the beginning of the twentieth century threaded with the human stories of the people that lived and died in the three year pandemic in Nova Scotia.
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A Watch in the Night
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95A Watch in the Night chronicles the struggles of one Nova Scotia family to survive on a tiny windswept island without running water, electricity, or reliable communication with the mainland. For thirty-six years, George and Ruth Millar tended the Pomquet Island light, raised generations of livestock, brought up their six children, and lived through violent storms and other weather disasters.A Watch in the Night is not a dry account of lightkeeping life, but rather a tale in which faith, ingenuity, and tenderness triumph over adversity.
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Traditional Newfoundland English
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The rich heritage of Newfoundland English, influenced by the dialects of the English, Irish, and Scottish immigrants to the province, receives well-deserved attention in this well-crafted dictionary. author R. A. Bragg aims to elevate Newfoundland English from being thought of as mere slang or accent to a standardized language, and to preserve the heritage of North America’s first English language for the future.
This dictionary offers both Newfy to English and English to Newfy translations with 1,500 fully annotated entries. The dictionary is completed by usage and pronunciation guides that present a regularized language structure, as well as three maps. As this dictionary shows, traditional Newfy talk is unique, relevant, and altogether “wunnerfo.”
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Drôle de Soccer !
Artist: Réjean RoyPublisher: Bouton d'or Acadie$9.95Two young Canada geese discover a strange object in their natural habitat. Believing that it is a dinosaur egg, they alert their flock immediately. They quickly ban together when a group of strangers arrives and begins kicking the abandoned egg. What ensues is a very funny match. Will the geese enforce the rules of the game between man and nature?
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St. Andrews By-the-Sea
Photographer: Rob RoyPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$17.95Roy captures the character and beauty of St. Andrews, a town alive with history and natural beauty.
Tucked away on a peninsula inside the tranquil waters of Passamaquoddy Bay stands the scenic town of St. Andrews. The natural beauty and picturesque
architecture of the town are unsurpassed in New Brunswick and make it one of Canada’s most popular vacation destinations. Rob Roy’s photographs are both practical and artistic, blending together the everyday scenes of the town with the striking landscapes and historical character of St. Andrews. -
Land of the Loyalists
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95The Loyalist ascendancy in the Maritimes was short-lived but pervasive. Included here are the buildings, the institutions and the culture that they left behind.
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Historic St Andrews
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$20.95St.Andrews-by-the-Sea is a much photographed little town, beloved by visitors and residents.The visual heritage of the town and the surrounding community has been documented by many photographers and reproduced here with historical context.
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New Brunswick: An Illustrated History
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Originally the land of the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, and Passamaquoddy, New Brunswick has a colourful and significant history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the province was settled by marsh workers and farmers from northwestern France and thousands of Loyalist refugees from a newly independent United States. After a golden age of lumbering, shipbuilding, and overseas trade in the nineteenth century, its economy declined and adjustment to the new continental economy was slow and trying. In the 1960s, premier Louis Robichaud’s Equal Opportunity program granted French-speaking Acadians, long second-class citizens in the province, cultural recognition. Today, New Brunswick remains the only officially bilingual province in Canada.
A lively narrative drawn entirely from published sources, New Brunswick: An Illustrated History is for general readers interested in the development of the province. Over one hundred historical photographs document this changing province, from its beginnings to present day.
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New Brunswick’s Early Roads
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Except for Roman military roads and the Inca roads in Peru, roads and road-making have seldom attracted much attention. Like fields, fences and old stone walls, roads can seem so much part of the fabric of a landscape that we need reminding that many of them were made intentionally. In New Brunswick, road-building was a great labour performed, as elsewhere, without fuss by often reluctant workers drawn from a remarkably small population. Against heavy odds, New Brunswick by 1930 had roads and a highway system that, in terms of quality and coverage, was the envy of many larger provinces.
A new addition to the Images of Our Past series, New Brunswick’s Early Roads follows the development of the province’s roadways through the era of post and military roads, the rise of the Good Roads movement, to the dominance of the automobile and paved highways
Over 60 remarkable black and white images document the astonishing process.
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New Brunswick Was His Country
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$25.95Regularly described as New Brunswick’s greatest scholar, William Francis Ganong (1864-1941) wrote more than many people have ever read. His range of interests is reflected in his vast body of work: botany, zoology, physiography, cartography, and native languages were all within his reach. But his greatest interest, subsuming all others, was New Brunswick.
Ganong endeavoured to write even his most scholarly papers for the general reader, and that is what historian Ronald Rees had done with New Brunswick Was His Country. An appreciation of Ganong’s work and a biography of the man behind it, rather than an exhaustive critical assessment, this fascinating overview will appeal to any reader interested in the natural and settlement history of New Brunswick and the working life of its most extraordinary scholar, from his summers conducting field research in Passamaquoddy Bay to his pivotal role in founding the New Brunswick Museum.
Richly illustrated with historical photographs, Ganong’s own maps and drawings, and contemporary images, New Brunswick Was His Country is an essential addition to Atlantic Canada’s historical canon.
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The Cape Breton Summertime Revue
Publisher: Breton Books$14.00Through Ron Caplan’s lively and revealing conversations, Mac MacDonald, Bette MacDonald [Mary Morrison!], Maynard Morrison [Cecel!], Leon Dubinsky, Gerald Taylor and Stephen MacDonald share the history and day-to-day work that created Cape Breton’s beloved stage performances of unforgettable song and outrageous comedy. The Cape Breton Summertime Revue takes you to the heart of ten years of a Cape Breton Classic. Warren Gordon’s terrific photographs are worth the price of the book.
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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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Cape Breton’s Christmas, Book * A Treasury of Stories and Memories
Publisher: Breton Books$19.95“We sit under the tree on Christmas morning and read these stories aloud..”
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Downhomer Almanac Cookbook 1
Editor: Downhome MagazinePublisher: Downhomer$19.95The Downhomer Household Almanac and Cookbook is the first of its kind. There have been almanacs before, and there have been cookbooks before, and this is not the first cookbook to have home remedies and cures, nor is it the first with household hints. There have been books containing humour, heart-touching stories, thoughts to live by, and even books in which to keep track of your family tree, but this is the first book that incorporates all of these. Not only that, this book also contains calendars covering the 1801 to 2050, cooking conversion tables, metric conversion tables, places to keep important dates, photographs, a place to write a biography of yourself, dedications, and much, much more. It is a wealth of information and a place to keep records to be handed down through the generations. This book is a must for people whose family and roots are near and dear to them, and contains a place to keep track of your future family tree (your children and grandchildren). On top of that, the beautiful writings, stories and poems in this book will make you laugh and make you cry. Downhomer Household Almanac and Cookbook is one of the most interesting books you will ever read.
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Downhomer Almanac Cookbook 2
Publisher: Downhomer$19.95This book is a follow-up to the first Downhomer Household Almanac & Cookbook, which became a Canadian Best Seller in less than eight months.
Contents
- Recipes – Five hundred and eighty new recipes of all kinds from all over the world, contributed by readers of Downhomer magazine, and laid out in ten easy-to-find categories.
- Tonic For The Soul – All new stories, writings, poems, information, jokes and real life’s funny experiences. This section will make you laugh and make you cry.
Additions to Almanac & Cookbook 2
- Grassroots Healing – Eighteen pages on the use of natural products for a healthier body and mind.
- Astro Guide – A general horoscope by Madam Doziac.
- Kids’ Recipes – Twenty pages of simple recipes that younger children can do themselves, as well as some interesting and educational reading for the younger set.
- VIP Pages – A guestbook with a place to record birthdates and anniversaries of the Very Important People in your life, along with historical events and a though to live by for each day of the year.
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Downhome Memories
Publisher: Downhomer$14.95It’s life as you remember it.
Downhome Memories brings together stories, poems and images guaranteed to strike a sentimental chord with every reader. Through the words of regular people—your siblings, your parents and your grandparents-histories are shared and the years that separate past and present slip away. The writing is honest and from the heart, born of a longing to recapture the simpler, finer things in life. There are elements in this collection to make you laugh, make you cry, make you proud and, most of all, make you remember.
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Captain Bob Bartlett and the Karluk Adventure
Artist: Mel D'SouzaPublisher: Downhomer$12.95It was 1913 and the ship Karluk left British Columbia on a scientific expedition to Canada’s Artic. At her wheel was Captain Robert Abram Bartlett, the “Master Mariner of the North” from Brigus, Newfoundland.
The Karluk became trapped in the early winter ice and was carried across the Artic Ocean, where it was crushed and sank. The crew and passengers set up camp on the ice and months later, when daylight returned to the Artic, they walked to an island. From there, the brave Captain Bartlett left the survivors while he and a young Inuk walked a treacherous 700 miles down the coast of Siberia to get help. This is one of the greatest stories of heroism and survival ever told.
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Dictionary of Newfoundland and Labrador
Publisher: Downhomer$19.95This unique reference book combines definitions with illustrations, pronunciations and clever turns of phrases that reflect the colour and rhythm of the style of English commonly used in Newfoundland and Labrador. It includes 3,496 words, meanings, pronunciations and possible origins of words; 564 saying and expressions; folklore; weatherlore; a guide to celebrations and customs; and much more.
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Backyard Horseman
Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing$18.00Completely updated for the modern horse owner, The Backyard Horseman dispels romantic myths and replaces them with something far more valuable: honest, practical advice. It covers topics such as buying, feeding, and training, as well as health, gear, shelter, pasture management, shows and events, and the tough ethical dilemmas owners face when horses grow old.
