Going Over is the biography of Titus Mossman, a veteran of the “Great War” who served with the 85th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) on the Western Front. This book blends social, political and historical issues of those turbulent times with the story of one young Canadian turned soldier, caught at the sharp edge of history.
Sharing the Journey tells of the author’s life and adventures from the far reaches of Canada to Lesotho in Southern Africa and from Slovakia to Alaska. Always an independent and mindful thinker, prepared to take the road that best suited his skills and beliefs, Jim shares what he has learned during his years working at 25 different jobs from farmer to university professor.
Paddy Boy is Patrick O’Flaherty’s lively memoir of childhood in a small secluded Newfoundland community, covering the years 1939-54. This time is most unique because it is a bridge between the old Newfoundland with its curious links to England, Ireland, and Scotland, and its new status, after 1949, as a province of Canada. O’Flaherty reimagines just what that lost world was like, how children figured into it, how his family and other families functioned and what part religion played.
In this hilarious and insightful memoir, Frank Cameron takes readers from his childhood to his professional days at CHNS and then the CBC and on to his present life, hosting a show at Seaside FM. Frank just can’t get radio out of his blood. In between is a satisfying chronicle of a media personality who never takes himself too seriously. Frank is funny, but he also doesn’t shy away from stating his opinions and telling it like it is.
After 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.
Decision-making happens throughout our lives. Some decisions we are proud of, others we regret, but they shape our lives. This book examines extraordinary events told to the author by more than 25 remarkable people. The men and women are police officers, firefighters, Canadian military personnel, Emergency Health Services (EHS) attendants, grief counsellors, social workers and ordinary citizens. All have faced adversity. Some have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and that is an important part of their story.
These are stories of hope and healing in the face of regret, challenge, and, in some cases, life and death. One high-ranking Canadian police officer reveals to the author, for the first time publicly, that he has been diagnosed with PTSD. The diagnosis came after years of demanding first responder work both in Canada and abroad, including devastating earthquake and flood recovery and relief efforts.
In another case, a former Ontario paramedic describes how a decision he made at a murder scene left him reeling. He has since started a non-profit organization in the victim’s honour and travelled coast to coast in Canada raising awareness that “Heroes are Human.”
A mother of two describes her split-second decision to drive her car, at high speed, into a ditch alongside a Nova Scotia highway. When her car malfunctioned and a head-on collision was imminent, she acted selflessly to avoid killing or injuring anyone. Her near-death experience and dramatic roadside rescue by two members of the military will haunt readers of this true story.
Underpinning the work is Landry’s interview with the man who accidentally caused the horrific house fire which was the focus of her previous work, The Sixty Second Story. That book pays homage to her late father, Baz Landry, a Canadian Medal of Bravery recipient, and his Halifax firefighting peers. Together they rescued an eight-week-old infant from a burning home in 1978.
Can a man have it all?
The warmth of a solid family and the challenges of a fruitful career?
These questions lie at the heart of Limerence, a fun novel exploring the lives of two people seeking very different ways to be men. One’s a stay-at-home dad, the other a freewheeling libertine. Both struggle with addictions to limerence, that Leonard Cohen longing for something new that drives so many men to leave behind what’s good in pursuit of what seems better.
A car crash in southern Manitoba flings lives apart like planets ejected from the solar system. A man with no future staggers dazed from the wreckage and vanishes. A man with no past arrives in Halifax and creates a new life.
Cain Cohen denies he ever was Sam Stiller, but the past is catching up to his present. People who knew Sam insist he is the same person as Cain, but he rejects them, repeatedly insisting he’s not Stiller. Is he right? Or is he deliberately trying to shake off his old identity and assume a new one?
As the mystery unfolds, the novel probes deeper questions about manhood. Old ideas of how to be a man celebrate the stoic breadwinning father, but they’ve fallen out of our culture. Newer ideas, like taking time off to raise your children, barely make a dent. Men are left to explore the unmapped terrain alone, shaping the future without anyone noticing.
Drawing wisdom from the great Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, William Shakespeare and Steve Perry, Limerence dives deep into the new world of new men and asks: What does it mean to be a man?
How does someone go from being a military nurse to a professional medium talking to angels and dead people? Read Karen’s enthralling autobiography portraying her spiritual journey and fascinating career change. Karen, The Angel Lady, didn’t talk to dead people as a child, nor is she a third-generation psychic. She didn’t grow up thinking, “I want to talk to angels for a living,” but looking back on her life, there were definitely clues she would.
Along the way, Karen had many frank chats with God while trying to stay on her life path, looking for divine guidance and help along the way. Discover the secrets of working as a professional medium and the realities of communicating with heavenly beings. It sometimes means persuading dead people to quiet down and allow her some private time.
As she recounts some hair-raising experiences in her life, Karen offers up helpful advice about knowing which angels are around you. With humour and a down-to-earth approach, Karen discusses her first ghostly encounter during a military tour of Gettysburg. She also writes of the startling first time a dead person spoke to her directly – a soldier killed in Afghanistan. And she tells of an angelic visitation at her military workplace informing her it was time to move on to the next phase in honouring her life path.
With warmth, Karen shares her angelic encounters: how Archangel Michael took over driving her car in a dangerous situation; how she sees the glowing presence of angels; how her deceased father grabs her attention from heaven; and what common messages your angels have for you.
Be inspired to fearlessly follow your life path. Know you are not alone in this world.
This is a book about life and this is a book about acting.
Exploring Shakespeare’s dictum, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players,” Bill Carr proves it isn’t just dramatic hyperbole but true. During his life, Bill has tried to live authentically while being very conscious he was acting. We are all acting, he claims, and some are better actors than others.
The same skills that work on the stage also work in life. Each requires the same attention to detail and a co-ordination of the inner life with the outer manifestation of that life. So Bill decided to improve his use of theatre techniques to better manage his own life. Now he shares those discoveries with readers.
Through exercises in the Play Journal and relating (often hilariously) his own life lessons, Bill will help you take the performance of your life to the next level – whatever you conceive that to be. Acting Up is about self-creation, taking control of the creative energies in and around you to be who you want to be in any given moment on your life’s stage. It asks you to follow Socrates’ advice, “Know thyself,” and challenges you to manifest that self in each moment. This is no easy task, but the alternative can be too costly.
The ideas here are gifts Bill received throughout his life from mystics, philosophers, seers, artists and seekers, who, like him, have experimented along the way, each offering bits and pieces that resulted in this book. Acting Up is part of an ongoing experiment in living. As you take part in the exercises, you join a company of artists dedicated to the adventure of self-discovery and, ultimately, self-expression. Perform your life as it was meant to be performed. It’s your show, so start acting up.
We’re all at sea these days, no matter where we live. We make impossible pacts to guard against drowning, cobble together precarious rafts, patch our bailing buckets, and still the water pours in; we cannot hope to escape it. Job loss, heartbreak, accident, cruelty, impotence, climate change, madness, death: every sort of weather conspires to keep us lost and insomniac, struggling to reach some sort of shore. What We’re Doing To Stay Afloat chronicles such watery conditions and offers poetry as one sort of kit containing tools fitted to the task of staying alive: humour, rage, hammer, buoy, radar, chart. Here, melancholia and surrealism interleave, monologues become dialogues, want ads and Facebook posts are recycled into intimate domestic conversations, and ballads of human desperation alternate with accounts of the silliness, grace and violence of the natural world. Poetry alone won’t save us of course, but in flashes it here reveals where we are; it names, navigates, and gives us light to row by, perhaps long enough to sight an approach to the next harbour.