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Dancing on a Powder Keg
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$39.95Ilse Weber’s letters document the life of a young Jewish author of children’s book, as she and her family were gradually trapped and persecuted in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. Her poems, written and performed in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, have become an international symbol of the camp and ghetto poetry. Ilse saved her older son, but she and her younger son were gassed in Auschwitz.
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The Case of Paul Kammerer The Most Controversial Biologist of His Time
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$27.99The Case of Paul Kammerer is a well-researched and highly readable historical account of one of the biggest, till today unsolved scientific scandals. Paul Kammerer, ‘the father of epigenetic,’ was a talented and idealistic biologist, whose ground-breaking research made headlines worldwide. Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, where Kammerer lived and worked, was at its creative peak yet already declining toward Nazism. The book that reads like a detective story, provides new evidence for the events that led to Kammerer’s tragic end while exposing the implicit yet dangerous links between science and politics.
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The Grieving Time A Year's Account of Recovery from Loss
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$8.99Like the millions of people who face a time of grieving, Anne Brooks looked desperately for something to read that would offer comfort after her husband’s death. Finding nothing that moved her, she began a monthly journal about the deeply personal side of her loss, her loneliness, and her struggle to come to terms with her independence and her new self. The Grieving Time is the intensely moving and deeply comforting account of her recovery-enduring today as the best book for grieving spouses or anyone facing the loss of a loved one through death or divorce. Thousands of counselors, psychologists, social workers, health care providers, ministers, and hospice workers have found it to be one of the most helpful books in their libraries-a testament to its universal significance and appeal.
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Show Me The Way To Go Home
Publisher: Bunim & Bannigan$18.95With near total recall, the author recreates what it was like, from a child’s point of view, to be tied to a charming, naïve single mother. The years are 1936 to 1948; the milieu, the New Jersey Oranges. Navigating the hardships of the Great Depression and the mysteries of world conflict, young Dorothy Jane asks one teacher if a war is ever ‘off.’ Show Me The Way To Go Home follows the unanchored, at times rakish, existence of a feckless mother and innocent daughter who rarely spending more than a few seasons at one address. It is a tale of resiliency and courage, of a child’s growing awareness of her predicament, and her gradually achieved maturity.
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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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The Last Canadian Knight
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95From a small-town law office in Nova Scotia to the boardrooms of London, England, where he was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s “privatization ace,” lawyer and businessman Sir Graham Day has established a sterling international reputation as a tough-minded but charming negotiator. In The Last Canadian Knight, award-winning business journalist Gordon Pitts chronicles Day’s meteoric rise and explores the valuable lessons Day has gleaned from a lifetime of global business experience.
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The Sea Was in Their Blood
$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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We Keep A Light
$15.95In We Keep A Light, Evelyn M. Richardson describes how she and her husband bought tiny Bon Portage Island and built a happy life there for themselves and their three children. On an isolated lighthouse station off the southern tip of Nova Scotia, the Richardsons shared the responsibilities and pleasures of island living, from carrying water and collecting firewood to making preserves and studying at home. The close-knit family didn’t mind their isolation, and found delight in the variety and beauty of island life.
We Keep A Light is much more than a memoir. It is an exquisitely written, engrossing record of family life set against a glowing lighthouse, the enduring shores of Nova Scotia, and the ever-changing sea.
