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Seven Grains of Paradise A Culinary Journey in Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Seven Grains of Paradise tells the fascinating and much neglected story about many kinds of food in Africa, a continent with a rich farming tradition, intricate cuisines, and a multitude of food cultures.
Here is the story of Baxter’s personal quest to learn about some fascinating and new (to her) foods in a handful of countries in sub-Sahara Africa as she visits African farms, markets, restaurants, and kitchens. The people who grow, sell, buy, prepare, and serve the foods help her explore the riddles of a continent better known for hunger than for its plentiful food resources. The author draws on stories and research conducted over the more than thirty years she has lived and worked in Africa.
From the fabled city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert to the rainforests of Central Africa, readers are invited along on a delightful journey of learning and eating–and some drinking too, of invigorating indigenous beverages, brews, and palm wine straight from the trees. The culinary journey takes the reader down garden paths, into forests that double as farms, through the chaos of markets, and into modest little roadside eateries.
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Scars and Other Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95“The scar didn’t use to show,” says Daniel, the narrator of the title story. But scars have a way of manifesting themselves, visually or otherwise, and the stories in this collection illustrate a varied compendium of characters marked in some way by their injuries.
Having lost a breast to cancer, a young woman visits a psychic seeking answers to the questions in her life. A bullied boy finds solace in the arrival of another unfortunate who has attracted the attention of his tormentors. A divorced father attempts to shield his young daughter from the trauma of tragedy. An eight-year-old boy witnesses death for the first time, a massage therapist is unnerved by the discovery he makes about a new client, and a young widow flounders in her struggle to cope with the loss of her husband. These and other characters come to vivid life in stories told with the sensitivity and skill that have earned the author continued critical praise.
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The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers
Editor: Julia Swan, Lesley ChoycePublisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In this poignant, often funny, and heartfelt collection, Nova Scotia authors and artists put to the page their thoughts and emotions about their fathers, who raised, inspired, loved, and taught them–and occasionally drove them crazy. As well as MacLeod, Bruneau, and Murray, The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers includes stories by Harry Thurston, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Frank Cameron, Joan Baxter, Jon Tattrie, Bruce Graham, Lesley Choyce, Lenore Zann, David Mossman, Janice Landry, Lindsay Ruck, Ian Colford, Julia Swan, Craig Flinn, and Daniel Paul.
Here are fathers of all kinds: quiet, thoughtful, wise men; stubborn and headstrong men; and men whose careers and circumstances called forth public bravery and heroism. Included too are fathers whose mark on the world is more private but just as compelling, just as fearless, just as noteworthy. They embody the strength everyone needs to weather the storms of life, the humour that helps us to laugh at crucial moments, and the stalwart vision it takes to raise daughters and sons and send them out into the world.
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Daniel Paul Mi’kmaw Elder
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Born in a log cabin during a raging blizzard on Indian Brook Reserve in 1938, Mi’kmaw elder Daniel N. Paul rose to the top of a Canadian society that denied his people’s civilization. When he was named to the Order of Canada, his citation called him a “powerful and passionate advocate for social justice and the eradication of racial discrimination.” His Order of Nova Scotia honour said he “gives a voice to his people by revealing a past that the standard histories have chosen to ignore.”
But long before the acclaim, there was the Indian Agent denying food to his begging mother. There was the education system that taught him his people were savages. There was the Department of Indian Affairs that frustrated his work to bring justice to his people.
Now, for the first time, here is the full story of his personal journey of transformation, a story that will inspire Canadians to recognize and respect their First Nations as equal and enlightened civilizations.
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Much Madness, Divinest Sense Women’s Stories of Mental Health and Health Care
Editor: Lori Hanson, Nili Kaplan - MyrthPublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is time to shed some light on the dark halls and windowless rooms where women’s mental health has been hidden from view. Where are the stories? Where are their voices? In historical and psychiatric records, women’s mental health is reduced to verifiable symptoms and causes, devoid of the subjective, absent of the lived experience. When confronted with their protestations and self-representations, our medical system and our societal institutions further pathologize, retrauamtize or silence women. Much Madness, Divinest Sense is a collection of women’s stories and essays about mental health and health care. These women–physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, community activists, health researchers, Indigenous women, transgender women, our neighbors, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers who are the recipients, providers and critics of care–break the silence to talk about the polluted, heart-wrenching, stigmatized, messy subject that is mental illness today. As with their first collection, Women Who Care: Women’s stories of health care and caring, the stories, essays and poems of women receiving, accompanying, critiquing or giving mental health care are again in this compilation as raw as they are real.
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Nebooktook In the Woods
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95In Nebooktook, Mike Parker once again pays homage to our wilderness heritage and those who, in days gone by, revelled in a life in the woods. In today’s world, primitive wilderness places are more “visionary” than “actual. ” The call of the loon is being drowned out by the industrial roar of “men who dig up and tear down and destroy.” Newspaper headlines bemoan a myriad of environmental concerns and issues almost daily as beleaguered politicians and bureaucrats, entrusted to responsibly manage natural resources and safeguard the environment, are taken to task.
In order to keep us grounded in the environmental riches we once possessed and where we should be heading, Parker reminds us of the beauty and power of the wilderness. He goes beyond mere documentation and offers a heartfelt call to see the wild places of Nova Scotia as more than a source for pillage and profit. Nebooktook, which in the Mi’kmaw language means “in the woods,” is an eclectic mix of history, heritage, ideology, nostalgia, philosophy, poetry, and prose. Set in Nova Scotia, the more than three hundred early-twentieth-century images appearing here could just as easily have been taken in any number of wilderness areas stretching from the Adirondacks to the Rockies. The book’s message is equally timeless and universal, spanning centuries and drawing upon scores of voices from a variety of disciplines and professions. Nebooktook is reflective, introspective, meditative, and thought-provoking. While it decries the practices and doctrines that wantonly destroy and pollute, more importantly the book celebrates the traditions, natural beauty, and intrinsic values of our woods and waters.
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Redemption Songs How Bob Marley’s Nova Scotia Song Lights the Way Past Racism
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Redemption Songs tells the extraordinary story of how one of Bob Marley’s greatest songs was born in Nova Scotia. It opens with Marley’s live acoustic performance of Redemption Song at the end of his life, and reveals that the core lyric comes from a speech Marcus Garvey delivered in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1937.
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What a Friend We have in Gloria
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Gloria Belding has just hurled a rock through her neighbour’s window, scattering broken glass in all directions and barely missing Duddy McGill. Now she waits, fogged with drink, for the police to handcuff her and haul her away. She’s been down this road many times and expects to go before a judge, get fined and then get on with her sorry, alcoholic life.
But Gloria is wrong. She gets a chance to turn her life around. In Bruce Graham’s heartwarming and hilarious new book, the final book of the Snake Road trilogy, he takes readers back to the close-knit and quirky community, picking up where Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore left off. It is a story of romance, love and reformation as Gloria discovers the road back to health and happiness is not a straight line. While Gloria learns new survival skills at Carson’s Point, back on the Parrsboro shore, Minnie is struggling to adjust to life after Duddy’s reformation. There’s other news as well. A new arrival has taken up residence in Mink Martin’s trailer and made a “breakthrough” discovery of his own: an artifact of great historical significance.
What A Friend We Have in Gloria is classic Bruce Graham, filled with all the usual weirdness of his kooky characters and the strange goings-on on this twisty little road in rural Nova Scotia. This time, the focus is on Gloria, former lover of Mink Martin, in a story that proves no matter how far down you sink in life, you can rise again.
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Nova Scotia Love Stories
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In Nova Scotia Love Stories, Lesley Choyce has assembled some of the province’s most beloved authors who explore through fact and fiction the myriad ways in which a love story exists. These writers with a strong emotional connection to this shaped-by-the-sea province demonstrate the many guises and moods of love: for the young, the aged and all points in between. There is love that is healing, heart-throbbing joyful, but also love that is disillusioned, unusual, possibly misguided, but always life-changing. The stories are heartwarming, touching, funny, and profound. This collection will convince any reader that love thrives and abides here on the wave-swept shores of Nova Scotia.
A young girl experiences profound attraction to the enigmatic but charismatic Manuel Jenkins in Budge Wilson’s tale; a child tells of having two mothers in Bruce Graham’s short story; and Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron each describe how they met and fell in love, bridging their lives from opposite coasts of Canada. Maureen Hull’s Miranda finds herself in a relationship with a rather unlikely partner; Jim Lotz and Lindsay Ruck tell of real-life love stories: deep, long-standing commitment between two kindred souls, through a lifetime of shared adventures.
There are other jewels here from Jon Tattrie, Steven Laffoley, Sheldon Currie, Harold Horwood, Carol Bruneau, Michael Ungar, William Kowalski, Don Aker, Chris Benjamin, and Lesley Choyce. Collectively, these writers explore many facets of this most human emotion.
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In the Country
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95In the Country is a collection of Wayne Curtis’s unflinching but lovingly told stories of the hardships of rural life for his generation. Despite an abiding love for the natural settings in which he himself grew up, Wayne describes the restrictions facing young people who yearned for a life beyond the farm. Country life, with its tranquility and beauty, its seasonal rhythms and gifts, also held many boys and girls back from achieving their potential.
The setting is rural New Brunswick in days gone by but not easily forgotten. It is a fictional world where the harsher realities of the time come sharply into focus. The old man in “The Last Hunt,” for example, embodies the dashed dreams and festering frustrations that make this final hunt of his life so charged with emotion. In the title story, a young woman soon realizes the death of her father has put an end to her educational goals as well, for now her duty is to help the family on the farm.
Many young country people wanted to mix easily with their more sophisticated contemporaries, but encountered insurmountable obstacles. Feelings of inferiority and embarrassment were often the result among those who lacked the social skills to navigate town relationships. In “The Falconer Spring,” Wayne captures the palpable longing, excitement but ultimately limitations two cousins experience on a trip to town. The sister in “Of Fall and Winter Rain” pays the ultimate price for her longing and naivété. The stories assembled here are both tragic and tender, told with Wayne’s evocative, precise prose.
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After Swissair
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the sea near the mouth of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board. Thousands of people responded immediately: emergency personnel, fishermen, the military, divers, community searchers and RCMP officials. In the days, weeks and months after the crash, local residents and ordinary people supported the investigation in any way they could and, more critically, they also sought to comfort the families of the victims.
In the face of this almost unimaginable event, many experienced enormous suffering and world views were changed forever for the survivors – both the friends and relatives of the victims as well as support teams and the local communities of St. Margaret’s Bay, Halifax and beyond. What carried so many of them through this tragedy was the astonishing generosity and kindness each group gave to the other. As Wilson writes, “We all needed the families as much as they needed us.”
She wrote this collection of poems “in gratitude and in celebration of the thousands of men and women who suffered – and sometimes triumphed – during the months and years that followed the crash.” The poems reveal the depth of the impact the crash of Swissair 111 had on so many people.
Over the past 17 years, Wilson has been informed and inspired by the families of the victims, workers on land and sea, observers, professionals and by the local residents she has interviewed. She wove together these experiences to create a poetic vision of the sea change that occurred because of what Nova Scotians saw, heard or imagined about people they had never met, revealing the wonder of the sheer courage and generosity of the human spirit.
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What We’re Doing to Stay Afloat
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95We’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.
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Acting Up
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95This 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.
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Angel Lady of the Maritimes
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95How 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.
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Limerence
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Can 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?
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The Price We Pay
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Decision-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.
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Travels With Farley
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$24.95After 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.
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Frontier Town: Bear River, Nova Scotia A Snapshot in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$26.95Bear River photographer Ralph Nelson Harris captured the village’s waning days of sail and lumber through his camera lens in the early 1900s. Drawing upon hundreds of recently discovered Ralph Harris images, historian and author Mike Parker puts a newfound face to Bear River’s past while utilizing painstakingly researched excerpts from The Telephone, Bear River’s newspaper of the day, to add an informative and entertaining voice to the story. Includes 470 images.
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I Owe It All to Rock & Roll(and the CBC)
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In 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.
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Music In the Dark
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Music in The Dark is a compelling novel set in Prohibition-era Montreal when alcohol, drugs and jazz music ruled “Sin City.” Taylor Williams is a young black musician struggling to find fame in the Montreal Harlem District amid gangsters, racism and bootleggers. As a young boy, Taylor escaped a terrifying ordeal that haunts him as he pursues his dream of becoming a famous jazz musician.
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Paddy Boy
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$17.95Paddy 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.
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Tapestry of Green A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Carl Cocking had two worthy ambitions: to restore his father’s battered reputation and bring his mother and brothers to some agreement whereby they could call themselves a family. Tapestry of Green is the story of one Englishman who traces the last months of his father’s life through the dark streets of Victorian London to the sampans and opium dens of China. During a quest that he cannot abandon, Carl witnesses the brutality of British trading ships, the Great Trek by the Dutch in South Africa and the beginning of the Opium Wars.
The story takes place in England and China between 1837 and 1843, in the era when hot air and gas balloons were creating great interest in aviation. Artist and inventor Robert Cocking often took his young son Carl on balloon excursions over the English countryside and the city of London where they could look down on a world filled with great filth and great beauty. Carl escapes the unravelling of his family and only returns to London when his father makes aviation history by becoming the first Englishman killed in a parachute accident.
“He is the greatest fool in England, they wrote in their horrid penny papers, and I would not let my father be so remembered.”
Carl tries to reconstruct the last months of his father’s life. His investigation takes him through London’s gentlemen clubs and shabby tenements and on a voyage to the other side of the world to the one man who helped his father design his unique parachute. Carl arrives in China just as the Chinese are rebelling over British intrusions and the supplying of opium to the masses of Chinese.
“On the second day on the Canton River thousands of dead fish floated by, killed by white powder seeping into the water from smashed wooden chests.”
Although Carl is fictional, his father Robert and the Opium Wars are very real.
Bruce Graham is a Nova Scotia writer and former broadcaster who, for many years, was the face of the evening TV news in Maritime homes. He is the author of seven books, three of which have been transformed into stage plays. Ivor Johnson’s Neighbours is being developed into a television series. His last book, Duddy Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, was published in 2013, and is now being prepared for the stage. Bruce lives in his hometown of Parrsboro with his wife Helen.
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Blue Tattoo A Novel
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters – from Boston mayor James Michael Curley to Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer – The Blue Tattoo tells the sweeping story of the lives caught up in the unbelievable devastation of the Halifax Explosion.
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Winds of Change Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95Calvin Woodrow Ruck, born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Bajan immigrants, saw roadblocks not as barriers, but as hurdles that he would eventually leap over.
From working in the steel plant and as a sleeping car porter to being awarded the Order of Canada and appointed to the Senate of Canada, Calvin worked diligently to ensure that his children, and his children’s children, wouldn’t have to go through the same things he went through. Although he was turned away from many opportunities, he was determined to provide for his family and took on a heavy workload in the Halifax community.
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An Ordinary Hero Story of David Goldberg, WWII Canadian Spitfire Pilot
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Imagine you are a pilot, shot from the sky, alone in enemy territory where no one speaks your language. It is winter, and soon will be dark. You could freeze to death, starve or be captured by the Nazis. And you are a Jew. This is David Goldberg’s predicament on March 8, 1944. An Ordinary Hero is Goldberg’s account of how, assisted by the French Underground, he made his way through occupied France and Spain and evaded capture by the enemy. He returned to combat in ground support as a dive-bomber to become the decorated (Distinguished Flying Cross) commander of the only Canadian fighter squadron in Italy.
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Down the Coaltown Road
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95In Down the Coaltown Road, Sheldon Currie uses two narrative voices to explore the effect of international affairs on a small, ethnically mixed Cape Breton coal mining community during the summer of 1940. Mussolini has just thrown his support behind Hitler, bringing Italy into the war, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King has rendered a list of Italian-Canadians who can be classified as possible dissidents. Tomassio, one of the town’s most hardworking miners, is among those rounded up for an internment camp in either New Brunswick or Ontario. Tomassio uses his customary ingenuity to escape the confines of the local jail where he and his friends are temporarily held – but his freedom does not last for long. Anna, Tomassio’s resourceful wife who has an unerring ability to get what she wants from the men in her life, tells her story, which begins in Italy when she identifies the athletic, if quite arrogant, Tomassio as her best chance for immigration to Canada.
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Coastal Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95She was 37, a single, sad freelance fisheries reporter and writer living in Vancouver, on Canada’s West Coast. He was 59, a widowed, heartbroken journalist and author, living in a small village on Isle Madame, Cape Breton, on Canada’s East Coast. The life paths of Marjorie Simmins and Silver Donald Cameron took many years to cross – but when they did, their worlds changed forever. Award-winning writer and journalist, Marjorie Simmins tells a story of love and resistance with humour and candour.
