Books, Biographies & Memoirs, Regional Canada, Territories

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Ron Stob, Eva Stob
Honey, Let's Get a Boat... A Cruising Adventure of America's Great Loop
by Raven Cove Publishing (Paperback)

This is the story of a couple's travels on a forty-foot trawler cruising 6300 miles and 145 locks around the eastern part of North America known as America's Great Loop or the Great Circle Cruise. Their nautical ineptitude is evident from the beginning, but pulling from their personal and collective strengths, the authors overcome doubt, a lack of experience, and real and imagined horrors. The odyssey is told the way life hands out its adventures -- sometimes humorously, sometimes tragically, but always memorably. The writing is light and appealing, but there is a serious strain running through the book for those who relish history and descriptions of the landscape. Astute and attentive to detail, they chronicled events and kept an account of expenses, equipment and charting. As a result, the appendix/guidebook is worth the price of the book for anyone interested in planning their cruise. Topics include necessary charts and guidebooks, information on locks, sett! ing an ...

Adam Gopnik
Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York
by Knopf Canada (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2006-10-10)

Following Adam Gopnik’s best-selling Paris to the Moon, the adventure continues against the panorama of another storied city. Autumn, 2000: the Gopnik family moves back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here are the triumphs and travails of father, mother, son and daughter; and of the teachers, coaches, therapists, adversaries and friends who round out the extended urban family. From Bluie, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, Gopnik’s New York is charmed by the civilization of childhood. It is a fabric of living, which, though rent by the events of 9/11, will reweave itself, reviving a world where Jewish jokes mingle with debates about the problem of consciousness, the price of real estate and the meaning of modern art. By turns elegant and exultant, written with a signature mix of mind and heart, Through the Children’s Gate is at once a ...

Farley Mowat
Bay of Spirits: A Love Story
by McClelland & Stewart (Paperback) (Release Date: 2007-09-18)

In 1957, Farley Mowat shipped out aboard one of Newfoundland’s famous coastal steamers, tramping from outport to outport along the southwest coast. The indomitable spirit of the people and the bleak beauty of the landscape would lure him back again and again over the years. In the process of falling in love with a people and a place, Mowat also met the woman who would be the great love of his life. A stunningly beautiful and talented young artist, Claire Wheeler insouciantly climbed aboard Farley’s beloved but jinxed schooner as it lay on the St. Pierre docks, once again in a cradle for repairs, and changed both their lives forever. This is the story of that love affair, of summers spent sailing the Newfoundland coast, and of their decision to start their life together in Burgeo, one of the province’s last remaining outports. It is also an unforgettable portrait of the last of the outport people and a way of life that had survived for centuries but was now passing forever. ...

Paul Watson
Seal Wars: Twenty-five Years on the Front Lines with the Harp Seals
by Firefly Books (Paperback)

Captain Paul Watson has rammed fishing trawlers, smashed whaling ships, sailed boldly into Soviet-controlled waters, and stood bravely on an ice floe between a baby harp seal and an oncoming seal boat. In this daring and sprawling memoir, the captain of the Sea Shepherd recounts his remarkable life on the front lines in the war to stop the viscious slaughter of the Canadian harp seal. Seal Wars opens in 1996 with Paul Watson -- holed up in a hotel with Martin Sheen in the Magdalen Islands and facing an attacking mob of angry sealers -- being rescued by police and airlifted to safety. Watson recounts the childhood experiences that shaped his adult consciousness and environmental ethic. He records a history of the seal hunt (including all the tragedies, brutalities, and government mismanagement and obfuscation) from its beginning up to the rescue campaigns he courageously led from the prow of the Sea Shepherd. Starting in 1976 with a Greenpeace crew off Labrador, Paul Watson ...

Cynthia J. Faryon
Unsung Heroes of the Royal Canadian Navy: Incredible Tales Of Courage and Daring During World War II (Amazing Stories)
by Altitude Publishing (Canada) (Paperback)

At the outbreak of World War II, the Royal Canadian Navy consisted of just 13 warships and about 3000 permanent and reserve members. By the war's end, however, it had grown into the third largest navy in the world, with 365 warships and more than 100,000 personnel. The men and women of the Royal Canadian Navy came from all corners of Canada to fight in the sea war against the enemy. Together, they exceeded even the highest expectations of their allies.

Afua Cooper
The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900) (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900)
by University of Georgia Press (Paperback)

During the night of April 10, 1734, Montréal burned. Marie-Joseph Angélique, a twenty-nine-year-old slave, was arrested, tried, and found guilty of starting the blaze that consumed forty-six buildings. Suspecting that she had not acted alone and angered that she had maintained her innocence, Angélique's condemners tortured her after the trial. She confessed but named no accomplices. Before Angélique was hanged, she was paraded through the city. Afterward, her corpse was burned. Angélique, who had been born in Portugal, faded into the shadows of Canadian history, vaguely remembered as the alleged arsonist behind an early catastrophic fire.The result of fifteen years of research, The Hanging of Angélique vividly tells the story of this strong-willed woman. Afua Cooper draws on extensive trial records that offer, in Angélique's own words, a detailed portrait of her life and a sense of what slavery was like in Canada at the time. ...

Donald S. Johnson
Charting the Sea of Darkness: The Four Voyages of Henry Hudson (Kodansha Globe)
by Kodansha Amer Inc (Paperback)

International in scope, this series of non-fiction trade paperbacks offers books that explore the lives, customs and thoughts of peoples and cultures around the world.

William Laird McKinlay
The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor's Memoir of Arctic Disaster
by St. Martin's Griffin (Paperback)

Robert Whyte
Robert Whyte's 1847 Famine Ship Diary: The Journey of an Irish Coffin Ship
by Irish American Book Company (Paperback)

The voyage of the 'coffin ship' the Ajax, from Dublin to Grosse í le, the Canadian quarantine station described in the contemporary diary of one of the passengers, Robert Whyte. Whyte was a Protestant gentleman of education and positions as well as being a professional writer who intended to publish his diary. The diary appeared in 1848. It is signed in the author's own handwriting and features vivid descriptions of the spectacular scenery along the way and striking delineations of the passengers, the crew and the suffering travelers.

Howard Norman
My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations (Directions)
by National Geographic (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2004-03-01)

An evocative portrait of the landscape and eccentric characters who have shaped his literary work by the critically acclaimed author of The Bird Artist and The Northern Lights captures the world of Nova Scotia in a collection of folklore, poetry, reflections, anecdotes, stories, and essays.

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