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Showing 1 - 20 of 108 items
Daniel Boone: an American life
By Michael A Lofaro. 2003
Biography of early pioneer Daniel Boone (1734-1820), a central figure in the trans-Appalachian westward movement into Kentucky and beyond. Relates…
how Boone's trailblazing exploits spurred increasing settlements but left him restless to explore new wilderness. Also describes his dealings with the Indians and land speculation difficulties. Some violence. 2003Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the birth of the American dream
By Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler. 2006
A chronicle of explorer John Smith (1580-1631), who founded and led the Jamestown colony from 1607-1609. Uses Smith's writings, colonists'…
diaries, and archives to trace his adventures, including his arrival in the New World facing possible execution, and to demythologize his relationship with Pocahontas and portray wilderness life. 2006Award-winning journalist examines the Golden Age of Piracy (1715-1725), when outlaws, defected sailors, privateers, and runaway slaves forged a republic…
in the Bahamas. Chronicles the lives of pirates Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy, Edward "Blackbeard" Thatch, and Charles Vane. Discusses British war hero Woodes Rogers's defeat of the pirate alliance. 2007David Crockett: hero of the common man (American heroes series #5)
By Bill Groneman. 2005
Alamo historian examines the myth and legend of David Crockett (1786-1836) to portray the real frontiersman from Tennessee. Discusses his…
character, reputation, and career in the U.S. Congress. Scrutinizes personal accounts and diaries for evidence of Crockett's heroism during the Mexican assault on the Alamo. 2005Kon-Tiki: across the Pacific by raft
By Thor Heyerdahl. 2004
Recounts the 1947 voyage of six Norwegians who sailed from Peru to Tahiti on a balsa-log raft to test the…
author's theory that the original settlers of Polynesia were South Americans following Pacific Ocean currents. Describes the sailors' difficult, exhilarating, and ultimately successful one-hundred-one-day journey. Includes 2004 foreword. 1950Amelia Earhart: the thrill of it
By Susan Wels. 2009
Biography of the daring female pilot who vanished in 1937 while attempting to circle the globe. Describes her tomboy childhood,…
love of flying that began with her first lesson at age twenty-four, rise to fame, unconventional marriage to publisher George Palmer Putnam, and mysterious disappearance. 2009The hard way around: the passages of Joshua Slocum
By Geoffrey Wolff. 2010
Biography of sailor and adventurer Joshua Slocum (1844-1908), the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo. Discusses his years at…
sea, beginning at age sixteen; his marriage to a woman who shared his love of the seafaring life; and his famous 1895 voyage and subsequent book. 2010Storm kings: the untold history of America's first tornado chasers
By Lee Sandlin. 2013
Examines the origins of meteorology and the study of tornadoes in the United States. Profiles early investigators of tornado activity,…
including Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and James Espy (1785-1860). Chronicles the creation and growth of national weather bureaus. 2013The obelisk and the Englishman: the pioneering discoveries of Egyptologist William Bankes
By Dorothy U. Seyler. 2015
Professor Dorothy U. Seyler recounts the life and work of William John Bankes, a scholar of language, history, and ancient…
Egypt. She discusses his many discoveries, such as the Egyptian King List, and his extensive work with the "lost" city of Petra. His personal troubles throughout this time are also examined. 2015Trials of the earth: the true story of a pioneer woman
By Mary Hamilton. 2016
An account by Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-1936) of her life as a pioneer in the American South. She describes facing…
natural disasters, dangerous wildlife, managing a boardinghouse for settlers in Arkansas, and running a logging camp in Mississippi, all while caring for her family. Some strong language. 1992A woman in Arabia: the writings of the Queen of the Desert
By Gertrude Bell, Georgina Howell. 2015
Collection of letters and diary entries by an Englishwoman who traveled the Middle East and worked as an archaeologist, photographer,…
translator, and spy, and helped to establish the modern state of Iraq. Arranged in groups highlighting her various endeavors. Includes entries from the editor providing further background. 2015The stranger in the woods: the extraordinary story of the last true hermit
By Michael Finkel. 2017
In 1986, twenty-year-old Christopher Knight drove to Maine and disappeared into the forest. He did not speak to another human…
being until he was arrested for stealing food nearly thirty years later. Discusses his survival in the wilderness in the intervening decades. Bestseller. 2017The Whisper on the Night Wind: The True History of a Wilderness Legend
By Adam Shoalts. 2021
NATIONAL BESTSELLERSpellbinding adventure from Canada's most beloved modern-day explorer.Traverspine is not a place you will find on most maps. A…
century ago, it stood near the foothills of the remote Mealy Mountains in central Labrador. Today it is an abandoned ghost town, almost all trace of it swallowed up by dark spruce woods that cloak millions of acres.In the early 1900s, this isolated little settlement was the scene of an extraordinary haunting by large creatures none could identify. Strange tracks were found in the woods. Unearthly cries were heard in the night. Sled dogs went missing. Children reported being stalked by a terrifying grinning animal. Families slept with cabin doors barred and axes and guns at their bedsides.Tales of things that "go bump in the night" are part of the folklore of the wilderness, told and retold around countless campfires down through the ages. Most are easily dismissed by skeptics. But what happened at Traverspine a hundred years ago was different. The eye-witness accounts were detailed, and those who reported them included no less than three medical doctors and a wildlife biologist.Something really did emerge from the wilderness to haunt the little settlement of Traverspine. Adam Shoalts, decorated modern-day explorer and an expert on wilderness folklore, picks up the trail from a century ago and sets off into the Labrador wild to investigate the tale. It is a spine-tingling adventure, straight from a land steeped in legends and lore, where Vikings wandered a thousand years ago and wolves and bears still roam free.In delving into the dark corners of Canada's wild, The Whisper on the Night Wind combines folklore, history, and adventure into a fascinating saga of exploration.Murdered Midas: a millionaire, his gold mine, and a strange death on an island paradise /
By Charlotte Gray. 2019
On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold mining tycoon, philanthropist and "richest man in the Empire," was…
murdered. The news of his death surged across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake, in the Northern Ontario bush. The murder became celebrated as "the crime of the century." The layers of mystery deepened as the involvement of Oakes' son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, came quickly to be questioned, as did the odd machinations of the Governor of the Bahamas, the former King Edward VIII. Despite a sensational trial, no murderer was ever convicted. Rumours were unrelenting about Oakes' missing fortune, and fascination with the Oakes story has persisted for decades. Award-winning biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray explores, for the first time, the life of the man behind the scandal, a man who was both reviled and admired - from his early, hardscrabble days of mining exploration, to his explosion of wealth, to his grandiose gestures of philanthropy. And Gray brings fresh eyes to the bungled investigation and shocking trial in the remote colonial island streets, proposing an overlooked suspect in this long cold case. 2019.The blind mechanic: the amazing story of Eric Davidson, survivor of the 1917 Halifax Explosion
By Marilyn Elliott, Janet Kitz. 2018
Eric Davidson was a beautiful, fair-haired toddler when the Halifax Explosion struck, killing almost 2,000 people and seriously injuring thousands…
of others. Eric lost both eyes-a tragedy that his mother never fully recovered from. Eric, however, was positive and energetic. He also developed a fascination with cars and how they worked, and he later decided, against all likelihood, to become a mechanic. Assisted by his brothers who read to him from manuals, he worked hard, passed examinations, and carved out a decades-long career. Once the subject of a National Film Board documentary, Eric Davidson was, until his death, a much-admired figure in Halifax. Written by his daughter Marilyn, this book gives new insights into the story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion and contains never-before-seen documents and photographs. Winner of the 2019 The Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction). 2018.Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson (Untold Lives Series)
By Mark Bourrie. 2019
NOMINATED FOR THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE AS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS-TV'S THE MORNING SHOW Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal.…
Co-founder of the Hudson's Bay Company. Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation. Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.Settler education: poems
By Laurie D Graham. 2016
In the stunning poems of "Settler Education", Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of…
nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, she reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present. Poems from this book won the 2013 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize. 2016. Uniform title: Poems.Rag cosmology
By Erin Robinsong. 2017
In this time of ecological precarity, "Rag Cosmology" is an urgent invitation to reinvent our modes of engagement with the…
environment we not only inhabit, but are. Refusing the lamentation that leaves us as resigned witnesses to devastation, "Rag Cosmology" counters fatalist narratives with the pleasures of ecological entanglement and engagement. Tracing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable things--economy and ecology, weather and lust, bills and inner voices, wages of avoidance and wages of listening--these poems offer the intimate and lush language of thought that yearn for an imaginative reinvention of how we understand what we are part of and what we are losing. Winner of the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QWF). 2017.The woo-woo: how I survived ice hockey, drug raids, demons, and my crazy Chinese family
By Lindsay Wong. 2018
A young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons…
when in fact they should have been on anti-psychotic meds. Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the "woo-woo"-Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo's sinister effects; at the age of six, she found herself living in the food court of her suburban mall, which her mother saw as a safe haven because they could hide there from dead people, and on a camping trip, her mother tried to light Lindsay's foot on fire to rid her of the woo-woo. The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, when her aunt, suffering from a psychotic breakdown, holds the city of Vancouver hostage for eight hours when she threatens to jump off a bridge. And when Lindsay herself starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family. On one hand a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience, and on the other a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, 'The Woo-Woo' is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself. Bestseller. Canada Reads 2019. Winner of the 2019 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. 2018.Wayside sang: poems
By Cecily Nicholson. 2018
Wayside Sang concerns entwined migrations of Black-other diaspora coming to terms with fossil-fuel psyches in times of trauma and movement.…
This is a poetic account of economy travel on North American roadways, across Peace and Ambassador bridges and through the Fleetway tunnel, above and beneath Great Lake rivers between nation states. Nicholson reimagines the trajectories of her birth father and his labour as it criss-crossed these borders in a study that engages the automobile object, its industry, roadways and hospitality, through and beyond the Great Lakes region. Winner of the 2018 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. 2018. Uniform title: Poems.