Best of
Canada

1978

Men for the Mountains


Sid Marty - 1978
    He was a mountain climber, rescue team member, firefighter, wildlife custodian, and adviser to tourists, adventurers, and people passing through. At all times, he was an acute observer of human and animal behaviour. In these pages he records with wry wit and bitter insight true stories of heroism and folly drawn from life in the high country.Marty writes vividly about a land and a way of life that are increasingly endangered. The visceral energy of his prose compels attention. This is a compulsive, alarming, and often hilarious read.

Underground to Canada


Barbara Smucker - 1978
    Every day that she spends huddled in the slave trader’s wagon travelling south or working on the brutal new plantation, she thinks about the land where it is possible to be free, a land she and her friend Liza may reach someday. So when workers from the Underground Railroad offer to help the two girls escape, they are ready. But the slave catchers and their dogs will soon be after them…

A New Kind of Country


Dorothy Gilman - 1978
    Pollifax series, had reached a point of no return in her life. With her sons in college, Ms. Gilman was searching for something unknowable, unnameable . . . until she bought a small house in a little lobstering village in Nova Scotia, Canada.And so she began her life again, discovering talents and interests she never realized were hers, accepting the inner peace she had always fought, and most of all, understanding the untapped part of herself, almost as if it were a new kind of country, to challenge, explore, and love.

Life Among the Qallunaat


Mini Aodla Freeman - 1978
    Her extraordinary story, sometimes humorous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s. Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Ontario, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic. This reissue of Mini Aodla Freeman’s path-breaking work includes new material, an interview with the author, and an afterword by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak.

Death of a Lady's Man


Leonard Cohen - 1978
    It is largely autobiographical in tone, offering the reader insights into Cohen's private world. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, Cohen's mournful, thought-provoking lyrics and poems have formed the backdrop to the musings of generations; this reissue, following on the huge success of his 2009 concerts, extends the experience to yet more new readers.

The Wild Frontier


Pierre Berton - 1978
    Wilfred Grenfell, the eccentric missionary; Sam Steele, the most famous of all Mounted Policemen; and Isaac Jorges, the 17th-century priest who courted martyrdom. Many of the stories of these figures read like the wildest of fiction: Cariboo Cameron, who, after striking it rich in B.C., pickled his wife’s body in alcohol and gave her three funerals; Mina Hubbard, the young widow who trekked across the unexplored heart of Labrador as an act of revenge; and Almighty Voice, the renegade Cree, who was the key figure in the last battle between white men and Aboriginals in North America. Spanning more than two centuries and four thousand miles, this book demonstrates how our frontier resembles no other and how for better and for worse it has shaped our distinctive sense of Canada.

15 Canadian Poets X 3


Gary Geddes - 1978
    All of the poets included in the previous editions have been retained, although their selections have been carefully reconsidered. Among new poets added to this edition are Anne Carson, Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, and Fred Wah

Tara Kane


George Markstein - 1978
    The icy wilderness of the Klondike during the Gold Rush is no place for a lone woman. The harshness and savagery are almost more than she can bear, but determined to find the truth, Tara battles on, and finds herself on a painful journey of self-discovery.

Essene Code of Life


Edmond Bordeaux Szekely - 1978
    A complete translation, from the Aramaic, of the manuscript discovered by Count Volney during his travels in Egypt and Syria, 1783-85; giving a record of the discourses between the famous Roman Historian, Josephus Flavius, as pupil, and Banus, the Essene, as master, during Josephus' three years' sojourn with Banus in the Desert of the Dead Sea, for his initiation into the Essene Teaching and Traditions.

Trail Of An Artist Naturalist: The Autobiography Of Ernest Thompson Seton


Ernest Thompson Seton - 1978