Regional Canada Books - Page 2

Frank Barr: Bush Pilot in Alaska and the Yukon (Caribou Classics)

Dermot Cole

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Best Bush Pilot Bokk Ever 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I loved this book. I have given it as gifts to many of my friends and they all loved it also. If you are a pilot or just a "want-to-be" read this book!

Editorial Review:

Meet Frank Barr, who flew every early plane from the Jenny to the Super Cub, carrying passengers and freight to remote villages in Alaska and the Yukon.

Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic

Kevin Krajick

List Price: $26.00 By: W. H. Freeman Amazon Marketplace: 11 new & used starting at $3.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the tradition of Sebastian' Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, Barren Lands is the extraordinary tale of two small-time prospectors who risked their lives to discover $17 billion worth of diamonds in the desolate tundra of the far north.

In the late 1970's, two men set out on a twenty-year search for a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied 16th-century explorers, Wild West prospectors, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged, stuttering fellow with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric and ruthless, they follow a trail of geologic clues left by predecessors all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted "barren lands" of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's "secret weapon," Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers carte, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries- setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.

A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands is also an elegy to one of earth's last great wild places, a starkly beautiful and mysterious land strewn with pure lakes and alive with wolves and caribou. An endless variety of primeval glacial rock formations hide copper, zinc, and gold, in addition to diamonds. Now that the barrens are "open for business," what will happen to this great wilderness region?

Barren Lands is an unforgettable journey for those who, in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper, "want to see that country before it is all gone."

Good Time Girls: Of the Alaska/ Yukon Gold Rush

Lael Morgan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Fun history of the world's (c)oldest profession in AK 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks bookstore. My dad, Class of '51 at UAF (we were there for his 50th reunion), had told me some stories about "The Line" and he had had his first job with the gold mining operations, so I was curious. There's not a lot of gory detail here. It's about people and places, but it's quite a colorful history. Though never officially legal, prostitution was tolerated and it flourished in Alaska for more than 50 years. And some very famous characters pop up, like Wyatt Earp and the "Birdman of Alcatraz". Definitely worth the time.

Best Of The West! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush, a time at the turn of the century, when the gold camps were booming and the dust flowed like wine. Leaving behind law and many of the constraints of the Post-Victorian era, men and women went north to find adventure and wealth. Most found death among the cold frozen mountains and rivers but a few survived to find money, power and, sometimes, even love.
The women found it easier to mine the miners then to mine the mines. Women couldn't work claims in most cases and most of the normal jobs didn't pay well.
If a woman wanted the wealth and adventure she was searching for she ended up becoming a Good Time Girl. Men outnumbered women ten to one and were always willing to pay for the company. Dance hall girls and prostitutes were among the pioneers who opened the new regions, became rich entrepreneurs and powerful women who, in some cases, changed the towns for the better.
But their history cannot be written in a vacuum. As many of them left behind no written records we have to use police logs, old photos and stories left behind by the more respectable women and men of the cities. The book deals with the conditions and events that made the Far North so much different from the lower forty-eight states where many of the women came from. Why did the cities, in many cases, allow a red light district? Why did they give them police protection? How did the women influence the towns and change the very future of the frontier? Why did so many women turn to be Good Time Girls?
With tons of humor, happy endings and sad ones, the chapters within this book give a detailed look at the history of the independent women who faced hardships, lost fortunes and the dangers of a wild land to find a future.

Editorial Review:

Morgan offers an authentic and deliciously humorous account of the prostitutes and other "disreputable" women who were the earliest female pioneers of the Far North.

What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered

Patrick Lane

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What the Stones Remember 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This memoir by one of Canada's best-known poets follows Patrick Lane's first year of recovery from a lifetime of alcoholism, a recovery that unfolds almost entirely in his Vancouver Island garden. The narrative weaves between his present-tense garden and the struggle and brutality that was Lane's past. His poetic voice permeates his storytelling, compelling us to see how the honesty and enchantment of the natural world can save us from our nightmares, our addictions, our terrible losses - if only we will let it.

Originally published a year and a half ago in Canada as There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden, the book won the 2005 BC Award for Canadian nonfiction. It is not at all disingenuous for Lane to re-release his memoir under a new title - What the Stones Remember - as there really are two stories folded into the one book. This new title summons the story of Lane's turbulent past as a wayward child, an absentee father, a fledgling poet, a failed husband, a triumphant writer, and ultimately a recovering addict. We follow him deep into his personal history and come to understand, along with him, that it is a miracle he is still alive. This story is rich with personal intrigue, gossip, sentimentality and curiosity. I think it's rare that we look even into our own lives so intimately.

The second story is the simple unfolding of the seasons in his suburban garden, and it mirrors Lane's journey of recovery and self-redemption. His garden is his sanctuary and the midwife of his rebirth as a sane and sober person. He delves into the ecology of his garden with the same studied depth as he digs through his personal history. The carefully documented hours of observation are underscored by a book knowledge of plant and animal classification, behaviour and habitat.

This being said, Lane is first and foremost a poet, and his garden ramblings are never dry or dense. How can they be when he periodically unearths old vodka bottles in the woodpile or under a bush? Or when he stops to watch a hermit thrush dance and mourn beside its dead mate? Or sees his mother, long decades dead, kneeling in the corner under the plum tree?

What the Stones Remember contains equal parts beauty and horror. Patrick Lane describes a past that many people would be inclined to leave buried in the furrows of time. But in bringing forth the dead, the wounded, the lost, this poet carves a path of healing and new life.

Editorial Review:

In this exquisitely written memoir, poet Patrick Lane describes his raw and tender emergence at age sixty from a lifetime of alcohol and drug addiction. He spent the first year of his sobriety close to home, tending his garden, where he cast his mind back over his life, searching for the memories he'd tried to drown in vodka. Lane has gardened for as long as he can remember, and his garden's life has become inseparable from his own. A new bloom on a plant, a skirmish among the birds, the way a tree bends in the wind, and the slow, measured change of seasons invariably bring to his mind an episode from his eventful past. What the Stones Remember is the emerging chronicle of Lane's attempt to face those memories, as well as his new self—to rediscover his life. In this powerful and beautifully written book, Lane offers readers an unflinching and unsentimental account of coming to one's senses in the presence of nature.

No Man's River

Farley Mowat

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With No Man's River, Farley Mowat has penned his best Arctic tale in years. This book chronicles his life among Metis trappers and native people as they struggle to eke out a living in a brutal environment. In the spring of 1947, putting the death and devastation of WWII behind him, Mowat joined a scientific expedition. In the remote reaches of Manitoba, he witnessed an Eskimo population ravaged by starvation and disease brought about by the white man. In his efforts to provide the natives with some of the assistance that the government failed to provide, Mowat set out on an arduous journey that collided with one of nature's most arresting phenomena—the migration of the Arctic's caribou herds. Mowat was based at Windy Post with a Metis trapper and two Ihalmiut children. A young girl, known as Rita, is painted with special vividness—checking the trap lines with the men, riding atop a sled, smoking a tiny pipe. Farley returns to the North two decades later and discovers the tragic fate that befell her. Combining his exquisite portraits with awe-inspiring passages on the power of nature, No Man's River is another riveting memoir from one of North America's most beloved writers.

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe: A Novel (Alex Awards (Awards))

Judy Fong Bates

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Set in the 1960s, Judy Fong Bates’s much-talked-about debut novel is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a small Ontario town’s solitary Chinese family, whose life is changed over the course of one summer when she learns the burden of secrets. Through Su-Jen’s eyes, the hard life behind the scenes at the Dragon Café unfolds. As Su-Jen’s father works continually for a better future, her mother, a beautiful but embittered woman, settles uneasily into their new life. Su-Jen feels the weight of her mother’s unhappiness as Su-Jen’s life takes her outside the restaurant and far from the customs of the traditional past. When Su-Jen’s half-brother arrives, smouldering under the responsibilities he must bear as the dutiful Chinese son, he forms an alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, one that will have devastating consequences. Written in spare, intimate prose, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a vivid portrait of a childhood divided by two cultures and touched by unfulfilled longings and unspoken secrets.


From the Hardcover edition.

I Married the Klondike

Laura Beatrice Berton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. "I Married the Klondike" is her classic and enduring memoir.
When she first arrived by steamboat in Dawson City, Berton expected to find a rough mining town full of grizzled miners, scarlet-clad Mounties and dance-hall girls. And while these and other memorable characters did abound, she quickly discovered why the town was nicknamed the "Paris of the North." Although the gold rush was over, the townsfolk still clung to the lavishness of the city's golden era and the young teacher soon found herself hosting tea parties once a month, attending formal dinners, dancing the minuet at fancy balls and going on elaborate sleighing parties. In the background a famous poet wrote ballads on his cabin wall, an archbishop lost on the tundra ate his boots to survive and men living on dreams of riches grew old panning the creeks for gold.
While thousands of people left the Klondike each October on the "last boat out" and Dawson City slowly decayed around her, the author remained true to her northern home. Humorous, poignant and filled with stories of both drudgery and decadence, "I Married the Klondike" is an unforgettable book by a brave and intelligent woman.
"I have read many books on the Yukon, but this is different. It is the gallant personality of the author which shines on every page, and makes her chronicle a saga of the High North."
--Robert Service, poet "The Cremation of Sam McGee"

Rusty Nails and Ration Books: Memories of the Great Depression and WWII 1929-1945

Barbara Ann Lambert

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Editorial Review:

Memories of when radio was king adn cotton sack underclothes were the rage. Memories of a nation at war: ration books, jam for Britain, women in industry and "digging for victory."

Finlay's River

R. M. Patterson

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Editorial Review:

Patterson tells the story of his 1949 trip up this wild river in remote northern British Columbia. Patterson uses his own journey as a framework to recount the adventures of explorers who went there before; all had struggled up the Finlay for different reasons, and all left spirited accounts of that challenging, doomed river - accounts that Patterson brings to vivid life again. Much of the Finlay, a river of whitewater rapids that flowed through a magnificent country of dense forests and high mountains, disappeared forever under the waters of Williston Lake with the completion of the W A C Bennett Dam in 1968. In this engaging book, Patterson preserves the memory of this wilderness and the long-gone adventurers who first told the world about its existence.

Reading The River: A Voyage Down The Yukon

John Hildebrand

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent. A marvel of a tale. 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Having once been an Alaskan traveler myself, I found myself slightly skeptical before plucking this tattered book off the shelf. Everything I'd read of modern Alaska seemed wrong, off-key, and too liberal or too commercialized. But after skimming through a few pages, I was hooked. Never before have I found such wonderful, accurate descriptions of the land, its people, and the emotional tracks it leaves on a person. Somehow, I assumed I was alone in my journeys and my memoirs of Alaska, and unable to share them with people. Here is a man who has weaved together a beautiful adventure, honest and simple. I felt as though I was reading a diary of my own excursions in the North. Reading the River is definitely one of the best books I have ever read. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what draws people away from the city, for those living in the city who craves the wild, and to every dreamer, explorer, and 'old-timer'.

Editorial Review:

Exploring the riverway of northwestern Canada and Alaska in a canoe, Hildebrand's personal account of river fish camps, good-hearted girls in the towns, sullen natives and cranky old-timers provides a record of a journey as much inward as it is outward.