National Network for Equitable Library Service

On December 6, 1917, the face of Halifax changed forever when the Imo, a Belgian Relief ship, collided with the French ship, the Mont Blanc. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Mont Blanc, which was carrying a large cargo of explosives, blew up. In Breaking Disaster, Ingram traces these details and stories as she pieces together the different narratives from the week that followed December 6, 1917, many of which have long faded into the larger story of the Halifax Explosion.

Adrian Smith was raised in what seemed to be a very traditional, Roman Catholic upbringing. His father, Adrian Smith Sr, was very religious. He had studied to be a priest and left the seminary only 6 months before his ordination. After he left the seminary, Adrian Sr then worked for 30 years as a child psychologist for PEI's Department of Education. He died at the age of 58 from a brain tumor. A week later after his death, Adrian Jr discovered that his father had been living a lie and that he was homosexual; he had kept it hidden his whole life.

The Only Film in Town is a memoir about the making of a small-town feature film with heart. When Stuart Cresswell of Simple Films Ltd. decided to make The Only Game in Town in and around Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, he did not anticipate the ups and the downs he would encounter, including the scrapping of the province's film tax credit. Inspired by his own family, Cresswell recruited young and sometimes inexperienced talent, and he forged ahead. His film is the story of Cormack Vertue, an autistic teenager with a unique ability: his super skill at solitaire.

Beaubassin was once a prosperous farming community at the head of the Cumberland Basin; Africville was the vibrant home of Black Nova Scotians who struggled to make a living and found spiritual solace in their church. Both are now gone, one a casualty of long-ago colonial warfare and the other a victim of misguided urban renewal. In this fascinating book, author Joan Dawson looks at 37 of Nova Scotia's lost communities: places like Electric City, Indian Gardens, and the Tancook Islands. Some were home to ethnic groups forced to leave.

Not all dreams have happy endings. Sailing in Circles, Goin' Somewhere is the funny, bittersweet memoir of a Prince Edward Island man who, over seven years, builds a classic 1930s wooden sailboat and, in 2004, attempts to circumnavigate eastern North America. The author leaves a small fishing port on the Island and tracks along the rugged coast, up the St. Lawrence River, and through the Great Lakes. Alone, he encounters heavy fog, near-collisions with freighters, mechanical breakdowns, enormous seas, several brushes with disaster, and even a hostile reception at one French-speaking port.

Just below the Antigonish-Guysborough County line, there is an overgrown spot, nearly impossible to find without a guide, where the cursed MacDonald farm once stood. Though no physical trace remains, the legend of the mysterious events that once took place lives on. In the newest addition to the Stories of our Past series, Monica Graham exposes the fascinating history behind the fire-spook of Caledonia Mills, Nova Scotia, a true story that spread as quickly and uncontrollably as the flames that started it all.

With these 61 readable essays, Cape Breton's Tom Urbaniak brings a courageous, critical and constructive eye to problems of our time. Whether it's revitalizing struggling communities, harnessing the power of small investors, reforming tired institutions or protecting parliamentary democracy, he is able to point to workable solutions. In this practical and thought-provoking reader, Prof. Urbaniak challenges students and citizens to engage with their region and with the world.

Gripping in its intensity, excruciating in its detail, John Mellor's account of the 1942 Canadian raid on the well-fortified beach town of Dieppe, France, is written with the fairness of a good historian, the eloquence of a well-honed author, and the compassion of a good interviewer-a man who was there. Mellor quickly puts the reader in the landing craft and on the beaches with individual Canadians who formed the bulk of the attackers.

In 1936, long before the discovery of the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, the Royal Ontario Museum made a sensational acquisition: the contents of a Viking grave that prospector Eddy Dodd said he had found on his mining claim east of Lake Nipigon. The relics remained on display for two decades, challenging understandings of when and where Europeans first reached the Americas. In 1956 the discovery was exposed as an unquestionable hoax, tarnishing the reputation of the museum director, Charles Trick Currelly, who had acquired the relics and insisted on their authenticity.

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones - Canada's first blind diplomat - vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory Indian philosophy that changed his life. Advaita Vedanta, the most iconoclastic and liberating of the classical Indian philosophies, profoundly altered the author's experience of self and world.