National Network for Equitable Library Service

The first comprehensive biography of Louise Arner Boyd — the intrepid American socialite who reinvented herself as the leading female polar explorer of the twentieth century. Born in the late 1880s to a gritty mining magnate who made his millions in the California gold rush and a well-bred mother descended from one of New York’s distinguished families, society beauty Louise Arner Boyd was raised during a glittering era. After inheriting a staggering family fortune, she began leading a double life.

The story of a brutal shark attack that cost a woman her arm and much of her leg, and her death-defying recovery. One of the most dreadful experiences humans fear is a shark attack. This horrifying agony is exactly what happened to Nicole Moore, a nurse from Orangeville, Ontario. It was an assault all the more brutal for being so unlikely — she was standing in waist-deep water at a Mexican resort.

The sinking of the Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Sophia was Alaska’s worst maritime disaster — until it nearly happened again. In 1918, the Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Sophia left Skagway, Alaska, on her last trip of the season to Vancouver. She never made it. Battered by a raging snowstorm and sent dangerously off course, she ran aground on Vanderbilt Reef, a rocky shoal in Lynn Canal, North America’s deepest and longest fjord. She would spend two days high and dry on the reef, with rescue ships standing by, unable to help, before she finally slid to her watery grave.

Polar Winds traces a century of northern flight from balloonatics to bush pilots and beyond. "They were all gamblers and fortune seekers. They did things on their own — were independent people who wanted to be free to roam. They were good people, but, of course, some were loners or escapists.

In 1996, successful businessman and certified pilot, Scott Griffin, decided to break from the comfortable routine of his life to go work for the Flying Doctors Service, an African organization that flies doctors to remote areas to administer medical assistance. Griffin also made the daring decision to fly his small, single-engine Cessna 180 solo from Canada to Africa and back again. My Heart is Africa is the engaging, personal story of Griffin’s two-year aviation adventure throughout Africa.

David Thompsons story is one of the great tales of North American adventure. His life was a mixture of truth and legend, but he was without a doubt one of the greatest surveyors and mapmakers of the North American continent. Raised in a charity school in London, England, and apprenticed to the Hudsons Bay Company as a teenager, he then travelled extensively, recording valuable navigational information. His life was one of adventure and hardship but also of incredible accomplishment.

A lifetime of wilderness adventures and the resulting insights relating to nature’s intricacies as experienced by a master in the art of primitive wilderness survival. "Fire! Wake up! The shelter is on fire!"His students affectionately call him "Doc Survival." He’s Quebec’s Indiana Jones in a forest setting.

A collection of adventures (and misadventures) spent travelling in the wilderness. Kevin Callan presents his best adventures – and misadventures – in the wilderness. Entertaining, yet enlightening, the stories are full of enthusiasm and are designed to get people to explore the wilderness on their own, and it’s hoped, be inspired to protect what’s still left. These captured moments of a life spent traveling in secluded areas and promoting their importance to all of us aren’t just for outdoorsy types.

Victims and survivors, angels and demons, intersect along winding roads to imperfect justice. “Bare light bulbs shone against walls painted with graffiti and dried blood, the rooms reeking of a sweet pungent odour like burnt plastic …” So writes award-winning Hamilton Spectator journalist and author Jon Wells in one of four harrowing murder stories in Death’s Shadow. Wells take readers up close into multiple homicide investigations, the agony of victims and their loved ones, and the chilling dance of death between cold-blooded killers and the hard-boiled investigators hunting them.

A dramatic story of the rescue of eight men on a prospecting mission in the Arctic that covers a period of four suspenseful months in the fall of 1929. This true story began in August 1929. A group of eight prospectors, led by C.D.H. MacAlpine of the Dominion Explorers, flew into the Arctic in search of mineral wealth. Grossly underequipped, the expedition ran out of fuel and was stranded above the Arctic Circle.