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Biography

Passing Through Missing Pages: The Intriguing Story of Annie Garland Foster
Frances Welwood

Annie Garland Foster was born in Fredericton, NB, in 1875. She was an educator, nurse, politician, social reformer, journalist and biographer of Pauline Johnson. But she was also a bit of a mystery. In 1939, Annie wrote an autobiography titled Passing Through in which she described the adventures of her earlier life: as a co-ed at UNB in the 1890s, teaching in rural Saskatchewan and BC, nursing the Great War's wounded, being elected to the City Council and consorting with suffragettes. Her memoir, peppered with pseudonyms and cryptic information, reveals her mysterious character which is emphasized by the discovery of her deliberate removal of one of the most intriguing and critical chapters of her story. Frances Welwood begins her work where Foster abandons her tale. Welwood follows her elusive subject, giving historical context to Annie's insightful and cinematic prose. But most exciting of all, Welwood finally sheds light on the events described in the six pages excised from Passing Through: the circumstances connecting Annie to a 1926 murder trial.

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Culture and Society

Passion to Dance: The National Ballet of Canada
James Neufeld

Passion to Dance is the story of the National Ballet of Canada — the people who dreamt the company into existence, the determination needed to keep it afloat, the bumps on the road to its success, and above all, its passion for dance as a living, evolving art form. One hundred and fifty photographs from the company's archives illustrate this definitive history, filled with eyewitness accounts, backstage glimpses, and fascinating detail. This is a record of one of Canada's boldest cultural experiments, a book to enjoy now and keep forever.

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Exploration and Geography

From Far and Wide: A Complete History of Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty
Peter Pigott

In searching for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in the 19th century, Britain's Royal Navy mapped and charted most of the Arctic Archipelago. In 1874 Canadian Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie agreed to take up sovereignty of all the Arctic, if only to keep the United States and Tsarist Russia out. But as the dominion expanded east and west, the "North" was forgotten. Besides a few industries, its potential was unknown. It was as one Canadian said "for later." There wasn't much need to send police or military expeditions to the North. Not only was there little tribal warfare between the Inuit or First Nations, but there were few white settlers to protect and the "forts" were mainly trading posts. Thus, in the early 20th century, Canada's Arctic was less known than Sudan or South Africa. From Far and Wide recounts exclusively the historic activities of the Canadian military in Canada's North.

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Military and War

Steel Cavalry: The 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars and the Italian Campaign
Lee Windsor

The story of the transformation from of a horse cavalry unit to one of Canada’s most famous armoured regiments. Twentieth-century warfare is epitomized by the image of Allied tanks growling across the countryside, engaging their Nazi counterparts. One of the most storied of such regiments is the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars. Founded in 1848 as the first volunteer cavalry regiment in British North America, the Hussars began the Second World War as a Motorcycle Regiment before converting to tanks in 1941. First posted to Italy in late 1943, the regiment was introduced to war near Ortona. They formed part of the great drive beyond Monte Cassino to Rome. But their reputation was forged at the Gothic Line and Coriano Ridge during two weeks that marked their fiercest and bloodiest trial of the war. Steel Cavalry is volume 18 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

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Politics, Business and Law

Last Moments: Sentenced to Death in Canada
Dale Brawn

Before the final execution in 1962, more than 700 men and women were executed by hanging in Canada. Last Moments shines a light into a dark corner of a long and painful part of Canadian history that threatens to re-emerge. Here are dramatic stories of the characters whose finals moments and last words were tragic, unpredictable, poignant, eccentric and often bizarre. Stories such as, before Confederation, executioners were often recruited from among the condemned, and they were given two options — kill or be killed. A Yukon execution was delayed because freezing spectators used the wooden trapdoor of the gallows to build a fire. One man brawled with his executioner on the scaffold before onlookers leaped into the fray, overpowered him and held him on the trapdoor until he was dropped to his death... and so many more tantalizing and twisted tidbits.

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Regional Interest

Necessaries and Sufficiencies: Planter Society in Londonderry, Onslow and Truro Townships, 1761–1780
Carol Campbell & James F. Smith

2011 marks the 250th anniversary of the coming of New England and Irish Planters to Nova Scotia. Necessaries and Sufficiencies is a social political, cultural and material microhistory of 18th-century daily life in the district of Cobequid, now part of Colchester County. Eight vignettes from a cross-section of immigrants detail migration and settlement and the evolution of New England and Irish cultural mores in this wilderness setting. Occupations of both men and women, family and religious life, educational and social institutions, health care, commercial links and more. A separate section chronicles Cobequid's reaction to the American Revolutionary War.

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Historical Fiction

Man and Other Natural Disasters
Nerys Parry

Simon Peters, a bookbinder full of theories on everything from heart-broken shrimp to the consciousness of DNA, is hiding from his horrific past in the basement of the Calgary City Library. Enter Minerva, a twenty-two-year-old student. Her ghostly resemblance to Simon's dead sister compels him to reveal the shocking story of the various natural disasters that killed his family. But Simon's story does not add up. When he finds Minerva bleeding on his bathroom floor, he must conquer the tyranny of his own memory and confront what really happened that summer of 1962. But the truth proves no less confounding, or tragic, than the original tale.

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Young Readers

The Avro Arrow: A Picture History
Lawrence Miller

When the magnificent new Avro Arrow fighter jet thundered into the sky over Malton, Ontario on a cold March morning in 1958, Canada's aviation scientists, designers, and pilots were the best in the world. Less than a year later the Arrow project was dead. It is shocking that the best interceptor in the world in the 1950s never went into service. Five Arrows were flying and the sixth would certainly set the world speed record, yet Canadian authorities ordered every one destroyed. This book tells the story of Canada's magnificent and doomed fighter plane using 100+ historical photos, bringing the airplane and the people who made it — and killed it — back to life.

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