I loved this book because of the honesty of the author. It is an old book written by a Canadian veteran of World War 1. He tells his story of all the madness, death and his whole experience of war with a brutal and poignant honesty. He starts by telling why he joined up. He is from the east coast but found work for the season getting the harvest in, in the prairies. It is 1915. On a hot day is he out helping bring in the wheat and he looks up to see his little brother who had enlisted successfully only a few months before. His brother just stands and looks at him, dressed in his khakies holding his rifle. The author realizes his brother is dead and he also realizes he is being told to sign up and so off he goes. What follows is a personal take on so many famous battles, but also a forthright telling of the mystical experience of being guided by his brother and saved numerous times. He is not afraid to discuss the mystical experiences of others. It is a totally different take on men at war.
In the autumn of 1915 Will Bird was working on a farm in Saskatchewan when the ghost of his brother Stephen, killed by German mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice. When it first appeared in 1930, Bird's memoir was hailed by many veterans as the most authentic account of the war experience, uncompromising…
This book was a treasure I found by accident while researching for my current project. It is based on the stories of one of the last buffalo hunters and fur traders of the prairies, Norbert Welsh. He tells his story to Mary in 1931 when he is 87 and blind. His stories will curl your hair. How the west was settled has a whole new perspective thanks to his honest, don't sugar coat it style. Learn how to take down a buffalo, cut off its head, keep the tongue for dinner, skin the pelt so your wife can stretch it and clean it and transform it into a supple coat, or blanket, then butcher the meat and preserve half of it for your family for the winter, give the other half to your wife and family to cut into thin strips, dry, pulverize, mix with the boiled fat of the animal, add a few berries and turn into pemmican, (the original protein bar) to be sold in pillow case size sacks to the Hudson's Bay Company. And you thought you were tough! Truly, we don't know what tough is, but you can gain some insight as you follow Norbert through his amazing life story.
The Last Buffalo Hunter is one of the few surviving oral accounts of the old North-West during the late nineteenth century, providing a valuable record of the spirit and romance of a way of life that ended with the demise of the once-vast buffalo herds.
Mary Weekes first met Norbert Welsh - whose colorful life story is told here in his own words - in 1931 when he was eighty-seven. She was enthralled by this blind old man who had "a memory crowded with stories that belonged to the making of the West." He agreed to let her write about…
I loved this book. It is an academic book, but it is so insightful. This is a retelling of the story of Canada's executed leader of the Metis People, Louis Riel. He is now on our silver dollar because it only took us a couple of generations to realize he was and is a national treasure. There are zillions of books about this man's story. But this one is different. It does not focus on his execution but on his early life. We learn he was sent to Montreal from the prairies and becomes a highly educated man, a debater, a writer, a young man who falls in love and is spurned because of his mixed ancestry. A man who can speak and write in several languages. A man who can challenge and stand up to a challenge. He is a man with one foot in the sophisticated world of Montreal and Ottawa, and the other foot in the down to earth world of his Indigenous/European people of the North West, long before the western provinces are created. He is also a man who yearns to do what is right. If only we had such leaders today! Perhaps it should be required reading of all wanna-be leaders!
Louis Riel (1844-1885) was an iconic figure in Canadian history best known for his roles in the Red River Resistance of 1869 and the Northwest Resistance of 1885. A political leader of the Metis people of the Canadian Prairies, Riel is often portrayed as a rebel. Reconstructing his experiences in the Northwest, Quebec, and the worlds in between, Max Hamon revisits Riel's life through his own eyes, illuminating how he and the Metis were much more involved in state-making than historians have previously acknowledged. Questioning the drama of resistance, The Audacity of His Enterprise highlights Riel's part in the negotiations,…
A creative non fiction account of the harrowing fight for freedom in Cork, Ireland during the War of Independence, told through the story of James, a 17 year old at the time of the Easter rising. James will become an Intelligence Officer in the Cork No 1 Brigade. Hold onto your hat. It is a wild tale. If you have a single drop of Irish blood, you will be amazed and beguiled by James and his generation of like-minded rebels.
