A proud Newfoundland soldier’s memoir gives unprecedented details of life as a German POW during the First World War.I’m going to tell my story. With those words, eighty-three-year-old Arthur Manuel set his remarkable First World War memoir in motion.Like many Great War veterans, Manuel had never discussed his wartime life with anyone. Hidden in the Manuel family records until its 2011 discovery by his grandson David Manuel, Arthur’s story is now b...

Hunangofiant dirdynnol Yogi, y chwaraewr rygbi a barlyswyd wrth chwarae rygbi i'r Bala. Dyma un o straeon tristaf ac anoddaf y byd rygbi yn y blynyddoedd diwethaf. Roedd Yogi yn 49 oed, ac yn chwarae ei gem olaf i'r Bala, lle gwnaed ef yn gapten am y dydd, ond o fewn deg eiliad, chwalwyd ei fywyd yn llwyr. Datgymalodd sgrym gynta'r gem, a thorrodd Yogi ei wddwg.The traumatic autobiography of Yogi, the Bala rugby player who was paralysed while playing his final game for the club at 49 years...

There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief,...

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...

Inspired by True Events “Men who weren’t hard workers didn’t last long at the lumber woods.” Most people in Newfoundland and Labrador have someone in their family who has worked “in the woods.” Some of these workers were employed seasonally—they fished in the summer and headed to the lumber camps in the winter—while others were full-time loggers who worked year-round. Stan White runs Camp 13 on the southwestern side of Gander Lake, which is a commercial operation cutting pulpwood for Bowat...

From our country's most important war historian, a gripping account of the turbulent relationship between Canada and the US during the Second World War. The two nations entered the war amidst rivalry and mutual suspicion, but learned to fight together before emerging triumphant and bound by an alliance that has lasted to this day.When the Second World War broke out in 1939, it set in motion a deadly struggle between the Axis powers and the Allies, but also fraught ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERFINALIST FOR THE OTTAWA BOOK AWARDSA masterful telling of the way World War Two has been remembered, forgotten, and remade by Canada over seventy-five years.The Second World War shaped modern Canada. It led to the country's emergence as a middle power on the world stage; the rise of the welfare state; industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. After the war, Canada increasingly turned ...

National BestsellerForeword by Peter Mansbridge“Barris tells the jaw-dropping story of a night that changed the war.” —The Globe and MailIt was a night that changed the Second World War. The secret air raid against the hydroelectric dams of Germany’s Ruhr River took years to plan, involved an untried bomb and included the best aircrewmen RAF Bomber Command could muster—many of them Canadian. The attack marked the first time...

Intrepid voyager, writer and comedian Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy's HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014.The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. The solid, reinforced hul...

The first comprehensive history of Canadians in WWI in forty years, and already hailed as the definitive work on Canadians in the Great War, At the Sharp End covers the harrowing early battles of 1914—16. Tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, died before the generals and soldiers found a way to break the terrible stalemate of the front. Based on eyewitness accounts detailed in the letters of ordinary soldiers, Cook describes the horrible struggle, first to survive in ...

A bold new telling of the defining battle of the Great War, and how it came to signify and solidify Canada's national identity.Why does Vimy loom so large in Canada's identity—and should it? Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian and a RBC Taylor Prize winner, examines the battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917 and the way the memory of it has evolved over a hundred years. Vimy is unlike any other battle in Canadian history: it has been described as the "birth ...

Shock Troops follows the Canadian fighting forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign.Through the eyes of the soldiers who fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, and based on newly uncovered Canadian, British, and German archival sources, Cook builds on Volume I of his national bestseller, At the Sharp End. The Canadian fighting forces never lost a battle during the final two years of the w...