Presenting five titles in the Quest Biography series that profiles prominent figures in Canada’s history. The important Canadian lives detailed here are: legendary Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman; Laura Secord, heroine of the War of 1812; Newfoundland politician Joey Smallwood, the final Father of Confederation; Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, the primary founder of Canada; and onetime governor general Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, an important figure in Canada’s early deve...

At a crucial moment in the Second World War, an obscure French general reaches a fateful personal decision: to fight on alone after his government’s flight from Paris and its capitulation to Nazi Germany.Amid the ravages of a world war, three men — a general, a president, and a prime minister — are locked in a rivalry that threatens their partnership and puts the world’s most celebrated city at risk of destruction before it can be liberated. This is the setting of ...

A bride, a groom, and a lover. One will die, another will hang, and the survivor will begin an obsessive 20-year odyssey to discover the truth. Three people caught up in the harsh class differences and religious and racial prejudices of Victorian Canada, where a vast new territory—the "Queen's Bush"—is being opened to settlement in Ontario's Georgian Bay country. Inspired by the true lives of Rosannah Leppard and Cook Teets, An Act of Injustice follows disgruntled newspaperman Leonard Babi...

Edward Mallandaine was there! To prove it he thrust himself into the historic photograph of the "Last Spike" being driven to mark the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Surrounded by the railway dignitaries of the time, his young face peers out amid their frosty beards.Edward had just turned eighteen when he left his home in Victoria, British Columbia, to join the Canadian militia to fight Louis Riel in the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Hired to ride dispatches over the un...

Born in Gambo, Newfoundland, Joseph ("Joey") Smallwood (1900–1991) spent his life championing the worth and potential of his native province. Although he was a successful journalist and radio personality, Smallwood is best known for his role in bringing Newfoundland into Confederation with Canada in 1949, believing that such an action would secure an average standard of living for Newfoundlanders. He was rightfully dubbed the "only living Father of Confederation" in his lifetime and was pr...

Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, George Jacob Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion's control over daily life. This first modern biography of the founder of Secularism describes a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake was hailed for having won "the freedoms we take for granted today." With Secularism now under ...

Presenting nine titles in the Quest Biography series that profiles prominent figures in Canada’s history. In these books we explore Canada’s rich political history through the fascinating lives of some of its most influential lives. Profiled are: prime ministers John Diefenbaker, John A. Macdonald, William Lyon Mackenzie King, and Wilfrid Laurier; suffragette Nellie McClung; and provincial leaders Joey Smallwood, Maurice Duplessis, René Lévesque, and James Douglas.Includes

Ottawa Book Award 2015 — ShortlistedBetween 1918 and 1921 a great storm blew through Canada and raised the expectations of a new world in which all things would be possible.|The years after World War I were among the most tumultuous in Canadian history: a period of unremitting change, drama, and conflict. They were, in the words of Stephen Leacock, “a time such as there never was before.”The war had been a great crusade, promising a world made new. But it h...

Annette Libeskind Berkovits thought her attempt to have her father record his life's story had failed. But three years after her father's death, she was going through his things and found a box of tapes—several years' worth—with his spectacular life, triumphs, and tragedies told one last time in his baritone voice.Nachman Libeskind's remarkable story is an odyssey through crucial events of the twentieth century. With an unshakable will and a few drops of luck, he s...

The true story, drawn from official documents and hours of personal interviews, of how Newfoundland and Labrador joined Confederation and became Canada's tenth province in 1949.A rich cast of characters--hailing from Britain, America, Canada and Newfoundland--battle it out for the prize of the resource-rich, financially solvent, militarily strategic island. The twists and turns are as dramatic as any spy novel and extremely surprising, since the "official" version ...

Just before midnight on February 13, 1950, three engines of a US Air Force B-36 intercontinental bomber caught fire over Canada's northwest coast. The crew jumped, and the plane ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The fact that the huge aircraft had been carrying a Mark IV nuclear bomb was kept carefully hidden. Three years later, the wreck of the bomber was found by accident in a remote location in the coastal mountains of British Columbia, three hours' flying time in the opposite dir...

History can be a very useful tool in understanding why we and those we must deal with think and react in certain ways. But in the wrong hands it can be dangerous and used to foster a sense of grievance or a desire for revenge. Eminent historian Margaret MacMillan is fascinated by the power of history in our thinking. In The Uses and Abuses of History, she points out some of the traps that we can fall into when assessing the present in light of the past.