Listen carefully and you will hear cottage country whispering lessons that can make our lives less frenetic, less complicated. The mournful call of the loon, the wind sighing in the trees, the hammering of the pileated woodpecker remind us that we are a part of a more natural world too often lost in our urban societies.Reflections from a still lake and a flickering campfire help us to realize that things might go easier for humankind if more issues were examined in softer, reflecti...

When Europeans discovered tobacco among Amerindians in the New World, it became a long-sought panacea of panaceas, the critical ingredient in enemas, ointments, syrups, and powders employed to treat everything from syphilis to cancer. Almost five centuries passed before medical researchers concluded that tobacco is unhealthy and can cause cancer.Smoke Signals follows tobacco from its origins in South America's Andes through its checkered history as a "miracle cure," powerf...

Shawnee war chief Tecumseh dedicated his life to stopping American expansion and preserving the lands and cultures of North American Aboriginal peoples. He travelled relentlessly trying to build a confederation of tribes that would stop the territorial ambitions of the newly created United States of America.Tecumseh tried both diplomacy and battle to preserve his Ohio Valley homelands. When he realized that neither could stop the American advancement, he turned to the British in Ca...

A woman from Northern Ontario is buried; her earthly papers reveal a mystery. Veteran Canadian journalist Jim Poling took on the most important assignment of his career: Just who was his mother? Why did she take a lifelong secret to her grave?In his search for clues throughout his childhood years in Northern Ontario, the author goes to Chapleau, the railway town where the people he believed were his ancestors played out their roles in building the railway. It ends in the Prairie vi...