Marty Leigh has wanted to go to sea ever since he was a boy growing up outside the Queen Victoria Markets. Despite his fathers misgivings and insistence that Marty learn a trade, Marty is determined to see his dream come true. When he is nearly seventeen, Marty takes the first step and signs up to be a deck boy. Now all he has to do is wait. Two weeks later, Marty receives a call that he is to set sail on the SS Barwon immediately. With his young heart beating wildly, his blood racing thro...

Revenge was just one of the catalysts responsible for the disposal of the Australian Commonwealth Shipping Line to Great Britain. In reality the final sale was a gift to a conglomerate of British shipowners; five new passenger ships and two large special purpose vessels all that remained of 57 ships. Ships sold for little more than their scrap value with a small down payment followed by default.28men depicts an explosive period of endemic industrial disputation, the near general st...

Seamen in the past were a breed of their own, nurtured by loving mothers who weaned them far too early for a life at sea. Suffering ships masters and officers who endured their presence collectively referred to them as conniving schemers and habitual belligerents with a divine penchant to avoid work. Boisterous anti-authoritarians who boldly strode the world stage only to fall victim to Shakespearian dogma, dragged kicking and screaming from life never to be heard of again. Saltwater Messi...

A unique breed of men and women emerged from the latter part of the nineteenth century. Some risked their lives on the footropes of sailing ships, others rose to prominence in industry, politics and government. Many forged new lives in far-off lands, but all were joined by a common thread to grasp a rapidly changing world and claim a niche in history. Olaf Johansson sailed halfway around the world to find his destiny on the banks of a river of little significance when compared to the great...

Old Union is the life's journey of Sam and Emily Wright who become of age in the Great Depression. Sam as a boy walks 550 miles from outback New South Wales with a single obsession, to go to sea. The 1935 seamen's strike pits seaman against seaman, strikebreaker against militant, the strong against the weak, a futile struggle that will gut a union of seamen.Sam matures in the turbulent years of war and the political upheavals dividing Australia. A coming of age in an era of persecu...

A thrilling new account of the engineering triumph that created a nationIn The Company, his bestselling work of revisionist history, Stephen R. Bown told the dramatic, adventurous and bloody tale of Canada's origins in the fur trade. With Dominion he continues the nation's creation story with an equally gripping and eye-opening account of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.In the late 19th century, demand for fur was in sharp dec...

Shortlisted for the Donner Prize for Best Public Policy Book of the YearFrom the authors of The Big Shift and Empty Planet, a timely and provocative exploration of the seismic forces reshaping Canada’s political, cultural, and economic landscape.Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s explosive new polemic, arrives in the midst of the greatest political crisis Canada has ever faced. The country stands at risk. Even before Donald Trump returned to the ...

The original Broad Street Bully has secrets to reveal.Before there was Bob Probert, Tie Domi, or Stu Grimson, there was Dave Schultz. The original enforcer changed the face of the NHL for decades to come, and helped bring the Philadephia Flyers their first Stanley Cup in franchise history, by scaring opponents into submission. His name was known and feared around the league—and still is. Schultz still draws long lines for his autograph.That’s a long way to ...

Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career.For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She liste...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, the BC town that burned to the ground in 2021, comes a meditation on hometown―when hometown is gone.**“It’s dire,” Greta Thunberg retweeted Mayor Jan Polderman. “The whole town is on fire. It took a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.”Before it made...

**AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe must-read memoir of one of the NHL's most controversial and successful coaches—winner of the 1994 Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers.**In the fraternity of NHL coaches, some stand out for their winning records, some for their big personalities and some for their unprecedented methods. Mike Keenan stands out on all these counts, and more.Breaking into the NHL as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers in 1984, Keenan got instant re...

**INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERAn outspoken, inspirational memoir from a charismatic athlete in the spotlight, Dreamer is the moving story of the first Muslim hockey player to win the Stanley Cup, and the impossible dreams he made a reality.**No one who knows the game is unfamiliar with the story of the NHL’s first Muslim Stanley Cup winner, Nazem Kadri, nor does anyone doubt his warmth and openness in front of a microphone, or his eagerness to challenge the...