Amidst shopping for members of my east coast family I spent some time at the small Indigo in Sunnyside Mall to look at their local history section. I had such luck in finding books there two years ago that I felt I might be able to use my $50 gift card there this year. I chose four titles, one of which Mark decided to give as a Christmas present:
The Viking Trail: Stories of the Great Northern Peninsula by Adrian Payne is about the Vikings’ exploration of northern Newfoundland (Vinland) in the eleventh century. I was enthralled by the book Westward to Vinland: The Discovery of Pre-Columbian Norse House-sites in North America when I read it just over a year ago. The Payne book is a 2023 imprint, thus will contain more recent news and discoveries not found in the 1969 Westward edition. Mark chose this book to give to me.
Nova Scotia’s Historic Inland Communities: The Gathering Places and Settlements that Shaped the Province by Joan Dawson was published in 2022 and tells about the Mi’kmaq, Acadian, European and black communities that settled in inland Nova Scotia.
The Acadian Saga: A People’s Story of Exile and Triumph by Dean Jobb is a new and expanded edition of the author’s original 2005 work. I read one book on the subject twelve years ago, History of the Acadians, and Mark and I visited Acadian Nova Scotia during one of our summer trips to the province, so I was happy to find this 2022 edition.
A Little of Everything: General Stores of Nova Scotia Remembering the Old Days, Old Ways by Mike Parker was published in 2022 and I bought a signed edition. While only 299 pages it was a sizable brick of a book, printed on thick pages which were generously filled with photos of Nova Scotian mercantile history.