286 pp Trade paper 29.95 97819268241

INUIT AND WHALERS ON BAFFIN ISLAND THROUGH GERMAN EYES

Wilhelm Weike’s Arctic Journal and Letters (1883-84)
by Ludger Müller-Wille & Bernd Gieseking (Translated by William Barr)

Wilhelm Weike, a 23-year old ordinary handyman from Minden/Germany, accidentally found himself spending the year of 1883-84 among Inuit and wintering with whalers on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. He was hired as servant to the fledgling scientist Franz Boas (1858-1942), later the eminent cultural anthropologist. During this sojourn Weike attended to and assisted Boas in his geographical and ethnological research following the first Polar Year of 1882-83. He kept a journal, a fascinating text and the longest he would ever write in his life, an exceptional piece of working-class literature.

This common man with basic education wrote a unique account of meeting and interacting with Inuit in a remote world totally alien to him. He keenly observes the life and habits of the Inuit, accepting them as equals and exhibiting no cultural arrogance. His journal provides an unusual historical glimpse of the human condition in the Arctic in the late nineteenth century. It complements the journals that Boas wrote simultaneously. Müller-Wille and Gieseking edited and annotated Weike’s journal extensively and, in addition, present his biography and highlight his observations and contributions next to Boas’ scientific work.

In bookstores November 1

Ludger Müller-Wille (anthropologist/geographer, McGill University) has studied human conditions in the circumpolar North—in Finland with Sámi and Finns, in Canada with Inuit, Dene, and Naskapi. His previous book is Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island 1883-1884 (1998).

Bernd Gieseking is a writer, playwright, and stage and radio comedian who, Like Weike and Boas, is from Minden, Germany. His dramatization of Weike’s and Boas’ arctic sojourn, The Colour of Water, premiered in 2010.

William Barr is a senior research associate with the Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary. He has translated many books from French, German, and Russian on Arctic and Antarctic explorers and scientists, including the arctic journals of Franz Boas.

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278 pp $27.95 9781926824123

SOLDIERS FOR SALE

German “Mercenaries” with the British in Canada during the American Revolution (1776-83)

By Jean-Pierre Wilhelmy

The British Army that fought the American Revolutionaries was in fact an Anglo-German army. The British Crown had doubts about the willingness of English soldiers to fight against other English-speaking people in North America. It also doubted the loyalty of the Canadiens who had only just been taken over after the conquest of New France. It thus turned to the princes of German States, who were also relatives of England’s ruling family, to obtain troops. To the Americans, these soldiers are known as The Hessians. In return for large amounts of money, German princes and barons provided about 30,000 soldiers, of whom some 10,000 were located in Canada for up to seven years and 2,400 chose to remain in Canada after the war. Many were dragged unwillingly from their families and sent to fight in a war in which they had no interest. Those who remained in Canada represented close to five percent of the male population at the time. They melted into the French and English-speaking societies, their names were Gallicized or Anglicized, but their history was unknown until this book appeared, even to their own descendants.

Jean-Pierre Wilhelmy is a Montreal historian who, in the late 1970s, wanted to know where his ancestors came from and discovered a major unexplored part of Canadian history. He published his work in French originally in 1980s and has constantly updated it. He has also written two books of historical fiction based on his research. This updated English adaptation of his research is his first publication in English.

In bookstores in Canada, November 15 (March 2012 in the United States)

Jane Jacobs’ book THE QUESTION OF SEPARATISM, QUEBEC AND THE STRUGGLE OVER SOVEREIGNTY is finally back in print augmented by a previously unpublished 2005 interview with her and a new preface. Below are excerpts from a recent article published in Counterpunch.

Order now

Jane Jacobs, five years later

Troubling Silence on Jane Jacobs’ Writings on Nations and Separatism

By Robin Philpot *

Jane Jacobs passed away five years ago on April 25, 2006. She will be remembered for her matchless contribution to cities throughout the world.

Less remembered—sometimes belittled—is her work on nations, national sovereignty, and the relationship between cities and the development of nations. Yet her third and her forth books dealt specifically with these issues and, in light of the current election campaign in Canada, they are still very relevant. The Question of Separatism (1980) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) were published in the wake of her two seminal books on cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and The Economy of Cities (1968), both written before she moved to Canada.

Nagging questions remain five years after her death? Why has the work of a leading thinker on the unfolding story of nations received so little attention? Why is the only book she wrote about her adopted country, The Question of Separatism, never discussed? Why, unlike her other six books, was it out of print for 25 years? How can 35 experts put together a 400-page anthology, What we see, Advancing the observations of Jane Jacobs (2010), without mentioning the book?

Jacobs answered these questions in part in an interview she granted me in 2005. She pointedly broke with her no-interview policy because this interview was to focus on her book The Question of Separatism, Quebec and the struggle over sovereignty, 25 years after it appeared and ten years after the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty.

Asked if the media ever talked to her about her book on separatism, Jacobs replied, “No. Practically never! You’re the first.” Explaining the silence she added: “Don’t want to think about it… or engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way. It’s an unwelcome subject (…) It was fear that there would be no more identity for Canada, that it would disintegrate if Quebec were to separate. It was foolish because there are so many examples of separatism, and nothing has disintegrated, unless they went to war. There were over thirty of these cases in very recent times since the issue of Quebec was raised in 1980.”

As in her other books, Jane Jacobs brought to bear her renowned capacity to observe the real world, avoided ideology and sloganeering, and set forth practical win-win solutions. Using examples, particularly that of Norway and Sweden, she discussed the timeless issues that influence—or afflict—debate on separatism in the world, such as emotion, national size and paradoxes of size, duality and federation, and the relationship between competing urban centres.

Jacobs posited that large regional cities and the nations they drive require a degree of political sovereignty to develop successfully, failing which they become “passive and provincial,” relegated to the shadow of a dominant city region. That is what she so accurately predicted about Montreal and Toronto, a result of the “gathering force” of national centralization concentrated in her home city of Toronto. She added that the desire for Quebec sovereignty was not about to disappear, unless of course Montrealers—and Quebecers—were ready to resign themselves to being a satellite of the greater Toronto city region. Ever the pragmatist, Jane Jacobs also showed how all parties stand to gain from a new arrangement that respects the Quebec people’s will for sovereignty.

The actors have changed since 1980 but the script remains the same. The current stalemat would not have surprised Jane Jacobs, who stood behind her 1980 conclusions. When I asked her in 2005 if she would write the same book again, she smiled confidently, “Yes, not because it is in my head, but because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.”

Five years after her death, hopefully we will benefit from her work on nations as much as we have from her work of cities.

* Robin Philpot is Montreal writer and publisher whose 2005 interview with Jane Jacobs is published in the new edition of The Question of Separatism, Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (Baraka Books 2011)

Two new books in spring 2011.

Break Away, Jessie on my mind; the award-winning young adult novel by
Sylvain Hotte, Translated by Casey Roberts; Illustrated by Pierre Bouchard.
ISBN 978-1-926824-05-5 | $16.95 (April 1 2011; US May 2011)

Alexandre McKenzie lives on North Shore of the St. Lawrence River. In summer he rides the logging trails on his quad. Come winter he isa promising young hockey star who seeks solitude at a bush camp by the frozen lake. But when he plunges into a relationship with a girl plagued by tragedy, things turn ugly. Fighting his own demons Alex fights to hold his head high, like the bull moose that haunts him from the moment he meets Jessie. Break Away tells of friendship, family, pride and love. It’s a story that could happen wherever winter, hockey, and young people come together.

“From the first page it is hard to put down… excellent for teens… characters are lively, likeable and endearing.” Info-culture

“…“ They’re nice, the magic tricks, McKenzie, the fancy plays, the razzle-dazzle…. but I don’t give a damn if we won! That’s not what I’m here to talk about. It’s about you, your game.”

Normally, his lectures made me fidgety and I’d stare at the floor waiting for him to finish. But this time, I held my head up, grinning from ear to ear. My mind was a million light years from Larry’s office. I didn’t care about the game. Didn’t care about his advice or anything else. There was one indelible image planted in my brain: Jessie jumping up and down and cheering her heart out after I scored the winning goal.”….”

Sylvain Hotte is an award-winning writer of fiction for young adults and children. He was born in Montreal to an Innu mother and a Québécois father and now lives in Quebec City. His first series Darhan was astoundingly successful. Break Away, Jessie on my mind is the first book of a trilogy.

Casey Roberts is a translator and editor based in Montreal.

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THE QUESTION OF SEPARATISM, Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty
By Jane Jacobs, with an exclusive unpublished 2005 interview with Jane Jacobs and a new preface by Robin Philpot
ISBN 978-1-926824-06-2 | $19.95 (April 2011)

The incomparable Jane Jacobs passed away five years ago on April 25, 2006. Baraka Books proudly offers readers a new edition of her third, least-known book to mark that anniversary. Undeniably a genius on urban issues, Jane Jacobs also grappled with the question of nations and political sovereignty. Out of print since the mid 80s, The Question of Separatism, Quebec and the struggle over sovereignty now includes a new preface and an exclusive and previously unpublished 2005 interview conducted in Jane Jacobs’ Toronto home just a year before she died. Random House first published the book in 1980.

“There’s no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs, nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us.” San Francisco Chronicle.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and lived in New York and Toronto. She wrote six other books that have sold in millions, including the groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).

At the invitation of Gilles Duceppe, Leader of the Bloc Québécois, Guy Bouthillier and Édouard Cloutier presented their new anthology Trudeau’s Darkest Hour, War Measures in Time of Peace October 1970 in the Parliament buildings on Thursday October 21. For Guy Bouthillier, it was an important symbolic gesture forty years after the fact to present this book of texts and speeches by some twenty-five eminent English Canadians about the decision made in the Parliament of Canada on October 16, 1970  to suspend the Constitution and all civil liberties and to send 12,500 troops into Quebec.

Édouard Cloutier pointed out that in October 1970, more troops were deployed in Quebec than in Dieppe, a major military operation carried out in 1942. He also saluted the memory of Tommy Douglas, former leader of the New Democratic Party who, from the very start, refused to support the Trudeau Government when it invoked the War Measures Act. As former Trudeau minister Eric Kierans wrote, “He showed political courage of the highest order.”

Guy Bouthillier and Édouard Cloutier both thanked Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe for inviting them to present the book to parliamentarians. They added that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Order Trudeau’s Darkest Hour now.

Read Guy Bouthillier’s article in Counterpunch War Measures in Time of Peace October 1970

212 pages: Paperback $19.95 ISBN 978-1-926824-04-8

The MONTREAL REVIEW OF BOOKS, summer edition, leads off with a long interview with Ishmael Reed as well as a video-taped interview recorded while he was in Montreal in April.

Jill Nelson, prize-winning journalist and novelist calls the book brilliant. She talks with Ishmael Reed about Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media in the NAACP’s organ  The DEFENDERS online.

The Montreal Gazette writes: “The new book levels the charge that American mainstream media, dominated by white conservative-minded pundits, have set on a mission to “break” the country’s first black president whose progressive ideals and objectives are anathema to the entrenched white moneyed establishment, which owns big media and manipulates it to inflame paranoid and racist sentiment among the white middle and underclass.”

MONTREAL – Ishmael Reed has a nice way with words, but isn’t much given to verbal niceties, like pussyfooting around the N-word. He puts it right up front, on the cover of his latest volume of bristling essays on the state of American society. Its zinger title in full is “Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers.” It’s a bit of a jolt for some sensibilities. He did a promotional appearance on a local radio station on a recent visit to Montreal and the host declined on grounds of propriety to speak the subtitle on air. But then Reed has made a career now going on half a century of jolting conventional sensibilities, from back in the mid-’60s day when he co-founded seminal “underground” paper The East Village Other. He’s 72 now and a venerable figure in American letters, but an accumulation of years, accomplishment and honours haven’t softened his punch.