Neighbours Helping Neighbours: The Story of Good Neighbours Food Centreby Wilmer FroesePublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9781778690150  I love books that started out as a passion project as the author’s enthusiasm shows through in the words. That is clearly the case with Neighbours Helping Neighbours. In a world filled with negativity and news channels that promote doom and gloom, Neighbours Helping Neighbours is a breath of sunshine. It gave me long-term warm fuzzies. The story of the Good Neighbours Food Centre reaffirmed to me that there is still so much good in this world. People who care are out there.  This book shares an inspiring success story that took place in Rosthern, a small town located halfway between Saskatoon and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The community banded together to create a food bank for people who lived with food insecurity. The author, Wilmer Froese, shared the initial planning of the food bank with two other community-minded people. Their vision statement was simple: to give food to people who need it. They opened in September 2011, operating one day a week at the local senior centre before upgrading to a standalone building. They faced some huge obstacles over the following years…

Saskatchewan Dirt: A Pandemic Quest for Connectionby Bev LundahlPublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9781778690129 We all know you should never judge a book by its cover, but I made that mistake initially with Saskatchewan Dirt. Based on the title, I assumed this book would be about a farmer’s search for ways to connect with others during the height of Covid. Wrong! It’s a “genealogical and geographical pursuit of the early connections between settlers and Indigenous people in southeast Saskatchewan.” This book unfolds in a creative way. Basically, the author and her road trip sidekick, Georgina, hit the highways and back roads of Saskatchewan to uncover the history of the settlers and Indigenous people of that region. (I loved that they spent plenty of time in the Estevan area, my stomping grounds.) Between and after the two road trips they took, the research continued via Zoom meetings and deep dives into the Internet. The details Lundahl unearthed add to the depths of this work. In addition to the genealogical aspects, the residential schools atrocity takes up a portion of the book. (She even touches on Pope Francis’s apology in 2022 for the Catholic church’s role in the history…

The Life Sentences of Rik McWhinneyby Rik McWhinneyPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9780889778979 When I review a book, I allot myself two weeks to read it. That way I don’t feel pressure when life throws curve balls my way, like it inevitably does to all of us. Two weeks wasn’t necessary with this book – I devoured it in one day. The content was so engrossing that it sucked me right in. I couldn’t let go until I’d turned the last page.  In brief, The Life Sentences of Rik McWhinney is about the torment that one man went through while in Canadian penitentiaries. Rik McWhinney spent over 34 years in prisons across the country, 16 of those in solitary confinement. He was granted parole in 2007 and struggled to adjust to a world so drastically different from what he had known for decades. Sadly, McWhinney passed away in January 2019 but we are fortunate to have his experiences live on in The Life Sentences of Rik McWhinney.  Most of my knowledge about penitentiary life came from TV and movies. How clueless I was! Being a prisoner in Canada is nothing like what you see on the screen. It is…

You Are Enough: Activate Your Angels & Magnetize a Soul-FULL Lifeby Lisa DriverPublished by DriverWorks InkReview by Toby A. Welch$24.95 ISBN 9781927570784 Every once in a while a book comes along that you didn’t know you needed but you do. You Are Enough is that book for me. In a very condensed nutshell, this spiritual guidebook covers how to get in touch with your angels so you can let go of your past and your current pressures in order to believe that you are loved and supported (and ultimately that You Are Enough.) Author Lisa Driver helps you accomplish this through the use of spiritual tools like meditations, exercises, and angel activations. It does make sense as you work your way through the book, I promise!  Driver mentions in her introduction that she worked on this book for almost four years and it shows. It is a dense read filled with a tremendous amount of information: that is a great thing for readers who like to delve deep into a topic. Fans of journaling will be pulling out their pens and notebooks as they go through You Are Enough. You’ll find journal prompts scattered throughout the book that are juicy…

Duty Done: Memories of Fairmont BarracksEdited by Donna Morse and Ric HallPublished by Your Nickel’s Worth PublishingReview by Toby A. Welch$19.95 ISBN 9781988783802 The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a lengthy, distinguished legacy in our country’s history. They were established in 1873, just six years after Canada was created. This phenomenal book delves into a slice of that RCMP history.  In 1914, a building was erected in the Cambie Corridor in Vancouver, BC. It served as a private boys school and then a military hospital before the Mounties took up residence there in 1920; they renamed it Fairmont Barracks. I’d wager they had no idea at that time that members of the RCMP would call the place home for the next 93 years.  Duty Done was clearly a labour of love for dozens of people. Beyond the Vancouver division of the RCMP Veterans’ Association, the list of people who devoted time and energy to ensure this book came to fruition is impressive.  You’ll find 28 chapters in this book, although they are called memories instead of chapters. Each of the 28 sections is a story from someone with ties to the Fairmont Barracks. The stories they share are diverse but…

Unsettledby Dawn MorganPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$24.95 ISBN 9780889778573 Subtitled A Reckoning in the Great Plains, Unsettled is a labour of love that, like all true reckonings, took a long time to take shape. The book revolves around four “lost anchor” events and the author Dawn Morgan’s urge to reconcile herself to them: the death of an old rancher who was gored by a bull bison named King, the death of King himself, the subsequent death of her father by suicide, and the disappearance of Assiniboine who once inhabited the land her ancestors settled. Morgan is a deft handler of the English language. She can weave disparate sources together to create connection and meaning where none was previously evident. In her heart-wrenching, sometimes comic, mostly conciliatory, search for release from her haunting past she introduces us to the poetry of Andrew Suknaski, examines the papers of the Palliser Expedition, dips into the diaries of Métis guide Peter Erasmus, detours into country-western lyrics, then veers into the writings of German philosopher Theodor Adorno. She reflects on Hemingway’s take on bullfighting, the life of Spanish gauchos, and Kafka’s novel “Amerika.” Reading Unsettled is a lot like being a…

Points of View: A Guide on Saskatchewan Projectile Points with Indigenous PerspectivesEdited by: Faith BoserPublished by Saskatchewan Archaeological SocietyReview by Toby A. Welch$29.95 ISBN 9781999530815 Right off the hop, Points of View struck me as a visually stunning book. It is a pleasure to hold and read. The cover features a graphic image that includes buffalo, trees, mountainous hills, and a wispy sky with a full sun. It’s so striking that I would like to have that illustration blown up to a massive size to hang on my living room wall.  Once you flip open the cover, you encounter a coil binding that is a huge asset as you work your way through the pages. (It’s so great when a book lays flat without you having to hold it that way.) Once into the book, you get page after page of colourful diagrams, breathtaking pictures, and charts and graphs galore. The entire book, from one cover to the other, is a feast for your eyes.  The over 200 pages of Points of View are glossy sheets, something I am a huge fan of. I love feeling the slickness between my fingers as I turn the pages. The smoothness is oddly…

From Left to Rightby Dale EislerPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Madonna Hamel$34.95 (pb)ISBN 9780889778641 In his book From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation, Dale Eisler helps us take a clear-eyed look at the province as the world economy shifted from post-industrial to global and the province’s population moved from farms to cities. Case in point: In 1971, 47% of Saskatchewan’s population lived on farms. By 2016 the the number was down to 16%. Eisler begins by attempting to define “populism” because , he says “the role of prairie populism is key to understanding the province’s values, economy and culture as a whole.” “For populism to ignite,” he writes, “two things are needed: something or someone to focus their anger and alienation on, and somebody who articulates their emotions in compelling and emotional language.” In engaging language Eisler describes the many faces of “populism” and how, over the decades, its meaning has changed to embrace both liberal and conservative voices. He is also quick to point to papa Trudeau’s cavalier disregard of the prairies when he asked, in 1969, “Why should I sell your wheat?” The off-handed comment aimed at a people who were losing their…

The Boy From Buzwah: A Life in Indian Educationby Cecil KingPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Toby A. Welch$29.95 ISBN 9780889778504 I’ll admit it – I live in a bubble. I have a routine life that is cozy. That said, when something comes my way that pushes me out of my comfort zone, I love it! The Boy From Buzwah did just that – it ripped me out of my sheltered life and deposited me into a fascinating new world that I thoroughly enjoyed reading about. This book is the self-written memoir of Cecil King. King grew up in Buzwah on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island in Ontario. A residential school survivor, King moved to Toronto to earn his teaching degree before spending his career striving for much-needed changes in Indigenous education.  I am not a fan of the current trend to write memoirs with a timeline that jumps all over the place, skipping around from current day to birth to young adult, back to childhood and everywhere in between. Thankfully King avoided any of that and The Boy From Buzwah unfolds in seamless chronological order. We start with King’s childhood attending the Buzwah School before…

I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like: A Memoir”by David CarpenterPublished by Thistledown PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$24.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-227-0 When I discovered that Saskatoon’s David Carpenter was releasing a new memoir, I Never Met A Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like, I immediately wanted to review it. I knew it would be illuminating, well-written and downright fun, because this is what I’ve come to expect of Carpenter’s work, whether fiction or nonfiction, and this latest title’s cleared the bar. Carpenter’s a bonafide storyteller and a “rabid conservationist,” and his entertaining stories and mind-broadening research into “this ancient cafeteria called nature”—and who and what threaten it—is an epiphanic read. The memoir’s an homage to “creatures with Fangs, Claws, and Other Pointy Things,” from mosquitos, snakes and weasels to the apex predators: wolves, cougars and bears. Over eighteen mostly short chapters that “follow the chain of predation,” we learn about Carpenter’s lifelong passion and reverence for the winged, finned and four-legged. “I seem to have a thing for predatory animals,” he writes. “My journals are full of them.” He’s been keeping field notes for fifty years re: his “sightings of and adventures with predacious creatures,” from boyhood memories of fishing on Lake…