Nova Scotia History with a Twist: True and Unusual Stories from Bruce Nunn.

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

This is a new edition of a collection first published in 1998, and as any author knows, to get a second edition is proof positive that your book attracts readers. In this case, sales undoubtedly were boosted by the popularity of Bruce Nunn’s long-running CBC radio series, Mr. Nova Scotia Know-it-All. Judging by the length of several of the 35 articles, he researched them further to expand them well beyond the usual short excerpts that make up radio talks. At the same time, judging by his frequent use of puns and often corny asides, Nunn writes as though he was reading another of his radio talks. I found these somewhat tiresome, but I admired the way he relentlessly sought out and talked with descendents of long-departed key figures of the original stories. It often helped when he got calls from his listeners or, in one case, from a local television producer whose father had often mentioned an ancestor who played a key role in saving all crew members of a ship that sank in 1912. That story, which he dubbed “Courageous Captains of Coincidence” (Nunn is also fond of alliterations), took up 10 pages. His research efforts and narrative skills are also revealed in his seven-page account of Joe Fassett, who became Nova Scotia’s first licensed amateur radio operator in 1913. In another 10-page account which, as he acknowledged, draws extensively from a major article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, he describes the amazingly varied career of Nova Scotia native George Mercer Dawson. For a second subject in the same article, we learn of the rags-to-riches-to-poverty of Alex “Big John” McDonald, who earned the title “King of the Klondike.” An even less known Nova Scotian, Simon Newcomb, is described as “the genius astronomer who brought order to the universe” — a slight exaggeration, surely, especially as we are told how he influenced Walt Whitman and Albert Einstein and is thought to have been a model for the Sherlock Holmes stories. A less complicated story uncovers the woman “who put the ‘Peggy’ in Peggy’s Cove.” In all, Nunn provides a potpourri of Nova Scotia folklore and history that will fascinate many others who can’t claim this ocean province as their home.