Louisbourg: The Phoenix Fortress

Tony Barclay is a retired juvenile corrections probation officer and a
former public-health research associate at the University of Toronto.

This excellent book, written by a historian working on the Louisbourg
site and photographed by a Nova Scotian, deals with the reconstruction
and revitalization of this famous fortress community. While the
introduction and the essays on “The Fortress” and “The
Community” place the subject in a larger context, they are still
primarily concerned with the place rather than with the two sieges it
endured.

The photographs all illustrate life in the years 1744 and 1745, showing
the people in period costume. The accompanying text is written from the
viewpoint of eighteenth-century people. It gives a living picture of the
reconstructed fortress and the town that grew up within its protective
walls.

The story of the rebuilding of Louisbourg—using information gleaned
from some 500 maps and 750,000 pages of records, preserved for more than
200 years—is remarkable in itself. This charming and highly
educational book shows that the reconstruction is much more than a
make-work project for unemployed coal miners in Cape Breton. The reader
becomes a visitor to the site and briefly returns to an earlier time, to
experience life in an outpost of the French Empire of Louis XV.