The province's premier journalist tells the story he was born to write. For lovers of history, travel writing, and sharp social observation comes a finely etched portrait of Nova Scotia by one of the province's most gifted writers. No journalist has travelled the back roads, hidden vales, and fog-soaked coves of Nova Scotia as widely as John DeMont. No writer has spent as much time considering its peculiar warp and woof of humanity, geography, and history. This book is the summation of DeMont's years of travel, research, and thought. It tells the story of what is, from the European view of things, the oldest part of Canada. Before Confederation it was also the richest, but now it is among the poorest. Its defining myths and stories are mostly about loss, willful endurance, and sheer determination. Equal parts narrative, memoir, and meditation, the book tells with enthralling clarity a complex and multi-dimensional story: the overwhelming of the first peoples and the arrival of a m{acute}elange of pioneers who carved out pockets of the wilderness; the random acts and unexplained mysteries; the mixture of shameful achievements and noble failures; the rapture and misery; the twists of destiny, and the hard-heartedness of fate. This is the biography of a place that has been hardened by history and a people shaped by the land and the past like pebbles on a beach. A place full of reminders of how great, from time to time, parts of the province have been, and how great -- with the right circumstances and a little luck -- it could be again