Just a Minute: Glimpses of Our Great Canadian Heritage - Softcover

From the discovery of dinosaur bones in Alberta to Jacques Plante's invention of the hockey mask and Marshall McLuhan's radical analysis of the media and the modern world, Just A Minute free-wheels through some of the most interesting and human stories of a nation that was named "Kanata" after the Iroquois word for "village." Did you know that the McIntosh apple came from one accidental tree? Laura Secord never had a cow. Baseball was being played in Canada a full year before American Abner Doubleday claims to have invented the game? Governor Frontenac came to Quebec City to avoid his French creditors? And did you that "truth, justice and the American way" was a Canadian invention? This is a hugely readable, historically accurate, and wildly entertaining volume that will leave readers constantly saying to themselves, "I don't know that."

Author Marsha Boulton is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in Maclean's, Canadian Business, Chatelaine and Toronto Life magazines, to name only a few. Her "Letter from the Country" is a regular feature on CBC Radio.

Her historical anecdotes, under the heading "Heritage Highlights" were syndicated by the Thomson chain, and reached grassroots Canada through over 450 weekly community newspapers nation-wide from Dawson Creek, Northwest Territories to Happy Valley, Labrador. Ms. Boulton has worked with Heritage Project Creative Director Patrick Watson on the research and scripting for many of the 60 "Heritage Minutes" which have been shown on national television and in Cineplex Odeon theaters thorough out the country.

Her jottings about country life and her anecdotal histories have appeared in dailies such as the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen. Her books are national bestsellers. In its seventh printing Letters from the Country, which won the Leacock Award for Humor in 1996, is a cross between Garrison Keillor's semi-fictional small town musings and Peter Mayle's fanciful A Year in Provence.

With a dollop of James Herriot and a pinch of Red Green, Ms. Boulton's "letters," comprise a chronological, seasonal memoir of contemporary life in the rural countryside of the late twentieth century. Subtitled "From High Heels to Wellington boots" her stories are timeless but particularly of this time. A second volume, More Letters from the Country was published in 1997 and is now in its second printing.

Just A Minute, Glimpses of Our Great Canadian Heritage, now in its ninth printing, is a spirited compendium of anecdotal Canadian history replete with stories of heroism, adventure, innovation and villainy perpetrated by both men and women.

The second and third volumes, Just Another Minute, More Glimpses of Our Great Canadian Heritage and Just A Minute More, published in 1997 and 1999 respectively, carry Ms. Boulton's unique tone and perspective forward into the past. Did you know that Sir John A. Macdonald almost lit himself on fire in his bed during the Constitutional talks? Or that the first European child born in North America was a direct descendant of Iceland's Ragnor Shaggypants? That Laura Secord never had a cow, the McIntosh Apple came from one accidental tree and Canadians were playing baseball a full year before American Abner Doubleday claims to have invented the game? These and other fascinating historical facts come alive in Ms. Boulton's three remarkably readable and accessible volumes.

Marsha Boulton lives on a farm near Mount Forest, Ontario where she raises sheep, horses and exotic fowl. She is currently working on a novel, researching a new book of histories, tentatively called Indiscretions: A History of Philandering and Abuse by Men in Power, and planting her not insubstantial garden.