Thanks to the continual pilgrimage westward to find work, the province’s population is routinely depleted, yet there remains a belief that all those scattered Maritimers long to come home. Nova Scotians are known as friendly, personable folk, earnest and hardscrabble, with a long storytelling tradition. He calls a man recounting a story an “old salt,” and repeatedly spins “yarns.” The author walks the old towns and villages – Yarmouth, Barrington, Glace Bay, Canso, Grand-Pré – leaning hard on nostalgia to bring their stories to life. What DeMont does with this well-trod material is render it as a sentimental journey. DeMont frames individuals and events in terms of work and achievement, even if the work is privateering, soldiering, or colonializing people and land.Īnyone who stayed awake in high school history class will be familiar with at least some of the events and characters described in these pages. The Long Way Home traces the arc of Nova Scotia’s history: Samuel de Champlain and the men of the Order of Good Cheer relations between the French/Acadians and Mi’kmaq the loyalists and the New England Planters arriving in Shelburne the Gaelic diaspora the shipbuilding empires in Yarmouth and beyond. This comes as no surprise: the author’s previous works of adult non-fiction, The Last Best Place: Lost in the Heart of Nova Scotia and A Good Day’s Work, are tributes to the proletariat. While the great men of history get their due, it’s the ordinary folk, the working class, that DeMont really wants to highlight and praise. The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia was begun before the strike, but themes of labour, mutiny, and adversity seem to yoke together DeMont’s material. The paper’s most beloved journalist, John DeMont, was one of the strikers. In August 2017, the bitter strike between the Halifax Typographical Union and the city’s newspaper, The Chronicle Herald, ended after 19 lengthy months.
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