Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson (Untold Lives Series)

Product Information

In many ways, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is a better and a worse man than you would expect from the few facts that I encountered in grade school. He seems to have been able to roll along with whatever situation he encountered, looking for an upside or an opportunity. He also seems to have had a natural aptitude for languages which stood him in good stead. On the poor side, he seemed to be motivated almost entirely by profit and was willing to abandon or double-cross his friends and business partners whenever it was convenient for him. Before that came about, Iroquois country was made up of not only forests and rivers but “vast fields of corn, walled towns so strong” that the English called them castles, and wide trails linking communities spread over 200 miles. The Iroquois cleared tens of thousands of acres in the forests and planted corns and beans, and men and women stayed in nearby cabins while clearing, planting and harvesting. Written in a wry and almost conversation manner, it is presented without any obvious agenda. Bourrie clearly enjoys the adventure aspect of the life at the centre of his story—with some infectious fondness for the rogue, even while articulating Radisson’s many character flaws—and has no time for mythmaking. He is dismissive of some of Radisson’s own claims in a delightfully direct manner. He is not afraid to occasionally assert his own voice or views, breaking the fourth wall to provide context or insight, in ways that can sometimes be jarring, but are often helpful.

The stories told about him in this book shows him double-crossing everyone, especially the French, English, and Mohawks. He probably felt he had no choice and he probably didn’t. He is an interesting character who was in North America, Caribbean, France, Holland, and Britain. It is surprising how many times he went from the New World to the Old World and how much he travelled around the New World considering how long these journeys took and how fraught with danger they were. A remarkable biography of an even more remarkable 17th-century individual … Beautifully written and endlessly thought-provoking.” The climbing varieties of round podded haricot beans are lighter in growth habit and can be grown in smaller containers; a large pot 45cm (18”) in diameter is ideal for eight plants. That Otherworld comprises people of many different cultures and languages. As often as not, they treat each other badly. Some are polygamous, others aren’t. Some torture their prisoners to death, others just bonk them on the head. Bourrie insists repeatedly that 17th-century Europe, gripped by feudalism, was in many ways less progressive than what is known as the New World. If Radisson, born into the peasant class, had never sailed to New France, he would have been trapped in a life of drudgery and servitude. Among the Iroquois, where social mobility was based on a kind of merit, he became, for a time, a young aristocrat.

But there used to be these giant magazines that were in weekend newspapers, and Saturday night city magazines, Toronto Life. And that part of the media has withered along with other print media like newspapers. Sourced from Radisson's journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived. ( From Biblioasis) Haricot beans can be sown two or three seeds to each pot. Sow about three weeks before you want to plant out. This will produce substantial, well-rooted plants that will get off to a flying start when planted out. Containers Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions.

Red Rum’ is a popular choice because it is self-fertile and less dependent on pollinating insects. ‘Painted Lady’ is one of the most attractive with red and white showy flowers. This book’s full title is Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson by Mark Bourrie. I loved this book. This is a book I got at a Ben McNally Brunch at the King Eddie. These are great events as you get a good breakfast at the King Eddie and hear four authors speak about their books. I have bought a number of books at these events as the most of the speakers are great. The link is here. It is hard to say if there will be more events at this point. A container that is 75cm ( 30”) in diameter would support eight or nine plants growing up a simple wigwam of canes. The old-school allotmenters’ method of growing runner beans is to do something called a runner bean trench. It used to be that magazines like Saturday Night or Macleans, or now I suppose The Walrus, would offer space for heavily-researched work — long reads that might become a book after it's published. Is that still the case? Are there options there for someone who wants to do a piece of historical non-fiction?Pierre-Esprit Radisson came to New France (modern Québec) as a young boy with little expected of him. Intelligent—if not necessarily learned—and charismatic, he was by nature a survivor with fluid loyalties. Based largely on Radisson’s journals, the book follows a life that moves in Indigenous communities (as a prisoner, as an adopted family member, and as a trader) and takes on dangerous and unsanctioned fur trading missions in his early years, eventually arriving in the courts of King Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England and laying the foundation for a massive fur trading enterprise in Hudson’s Bay (first for the French and then for the English). He was, as the author notes in his introduction, everywhere “a time traveller to the 1600s would want to The Tomato 'Tumbler' I planted in VegTrug Poppy in the conservatory have made great progress. this bushy, trailing variety is ideally suited to pots and hanging baskets and I'm intending it to cascade over the sides of the VegTrug. The plants are already branched and producing flowers. As Poppy only holds a smaller volume of compost I will need to start feeding these soon. Although you do not usually start feeding with a tomato fertiliser until the first truss has set, I'm going to give these a weak solution of tomato feed from now on to prevent the plants from becoming thin and weak. There are things that are flourishing and literary non-fiction, in the sense of memoir, is doing really well. The work of people like Desmond Cole and Jesse Thistle, a whole pile of other young memoir writers, they're doing great work. They're selling lots of books. It's the other stuff that has problems. These are along the same lines as VegTrellis: robust wire cages that you simply join together to make a tube which you drop over the plant to allow it to grow up through the middle. Supporting tomato plants is always a headache. Anchoring canes is a problem: in containers there is never sufficient soil depth. The spikes on the bottom of the tomato tower anchor the support and act as legs supporting from all sides.

A good mulch around the base of the plants, I use compost, helps prevent them from drying out quite so fast. Harvesting Harvesting Runner Beans The Dutch and their (temporary) French business allies seemed to have targeted Groseilliers as the less intelligent, most treacherous, and more gullible of the pair. The spy had chosen the right target. Touret pumped Groseilliers for information, then offered the Frenchman a Dutch passport and passage to the Netherlands as a guest of their effective ruler, Johann de Witt. Radisson and Groseilliers were the focus of espionage directed at the highest levels of three governments: those of France, Holland and England. - Mark Bourrie Mr. Bourrie’s analysis of Radisson as an “eager hustler with no known scruples” seems to be on the mark. But those less-than-admirable traits helped create a prevailing mythology about his adventures. It also gave a Baron Munchausen-like quality to his stories that allowed him, in Gump-like fashion, to “Run Radisson Run” around the known world.If you’re one of the many people who think that Canadian history is boring, this book may change your mind.” There are plenty of varieties to choose from, old and new. It is probably best to choose a red or bicoloured flowering variety of runner bean for pots as these are prettier. Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson is a biography of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, co-founder of the Hudson's Bay Company. Mark Bourrie is a Canadian lawyer, blogger, journalist, author, historian, and lecturer at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa, wrote this biography. Besides being a businessman, he was an admitted cannibal and murderer, and he enjoyed connections to royal courts and enthralled kings by writing — specially for them — accounts of his journeys.

Bush Runner also puts some context to the demands by Canada’s First Nations for recognition of their land and other claims. But Canadian non-fiction, talking about memoirs, cookbooks, little kids books about dinosaurs, Canadian biographies, all that stuff accounts for less than five per cent of the Canadian book sales in Canada. And non-fiction is a little over 30 per cent.This title helps us continue moving forward in the right direction. I agree with the author that ‘everyone deserves a good story’ and as someone with an interest in historical geography I am fascinated by the events depicted in this work. This well researched, and impeccably well documented, telling lays bare the underbelly to the settlement history of Canada. Anyone who doesn’t get the arguments for land settlement claims by indigenous peoples would learn much from reading this book. Bourrie loves Canadian history, and is the author of several books on Canadian subjects including Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, which won the final RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction writing.