• Age: 16 to 18
• Grade: 11 to 12

Canada's Sharon Wood became the first woman from the Americas to summit Mount Everest after she had spent 62 days climbing the mountain, sometimes on all fours. "I reached deeper than ever before and still had something left," she said afterwards. "Makes you wonder what our limits really are."

This is one of the memorable stories, plucked from the front-page headlines of the time, that best-selling social historian Brian Brennan tells in this book about people and events that have engaged the attention of Canadian readers over the years.

Other stories in the collection tell about:

Sarah Bernhardt doing a vaudeville tour of Canada because she urgently needed the money.

A group of single male ranchers becoming the romantic targets of women from around the world.

Alberta becoming part of a top-secret Allied Second World War initiative to build aircraft carriers out of ice.

Rudyard Kipling giving Medicine Hat an enduring slogan when he wrote that because it sat on top of a seemingly unlimited supply of natural gas the town had "all hell for a basement."

An unscrupulous California "rainmaker" taking advantage of a drought to make money off desperate farmers.

Read these great stories and more by adding Boondoggles, Bonanzas and Other Alberta Stories to your library today.

Brian Brennan is an Irish-born writer who has lived and worked in Canada since 1966. He makes his home in Calgary, Alberta, where he has worked as a journalist and author, publishing eight books of biography and social history including The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning Story (2008), How the West Was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray (2006), Romancing the Rockies: Mountaineers, Missionaries, Marilyn & More (2005) and Scoundrels and Scallywags (2002). He was the first recipient of Canada’s Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award and has written freelance articles and columns for magazines and newspapers across the United States and Canada, including the New York Times, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. Brian also serves on the National Council of The Writers’ Union of Canada.

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