Author and historian Pierre Berton believed that successive generations must revisit the big events. Vimy, his examination of the signature Canadian battle of the Great War, though seemingly definitive, was more a milestone. Detailing the broader history of the Canadian front-line contribution to the same war, At the Sharp End (Viking Canada, 608 pp.) is the first such history published in 40 years. Suitably, it’s a page-turner. Tim Cook, Carleton University professor and Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, documents the war from the viewpoint of the Canadian infantry. An engrossing read, Cook’s first volume encompasses the years 1914 to 1916. Framing the war’s political context concisely, Cook documents the story of the Canadian Corps from its chaotic Valcartier training through its green and eager arrival in the trenches of France. Dubiously honoured by being on the receiving end of the first gas attack of the war at the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadians embarked on a long, bloody learning curve, maturing as an elite fighting force on the Somme. Cook deftly chronicles the crystallization of front-line fighting tactics by real men, individuals tasked with winning a war so new and cruel many hadn’t words for it. Volume 2 can’t arrive in bookstores soon enough.

Beautifully researched and illustrated with numerous photos, Wayne Ralph’s William Barker, VC: The Life, Death and Legend of Canada’s Most Decorated War Hero (John Wiley & Sons, 256 pp.) is an astonishing read. A fighter ace more decorated than any hero of the First World War, it was Barker’s friend and post-war business associate Billy Bishop whose name has endured. Barker’s story, however, is the more compelling. A Dauphin, Manitoba boy, Barker had a bigger-than-life personality and unbridled drive. He became a consummate fighter pilot over Italy and ended his 50-victory run in a dogfight to end all dogfights over the French front-lines that left him physically and emotionally wrecked. Ralph richly chronicles Barker’s personal and professional transformation as well as his postwar contribution to Canadian aviation.

Despite his status as an international hero and celebrity, his ignominious death in a flying demonstration after the war seemingly signalled the decline of Barker’s fame. Ralph’s revival of Barker’s story is nothing short of brilliant. Here’s hoping that Paul Gross will follow up his now-in-production Passchendaele with the movie version of this book.

History can sure be made boring in the hands of some people. So said Everett Baker, history buff, photographer and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool field man. Touring his home province, spreading the gospel of collectivization, Baker filled community halls for his much-loved slide shows based on the subject.

As much as Baker was keen on the province’s early history, he avidly documented his own era. Everett Baker’s Saskatchewan: Portraits of an Era (Fifth House Books, 208 pp.) features colour slides of rural and urban Saskatchewan taken during his travels through the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Like a family photo album for an entire province, Baker’s photo collection captures a magic, tragic time of hard work and hard play, alternating drought and bumper crop, of prairie people very much in touch with their landscape.

Author and historian Bill Waiser (Saskophiles check out his excellent Saskatchewan: A New History) selected the book’s photos and penned the Baker bio that opens the book.

Stalin’s massive resettlement and social cleansing programs of the 1930s caused suffering and death on an unimaginable scale. Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton University Press, 248 pp.) focuses on one incident in which thousands of deportees — career criminals, former business and property owners, senior citizens and people simply plucked from train stations — were transported thousands of miles and deposited on an island on the Ob River in Siberia. Expected to fend for themselves without tools, basic provisions or adequate food and clothing, members of the group began to eat each other.

The incident is reflective of the gulag system as a whole, posits author Nicolas Werth. Part of the University of Princeton Press Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity series, this readable academic treatise concentrates on how the system operated and why, instead of creating self-sustaining, commodity-producing communities, the experiment was a vast, tragic failure.

By pirate standards, Bartholomew Roberts died as he should have: at the helm of his ship, canons blazing. If a Pirate I Must Be: The True Story of Black Bart, King of the Caribbean Pirates (Skyhorse Publishing, 256 pp.) details the exploits of the most successful pirate captain of piracy’s golden age. A gentleman amongst hard-bitten, punch-swilling, surprisingly egalitarian thieves, Roberts marshalled a cohesive pirate force unlike any seen before or since. Author Richard Sanders sympathizes with the devil, bringing the man and the lifestyle to life in a salty, boozy, sweat-and-gunpowder crusade that terrorized the high seas from Brazil to Newfoundland to Africa.