Books
L.D. Cross has published several books, please scroll down for more information and click through each title to purchase the book:
Inside Outside: In conversation with a doctor and a clothing designer
ISBN: 1-894439-12-0 Ottawa, ON, Creative Bound, 2004.
Ottawa Titans: Fortune and fame in the early days of Canada's capital
ISBN: 1-55153-960-8 Calgary, AB, Altitude Publishing, 2004.
Spies in Our Midst: The incredible story of Igor Gouzenko Cold-War spy
ISBN: 1-55439-028-1 Calgary, AB, Altitude Publishing, 2005.
Marriage is a Business
ISBN: 978-1-897449-30-1 Ottawa, ON, Baico Publishing, 2008.
The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Exploring the elusive route through Canada's Arctic waters
ISBN: 13-078-1-55277-432-8 Toronto, ON, James Lorimer & Co. Ltd., 2009.
The Underground Railroad: The long journey to freedom in Canada
ISBN: 978-1-55277-581-3 Toronto, ON, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 2010.
Treasure Under the Tundra: Canada's Arctic Diamonds
ISBN: 978-1-926936-08-6 Victoria, BC, Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2011.
Code Name Habbakuk: A secret ship made of ice
ISBN: 978-1-927051-47-4 Victoria, BC, Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2012.
Flying on Instinct: Canada's Bush Pilot Pioneers
ISBN: 978-1-927051-84-9 Victoria, BC, Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2012.
High Peaks Engineering: Rocky Mountain Marvels
ISBN: 978-1927527-80-1 Spring 2014.
The Luck of the Karluk: Shipwrecked in the Arctic
ISBN: 9781772030204 Spring 2015
Inside Outside
Don't start a mind and body change without reading this book first!
Know your MD Score if you want to reduce your weight.
Know the Rule of Thirds if you want to look slimmer.
A lifetime of feeling good and looking good can be yours. Yes, you can do it!
Good health and personal style are not gifts mysteriously bestowed on a few, fortunate women. They are the outcomes for all women who shape their lives with intent and determination.
In a refreshingly honest discussion with journalist Dyan Cross, family physician Marilyn Daryawish and clothing designer Paddye Mann show readers how you, too, can take control of your life, both inside and outside, to enhance your health and natural beauty. It just might be the best thing you will ever do for yourself and those you love!
Inside Outside is available directly from the author
Ottawa Titans: Fortune and Fame in the Early Days of Canada's Capital
In its early days as Bytown, Ottawa was a community of entrepreneurs. Through the stories of eight intriguing businessmen the development of the country's capital is revealed. These capital titans, in working toward their dreams, flavoured the region, and the country, with their strong personalities and opinions. Their legacy is still being felt today. These are their amazing stories.
Learn about:
- Philemon Wright (1760-1839)
- Lieutenant-Colonel John By (1779-1836)
- Thomas MacKay (1772-1855)
- Nicholas Sparks (1792-1862)
- John Egan (1811-1857)
- J.R. Booth (1827-1925)
- E.B. Eddy (1827-1906)
- Thomas Ahearn (1855-1938)
Ottawa Titans: Fortune and Fame in the Early Days of Canada's Capital is available from Amazon.ca and Federal Publications
Spies in Our Midst: The Incredible Story of Igor Gouzenko, Cold War Spy
Igor Gouzenko was a former clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa who defected to the West in 1945. His story was so astounding that, at first, no one believed him. But the evidence he smuggled from the embassy eventually led to the arrest of a large Soviet spy ring in Canada, and sent Gouzenko into hiding for the rest of his life. His revelations reverberated throughout the world and ignited the Cold War. This is his amazing story.
Chapters:
- The Lure of Freedom
- Search for Sanctuary
- Behind the Scenes
- In from the Cold
- Canadians Learn the Truth
- The Fallout
- Hiding in Freedom
Spies in Our Midst: The Incredible Story of Igor Gouzenko, Cold War Spy is available from Amazon.ca
Marriage Is A Business
Throughout history marriage always has been a business arrangement.
Don't fix your marriage, keep it from breaking in the first place.
Recent government statistics state that 47-percent of marriages fail.
Check out actual responses to 10 survey questions and predict your marriage's survival chances.
Marriage is a business- yes, it is! More thought goes into selecting a house than a spouse. These are the biggest investments most of us ever make. So why should a spouse rate lower on the strategic planning scale?
Throughout history, marriage has been a political and economic match first and then a love match - maybe. Marriage was a business to seal political initiatives, create alliances and reinforce lines of succession. The head ruled the heart.
But what about marriage choices today? Forget Romeo and Juliet. Think venture partnership.
Marriage is a business; the ultimate home- based business. It is the family firm. Each partner in the enterprise must bring the same set of skills to the dining room table that they would bring to the boardroom table - strategic thinking, problem solving, compromise, ethical behavior, passion, commitment and, a whole lot more!
Marriage Is A Business is available from Chapters Indigo and Baico Books
The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Exploring the elusive route through Canada's Arctic waters
It was the greatest earth-based quest before the quest to put a man on the moon. For centuries, Europeans sought the elusive Northwest Passage that would link Europe to the Far East and China. Early visitors to Canada's northern coasts included Viking sailors and Basque whalers. Then came the prominent explorers John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, Sir John Franklin and Roald Amundsen. Others tried to find a passage overland through North America or up the Pacific coast to the Beaufort Sea. This book explores the explorers who traced a passage through the ice at the top of the world. Now that global warming threatens to melt much of the Arctic ice cap, conflict over who owns the Northwest Passage and the resource riches of the Arctic is intensifying
The Quest for the Northwest Passage: exploring the elusive route through Canada's Arctic waters is available from:
The Underground Railroad: The long journey to freedom in Canada
After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, it persisted for decades in much of the U.S. Even in states where slavery was illegal, slaves were subject to capture and return to their owners. The only sure escape was to cross the border into Canada and establish a new life there.
The Underground Railway was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses, an organized escape route run by black and white abolitionists who helped black slaves find freedom in Canada. They arrived and set to work at points as far east as Nova Scotia and as far west as British Columbia, but the vast majority landed in southern Ontario. This book recounts the harrowing experiences of many including Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped and later helped many others to do so and Alexander Ross a white doctor and ornithologist from Belleville, Ontario who travelled many times to southern plantations to 'study birds' and to surreptitiously hand out information on secret routes north. His travels truly did give wings to freedom. Stories about the businesses and lifestyles in Canada of Josiah Henson, Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Rose Fortune, John Ware and Mifflin Wistar Gibbs are also told.
This book received the Ontario Historical Society's inaugural Huguenot Society of Canada Award honouring "the best book published in Ontario in the past three years which has brought public awareness to the principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of thought".
The Underground Railroad: the long journey to freedom in Canada is available from:
Treasure Under The Tundra: Canada's Arctic Diamonds
Ice - the carbon kind not the frozen kind. It is said the sparkle from Canadian diamonds mimics the awesome and seductive radiance of the northern lights, and yet, until 1991, no one thought there were diamonds in Canada. No one except two geologists who went in search of diamonds and found them on the Lac de Gras Barren Grounds at Point Lake near Yellowknife in the Canadian Arctic.
The discovery by Chuck Fipke and his partner, Dr. Stu Blusson, caused great excitement in international diamond circles. Today, Canada is the world's third-largest producer, by value, of rough stones. Why? Canada won the geological lottery and, in contrast to gems mined in Africa, Canada's stones are considered pure "ice" and are "clean" -- not tainted by bloodshed and used to finance international murder as are diamonds from other parts of the world such as Sierra Leone and Angola. The searchers may have had more flaws than the gemstones they were hunting but the discovery of diamonds in Canada's Arctic is a timeless story of persistence in the face of overwhelming odds followed by ultimate vindication and financial success.
Treasure Under The Tundra: Canada's Arctic Diamonds is available from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, ChaptersIndigo.
Code Name Habbakuk: A secret ship made of ice
The rise and fall of Project Habbakuk, a World War II military initiative, involved eccentric inventor Geoffrey Pyke, dashing naval commander Louis Mountbatten, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and William Lyon Mackenzie King along with National Research Council (NRC) scientists in Ottawa.
An invincible secret weapon - immense aircraft carriers built of ice -- would roam the north Atlantic protecting Allied convoys from predatory German submarines. Their massive white hulls would churn through the water, launching aircraft, protecting shipping, decimating U-boat wolf packs. The iceberg ships would be the enemy's worst nightmare. And if damaged, the unsinkable ice ships (after all, ice floats) were sitting in the middle of a limitless supply of repair material - water. It was to be an all-natural solution not to mention cheap to build. So a prototype was constructed on Patricia Lake at Jasper National Park in the Rocky Mountains by a crew of conscientious objectors under the direction of NRC scientists. It was wartime. Spies were everywhere. Who would look for a model aircraft carrier so far from the ocean? But the bizarre concept literally went down the drain.
Readers of Code Name Habbakuk who travel to Jasper National Park can see a heritage plaque commemorating the ice ship on the lake bottom (for divers) and on the lake shore (for drivers).
Code Name Habbakuk: a secret ship made of ice is available from Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, ChaptersIndigo.
Flying on Instinct: Canada's Bush Pilot Pioneers
They were nicknamed Snow Eagle, Flying Knight, Bush Angel, Punch, Doc and Wop. They worked in open cockpits and flew through cold, snow and fog without the benefit of radios, maps or weather reports. They flew over the Barrens, frozen lakes, boreal forests and mountain ranges by dead reckoning and line of sight. They landed on makeshift runways, glaciers, muskeg, tundra and glassy lakes. Comrades of the wilderness, they were Canada's early bush pilots. These brave and enterprising pilots rolled back the boundaries of western and northern Canada, delivering mail, medicine, miners and all the supplies needed by frontier settlements. Flying such planes as Curtiss, Bellanca, de Havilland, Fairchild, Junkers, Norseman, Stinson and Vickers, they were the off-roaders of aviation, venturing where no others dared to go. Climb into the cockpit with these pioneering pilots for an exciting trip into Canadian aviation history.
Flying on Instinct: Canada's Bush Pilot Pioneers is available from Amazon.ca, Chapters Indigo and directly from Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.
High Peaks Engineering: Rocky Mountain Marvels
Building transportation routes through the Rockies is dangerous. It always has been. It is also expensive, labour-intensive, and highly political. But railway and highway construction through the western cordillera succeeded thanks to scientific innovation and sheer human grit. In the nineteenth century, steam locomotives, railways, tunnels, trestles, and telegraphy represented the hi-tech advances of the day. A vast country with a small population raised money (and more and more money) and overcame mountain summits, foul weather, and scandal to build the longest railway of its time that would unify the young nation of Canada from east to west. To offset operating costs and increase passenger traffic, the three architectural wonders of the Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise Resorts were created amid snowy heights, glaciers, and the headwaters of four river systems-Athabasca, Columbia, Fraser, and the North Saskatchewan. Natural marvels like Cave and Basin, Radium, Miette, and other mineral hot springs were also developed. In the twentieth century, the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway accelerated the appeal of the peaks. Today, oil and gas pipelines are pushing new routes through the Rocky Mountains. The physical challenges are similar to earlier eras, but high peaks engineering must also address the ecological impacts of pipeline corridors moving oil and gas through Rocky Mountain passages. It will be another test of Canadian resourcefulness.
High Peaks Engineering: Rocky Mountain Marvels is available at Chapters Indigo, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, McNally Robinson and directly from Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.
The Luck of the Karluk: Shipwrecked in the Arctic
A diverse group of federal scientists, international scholars, inexperienced crew, an Inuit family, sled dogs and a black cat set out in June 1913 from Victoria, BC aboard HMCS Karluk, a renovated wooden whaling ship. Little did they realize how woefully unprepared they were for the challenges of the North while charting unexplored landmasses of the Western Arctic and recording polar flora, fauna, archaeology, meteorology and oceanography. The tale of the first Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE) is one of optimism, naivete, incompetence and heroism played out in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth. Just a few months into the journey, their vessel became lodged in pack ice, eventually sinking near the East Siberian Sea. Stranded on shifting ice floes, Captain Bob Bartlett leads the exhausted castaways to desolate Wrangel Island where they set up camp. He then leaves during a blizzard with Inuit guide Kataktovik trekking 1,100 km down the frozen Siberian coast hoping to find passage across the Bering Sea to Alaska and a rescue ship. The 15-month saga of the misadventures of the Karluk is a revealing study of the strengths and weaknesses of human nature under treacherous conditions.
The Luck of the Karluk: Shipwrecked in the Arctic is available in print and e-book formats from Chapters Indigo, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, McNally Robinson, Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd.