Douglas Hunter, a resident of Port McNicoll for 20 years, has been a freelance writer since 1993 and has brought a wide range of interests and experiences to his career, all of which show up throughout his published work.

Including writing columns on a wide range of topics for The Free Press.

Hunter, a resident of Port McNicoll for almost 20 years, has been a freelance writer since 1993 and has brought a wide range of interests and experiences to his career, all of which show up throughout his published work.

His BA at McMaster included studies in studio art and art history which has led to his work as a graphic artist, designing his own books and those of others. A lifelong obsession with sailing is reflected in books on sailing (including one on design with another Simcoe area resident, yacht designer Stephen Killing) and in books that, while not primarily about sailing, often have boats in them. Note especially his works on exploration -his explorers all sail places, they don't walk. He's a hockey fan and has written about Tim Horton and the Edmonton Oilers and he worked for a while at the Financial Post and has several books about business to his name, including the award winning The Bubble and The Bear', about Nortel, and a biography of John Molson.

Often his interests combine in one book -the book about Horton also talks about the

ON BOOKS

coffee shop and his trilogy on exploration deal extensively with, as he calls it, "the commercial imperative, and chicanery, of the age', as well as sailing.

Currently Douglas is promoting his latest book, The Race to the New World' and is a doctoral candidate in history at York University.

The Midland Library is pleased to host a launch of this book on May 17th at 7:00 pm in the Assembly Room. There will be a presentation by Mr. Hunter, copies of his book will be available for sale and there will be a reception and signing to follow. Admittance is free.

Hunter's first book on exploration, God' Mercies, "revealed the traumatic intersection of the careers of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain" and was nominated for the Writers' Trust Literary Non Fiction Prize and for the Governor General's Literary Award. His second, Half Moon, followed Henry Hudson up the river in New York that bears his name.

In "The Race to the New World" Hunter is again interweaving the tales of two famous names -John Cabot and Christopher Columbus -though most of the focus is on Cabot. As is often the case when we move beyond what we were taught in school, the story is far more interesting than we thought. The book has been called "fascinating" by the Washington Post, CBC Radio, and Booklist.

Hunter reveals that Cabot was, in fact, a self styled but not very successful engineer who probably went with Columbus on his large (17 ships) second voyage to the West Indies to supervise the building of a harbour. That apparently failed and Cabot returned to Europe where he ran up debts, took financing to build a bridge in Seville which never got started and fled. So he turned to exploration as being more likely to provide rewards.

Hunter, according to the Canadian Geographic Magazine, is a deft stylist with a keen eye for detail' and he manages to bring these famous names to new life while presenting a solid, scholarly work that will satisfy the generalist and the specialist both.