Night We Stole The Mounties Car

Max Braithwaite has the unique capacity to be both tender and caustic – both nostalgic and uncompromisingly honest. He is also one of Canada’s few original humorists. All these qualities are present in his latest bittersweet recollections of life on the Prairies during the early Thirties. It was a time of depression and drought; but for Max, a young schoolteacher, it was also a time for courtship and marriage, for those hilarious episodes in Wannego, Saskatchewan, which did much to belie the grimness of the era. There was Max’s disastrous umpiring of a Ladies’ Softball game; his writing and directing of a play that generated more drama off-stage than on; the awful problem of the wasps at the outhouse, and much, much, more. The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car follows Never Sleep Three in a Bed and Why Shoot the Teacher? and completes the story of Max’s early years. It is also Braithwaite at his vintage best – lusty, thought-provoking, and consistently amusing.

"Max Braithwaite has the unique capacity to be both tender and caustic - both nostalgic and uncompromisingly honest. He is also one of Canada's few original humorists. All these qualities are present in his latest bittersweet recollections of life on the Prairies during the early Thirties. It was a time of depression and drought; but for Max, a young schoolteacher, it was also a time for courtship and marriage, for those hilarious episodes in Wannego, Saskatchewan, which did much to belie the grimness of the era. There was Max's disastrous umpiring of a Ladies' Softball game; his writing and directing of a play that generated more drama off-stage than on; the awful problem of the wasps at the outhouse, and much, much, more. The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car follows Never Sleep Three in a Bed and Why Shoot the Teacher? and completes the story of Max's early years. It is also Braithwaite at his vintage best - lusty, thought-provoking, and consistently amusing."--://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/17408/night-we-stole-mounties-car#9781551996493.

Set in the Saskatchewan prairies during the Depression, Why Shoot the Teacher is the Canadian classic that tells the story of a young man’s first collision with reality: an ill-paid teaching assignment in an isolated country school. This autobiographical novel is riotous, grim, candid, and infinitely entertaining. While it is perhaps Braithwaite’s best-loved book, it is also a vivid evocation of the Dust Bowl desolation wrought by the “Dirty Thirties” on the Saskatchewan Prairies, the ordeal of youth among a people bereft of pity and charity, and the human compassion that adds warmth and poignancy to an unforgettable story.

Canadian Literary Landmarks

A book as rollicking and exuberant as the boyhood pleasures and perils it recalls, Never Sleep Three in a Bed combines humour and realism in a nostalgic but unsentimental journey into Max Braithwaite's—and Canada's past. From the pinnacle of his remarkable writing career, the popular author and humorist casts a perceptive eye over the world he shared with his family and friends in western Canada during the first quarter of the twentieth century. That world comes to life in vivid anecdotes of how things were. Highly entertaining and unexpectedly thought-provoking, this is Max Braithwaite at his impressive best. Never Sleep Three in a Bed is the first book in an autobiographical trilogy.

Provides author biographies, publication data and plot summaries for some 500 fictional works featuring the Mounties, and plot summaries, casts, and credits for about 225 films. Also includes comic books, comic strips, TV and radio shows, operas, stage dramas, and musicals. Some bandw illustrations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

If "Why Shoot the Teacher," "Never Sleep Three in a Bed," and "The Night We Stole the Mountie's Car" made you smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud, then here (as the man said) is just the book for you! Yes, Max is back! And Braithwaite fans, along with anyone who reads for the warm companionship of a good laugh and some delightful insight, need look no further. Here is Max's Book of Books - the wit and wisdom of a forty-year career that has won the author hundreds of thousands of book-reading and movie-going fans, and a Stephen Leacock Award for Humour as well. Here is Braithwaite on growing up on the prairies in the twenties and thirties, on the growing pains associated with raising children of your own, on Ontario, where he now lives, on himself, and on his writing career. Each fiction and non-fiction piece in this colourful collection is prefaced by the author with a short introduction dealing with the work itself and the author's own feelings about it. Together, these personal observations provide a warm and insightful look at one man's career and personal life throughout a lifetime of writing for and about Canadians. "Max: The Best of Braithwaite" brings together all the places, times, and faces - pensive, nostalgic, humorous - that Braithwaite fans have come to expect and love. Max"imum" Braithwaite indeed!

Here we have the personal account of the misadventures that preceded the opening to the public of the Leacock home in 1958. Forty years ago, in October 1954, a committee was formed, chaired by Pete McGarvey, to acquire and preserve Stephen Leacock’s summer home, known as The Old Brewery Bay. Four years later a golden key opened the front door of the home, allowing Leacock fans to pay homage to the humorist in a setting he had prized above every other. As the years have passed, appreciation of Leacock’s genius has grown and today the Leacock Museum is open year-round to visitors from all parts of the globe. The Old Brewery Bay is a Leacockian yarn full of ironies, the greatest one being that the salvation of Leacock’s home was accomplished not by a national campaign involving governments, philanthropists, McGill alumni, and foundations (all of whom were approached in a spirit of urgency and all of whom backed away), but by a gang of naive and stubborn Orillians, using old-fashioned political moxie. Leacock would have loved that - his Mariposans showing the big sophisticated world how to get things done.