by Neil Gower
FRIESENPRESS
2023
The life story of Gordon Gill, writes author Neil Gower, “connects a Cree-speaking grandfather born before the last Métis/Indigenous uprising put down by military force in 1885 to high-tech computer-operated 1,000-ton cranes” in the 21st century north. Based on oral interviews, the book traces Gill’s life from his early days in “a one-room stick-built house” in the 1940s while his father worked a trapline, to becoming a mechanic and welder in the NWT as gold-mining and oil and gas exploration boomed, to owning a northern shipbuilding company and then a crane company. It’s an engaging story of a tough, kind, entrepreneurial Métis man who, with money or not, was always rich in “family, humour, adaptability and perseverance.”
by Carmen P. Naccarato
Self-Published
2021
Growing up in Italy, “I developed an appreciation for the giometro profession, the Italian term for an architectural draftsman,” writes Carmen P. Naccarato in this beautifully illustrated collection of his work over the past 60 years. “The way these professionals could look at a site laid out for them and see what type of building would work best on its landscape was like an artist looking at a blank canvas.” The sketches, design drawings and pencil renderings in the book, the majority of them commercial projects and private homes in Alberta, are “a collaboration,” he writes, between the land, the draftsman and the client. At its finest, his work is truly art.
