Index
Results (172)
Review
An Okanagan History: The Diaries of Roger John Sugars, 1905 to 1919
Between the 1890s and the Great War the Okanagan Valley was transformed from an extensive ranching landscape into an ordered landscape of orchards and townsites. This was a result of access to the valley thanks...
BC Studies no. 148 Winter 2005-2006 | Page(s) 125-7
Review
Review
Okanagan Geology South: Geologic Highlights of the South Okanagan, British Columbia
Guidebooks present risks. Some authors inadvertently lead readers into the minutia that is their passion. Others find themselves indulging in editorial or polemic. Yet others lose their readers in what might be described as a...
BC Studies no. 185 Spring 2015 | Page(s) 232-33
Review
Writing the Okanagan
George Bowering’s new anthology, Writing the Okanagan, is a collection of Bowering’s fiction associated through setting, choice of characters, or autobiographical referents, with the Okanagan, chiefly the South Okanagan, where he grew up. Many of...
BC Studies no. 190 Summer 2016 | Page(s) 165-166
Review
Up Chute Creek: An Okanagan Idyll
In the early 1970s, Melody Hessing and her husband Jay Lewis bought acreage in the south Okanagan near Naramata. They called their property the Granite Farm. They were idealists, hoping to build a house and...
BC Studies no. 166 Summer 2010 | Page(s) 114-5
Review
The Comox Valley: Courtnay, Comox, Cumberland, and Area
In the publisher’s promotional sheet, this attractive book is described as “an intimate portrait of an incredibly beautiful and special place.” This sense of affection for the region comes across strongly in the course of...
BC Studies no. 156-157 Winter-Spring 2007-2008 | Page(s) 195-7
Review
The Woman in the Trees
The southern interior of British Columbia is a landscape woven together by stories, from the geological chronicles of glaciers and mountains to the almost mute presences of kekuli pits, abandoned cabins, and weathered fence lines...
BC Studies no. 154 Summer 2007 | Page(s) 149-51
Review
Up-Coast: Forests and Industry on British Columbia’s North Coast. 1870-2005
The southern interior of British Columbia is a landscape woven together by stories, from the geological chronicles of glaciers and mountains to the almost mute presences of kekuli pits, abandoned cabins, and weathered fence lines...
BC Studies no. 154 Summer 2007 | Page(s) 151-3
Review
Red Dog, Red Dog
Due to the strong tourism and leisure economy of British Columbia, the Okanagan Valley has become primarily associated with orchards, beaches, and, most recently, award-winning vineyards – in short, the Okanagan Valley is synonymous with...
BC Studies no. 163 Autumn 2009 | Page(s) 138-9
Review
Dancing in Gumboots: Adventure, Love & Resilience: Women of the Comox Valley
Dancing in Gumboots: Adventure, Love & Resilience: Women of the Comox Valley is a collection of memoirs by thirty-two women who came to the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island in the 1970s. Drawn by an...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 185-187
Review
The Third Crop: A Personal and Historical Journey into the Photo Albums and Shoeboxes of the Slocan Valley, 1800s to early 1940s
The Slocan Valley is quirky and isolated, and its past can be told in many ways. The valley has been a site of conflict between capital and labour on an industrial mining frontier, a haven for...
BC Studies no. 174 Summer 2012 | Page(s) 151
Review
The Slocan: Portrait of a Valley
THIS LONG-AWAITED BOOK argues that the Slocan Valley, through its often dramatic history, is a reflection of the region and its connection with events in British Columbia and Canada. Not so much a local history,...
BC Studies no. 145 Spring 2005 | Page(s) 134-5
Review
Steel Rails and Iron Men: A Pictorial History of the Kettle Valley Railway
THE DECISION of Whitecap Books to publish the first paperback edition of Steel Rails &Iron Men is appropriate and timely. Since this book appeared in cloth in 1990, the Kettle Valley Railway (the KV) has...
BC Studies no. 141 Spring 2004 | Page(s) 134-6
Review
The Slocan History Series
Edited by Cole Harris, the Slocan History Series began with four booklets that focus primarily on the mining “boom days” of the 1890s and their long-term effects on the region....
BC Studies no. 196 Winter 2017-2018 | Page(s) 141-144
Review
Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley
The cover of this atlas is engaging [1]. The muted grey, black, and red jacket offers an intriguing bird’s-eye view of Vancouver in 1912, looking west from New Westminster to Stanley Park. The heavy antique...
BC Studies no. 150 Summer 2006 | Page(s) 123-6
Review
The Kelowna Story: An Okanagan History
Sharron Simpson’s The Kelowna Story offers her clear intention of providing for the people of Kelowna, most of whom are recent arrivals, “a collective memory” (9) about the origin and development of their community. Overall,...
BC Studies no. 175 Autumn 2012 | Page(s) 132-33
Review
Starbuck Valley Winter
YOU WON’T FIND many kids like Don Morgan these days. The plucky protagonist of this reissued children’s novel is a sixteen-year-old who hunts avidly, builds a waterwheel-driven pump to supply the farmhouse with water, and dreams of...
BC Studies no. 144 Winter 2004-2005 | Page(s) 139-41
Review
Cornelius O’Keefe: the Life, Loves, and Legacy of an Okanagan Rancher
Cornelius O’Keefe was one of a small group of pioneer Okanagan ranchers who managed, in the late nineteenth century, to accumulate land, wealth, and influence. His rags-to-riches story was made possible by a combination of...
BC Studies no. 205 Spring 2020 | Page(s) 120-121
Review
This Was Our Valley
The 2019 edition of This Was Our Valley by Shirlee Smith Matheson and Earl K. Pollon continues a longstanding conversation about the impacts of large dams in northern British Columbia. This story, told in three acts,...
BC Studies no. 205 Spring 2020 | Page(s) 121-122
Review
Okanagan Artists in their Studios
It is often said that the images that come to mind when thinking or writing about the cultural history of British Columbia are the province’s varied landscape and the art of the First Nations people....
BC Studies no. 190 Summer 2016 | Page(s) 166-167
Review
Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast: Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley
Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast is a significant addition to our understanding of colonialism, settler-Indigenous relations, and human-land relations in British Columbia. Jeff Oliver’s work is part of a growing trend that...
BC Studies no. 182 Summer 2014 | Page(s) 227-228
Review
The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thorton
Sheryl Salloum’s new book The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thornton explores why this important BC artist has generally been ignored in the historical record and cultural landscape of this province. Given that she...
BC Studies no. 176 Winter 2012-2013 | Page(s) 181-2
Review
The Cowichan Valley: Duncan, Chemainus, Ladysmtih and Region
We become travellers in our own land when we read Georgina Montgomery’s story and marvel at Kevin Oke’s photographs in The Cowichan Valley. The last word goes to Rick Pipes of Merridale Ciderworks, who comments:...
BC Studies no. 170 Summer 2011 | Page(s) 180-181
Review
Myra’s Men: Building the Kettle Valley Railway, Myra Canyon to Penticton
In August 2003, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire southeast of Kelowna destroyed or damaged the Myra Canyon trestles, eighteen railroad structures, and the roadbed between them. This 5.5-mile (8.9-km) elevated path around a mountainous amphitheatre...