Book & Film Reviews
Results (1810)
Review
Reconsidering Confederation: Canada’s Founding Debates, 1864-1999
A dynamic collection of essays, Reconsidering Confederationsets out to “provide a primer for Canadians who want to better understand similarities and differences between provinces, regions, and peoples” (13). Much more than a basic outline of...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 160-161
Review
Selling Out or Buying In? Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985
Today we live in a consumer-oriented culture in which material items help to define who we are, or, who we want to be. To meet our material needs, stores are now open seven days a...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 192-193
Review
Song of the Earth: The Life of Alfred Joseph
Song of the Earth tells the story of Alfred Joseph, the Witsuwit’en hereditary chief and lead plaintiff in the landmark Delgamuukw-Gisday wa court case that first articulated the doctrine of Aboriginal title in Canada. Joseph grew up...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 182-183
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
Trail North: The Okanagan Trail of 1858-68 and Its Origins in British Columbia and Washington
In Trail North, Ken Mather directs our attention to a relatively forgotten part of British Columbian history: the trails linking the interior of British Columbia to the Columbia Plateau of Washington and their contribution to...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 188-189
Review
A Mill Behind Every Stump
This modest book aims to preserve the vanishing world of the Cariboo homesteader. It recounts a life of geographic isolation, in Secwépemc traditional territory, that bred both freedom and self-reliance. Life in this context also cultivated...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 183-184
Review
The North-West Mounted Police, 1873-1885
In a wonderfully detailed and researched volume, Jack F. Dunn has created a study that is a worthy addition to Brendan and Horall’s Red Coats on the Prairiesand R.C. Macleod’s NWMP and Law Enforcement. Focusing...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 189-190
Review
Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada
Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada is a fold-out display-ready wall map of Canada, hypsometrically tinted to highlight the physiographic landscape of the northern portion of North America, and labeled entirely and only in...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 179-180
Review
Beckoned by the Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadia Coast
The sea draws many, to many destinies. Even those of us who are landlocked remain drawn due to history, biology or too much reading. This book offers the stories of 24 women (25 including the...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 184-185
Review
Mudflat Dreaming: Waterfront Battles and the Squatters Who Fought them in 1970s Vancouver
Liminal spaces make places. This is the central theme of Jean Walton’s book, Mudflat Dreaming, an unconventional work of literary nonfiction that weaves together memoir, film studies, and Vancouver history in the 1970s, a pivotal...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 190-192
Review
Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food
With its over 250 prose and poetry narratives, biographies, and recipes, Rachel Rose has edited a timeless anthology, Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food. Rose, named Vancouver’s poet laureate in 2014,...
BC Studies no. 204 Winter 2019/20 | Page(s) 222-223
Review
Where it Hurts
Where it Hurts, by Sarah De Leeuw, is a collection of essays within the genre of creative non-fiction. The vivid essays express loss, trauma and humor. De Leeuw uses complex imagery that takes the reader...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 158-189
Review
Spying on Canadians: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War
Spying on Canadians opens with the goal of adding “to the political demands for a new commitment for a transparency in national security appropriate to our purportedly democratic society.” (9) It is a principled point. Describing...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 155-157
Review
Asian Canadian Studies Reader
This collection of essays is an integral part of American-modelled activism to establish a collective scholarly field for Asian Canadians beyond national boundaries. Such trials, as the editors argue, have already been initiated, for example,...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 153-154
Review
Growing Community Forests: Practice, Research, and Advocacy in Canada
Over the past two decades, community forestry has been adopted with growing frequency across Canada. Localities have sought to balance multiple values – economic, social, environmental – within systems of decentralized forest management. Contributors to Growing...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 164-165
Review
Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast
The 40th anniversary reprint of the original, classic study, Indian Fishing,has arrived. Its author is the multi-talented graphic artist, photographer, archeological fieldworker/ethnographer, and museum exhibit curator, the late Hilary Stewart. For only one of these many skills...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 151-152
Review
Before and After the State: Politics, Poetics, and People(s) in the Pacific Northwest
The authors of Before and After the State: Politics, Poetics, and People(s) in the Pacific Northwest attempt to expand our understanding of the development of two nations, and a border between them, from a mostly political story...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 194-195
Review
Review
Fernie at War 1914-1919
Wayne Norton provides a fascinating story of a British Columbia resource town navigating its way through the tribulations of the Great War. In so doing, he adds to the small but growing body of works that...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 161-162
Review
Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: A Critical Introduction
Jim Reynolds, a highly experienced Aboriginal rights lawyer, pursues two ambitious aims with his new book, Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: A Critical Introduction. One is to provide a succinct yet comprehensive overview of Canadian law...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 159-160
Review
The Miracle Mile: Stories of the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games
The Miracle Mile written by Jason Beck, the curator at the BC Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, is a masterfully constructed narrative of the first truly international event in British Columbia sport history. The 1954...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 154-155
Review
The Campbell Revolution? Power, Politics and Policy in BC
This is one of those rare collections that focusses on a recent significant political transition. In doing so Jason Lacharite and Tracy Summerville have produced a needed and worthwhile book. For those not cognizant of recent...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 193-194
Review
Witness to Loss
Witness to Loss is a multi-authored study of wartime Japanese Canadian confinement that draws from the memoirs of Kishizo Kimura, a Japanese-born man who immigrated to Canada in 1911. Kimura had an important impact on the...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 163-164
Review
Engaging the Line: How the Great War Shaped the Canada-US Border
That the Great War changed boundaries and upset communities is not news to anyone who looks at an historical atlas of Europe. That the war affected communities living along what is often referred to as ‘the...