Book & Film Reviews
Results (1754)
Review
Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses and the Imperial Press
In May 1861, the British Colonist, a local newspaper in Victoria, Vancouver Island, reported on a “Horrid Massacre in New Zealand.” According to the Colonist, Maori warriors had launched a surprise attack on a small...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 172-4
Review
The Life and Art of Arthur Pitts
Kerry Mason begins The Life and Art of Arthur Pitts with a question: ‘Why haven’t I heard about this artist?’ (x) By the end of the book the reader is persuaded that we should indeed...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 174-5
Review
Imagining Uplands: John Olmsted’s Masterpiece of Residential Design
This is a most handsome book, and a most intelligent analysis of the dense process of realizing a design concept. Larry McCann has allowed his telling of the Uplands history to be imaginative, if not...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 175-77
Review
Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.
E.A Heaman has produced a decided masterpiece on a topic too often thought to be dry as a bone. Taxation, with its underlying legitimacy of consent, is the lifeblood of the state, supplying it with...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 177-8
Review
An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919-1936
For most of the past eighty years, Section 98 of Canada’s Criminal Code has been seen as an “exceptional law” in a different way than Dennis Molinaro regards it. Because of its limited life (1919-1936),...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 178-9
Review
The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang
The past decade has witnessed a surge in Vancouver criminal and nocturnal history, from Daniel Francis’s Red Light Neon (2006) to Diane Purvey and John Belshaw’s Vancouver Noir (2011) and Belshaw’s edited collection Vancouver Confidential...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 179-181
Review
Beyond Mile Zero: The Vanishing Alaska Highway Lodge Community
The Alaska Highway runs from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska. Built by the American military for defense purposes during the Second World War, it was opened to the public in 1948 and...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 181-2
Review
The Queen of the North Disaster, The Captain’s Story
As one might expect from a competent and conscientious career mariner, Colin Henthorne’s account of the sinking of the Queen of the North on March 22, 2006, a little south of Prince Rupert on British...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 182-4
Review
Review
The Regulation of Peace River: A Case Study for River Management
The Peace River is an impressive natural system, flowing from the Rocky Mountains of northeastern British Columbia to the Arctic Ocean, and it has been historically (and prehistorically) a vital part of the region. From...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 185-7
Review
In the Spirit of Homebirth: Modern Women, An Ancient Choice
This edited volume of modern BC birthing stories will be a compelling read for anyone with a personal or professional interest in the rich drama of childbirth. Not intended as a scholarly text, the sixty...
BC Studies no. 197 Spring 2018 | Page(s) 187-88
Review
Review
Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws: Yerí7 re Stsq’ey’s-kucw
Marianne and Ron Ignace are members of the Secwépemc First Nation in south-central British Columbia. Ron was raised by his great-grandparents, grew up speaking Secwepemctsín, and is a former Chief. Both Ron and Marianne have...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 183-4
Review
Everything Shuswap
In 1969, Jim Cooperman arrived in British Columbia from the United States, one of many Vietnam ‘war resisters’ who remade our province in ways that few people yet fully appreciate. One was in building a...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 184-5
Review
Crossing Home Ground: A Grassland Odyssey through Southern Interior British Columbia
David Pitt-Brooke is an advocate for the protection and preservation one of British Columbia’s underappreciated landscapes. Rather than looking towards the more iconic mountain peaks and old-growth forests of British Columbia in his search for...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 185-7
Review
Summer of the Horse
Donna Kane’s Summer of the Horse elates and lures readers towards reenchantment, or what deep ecologist Thomas Berry calls “a reverence for the mystery and magic of the earth and the larger universe.” Kane calls...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 187-8
Review
Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada
Animal Metropolis: Histories of Human-Animal Relations in Urban Canada edited by Joanna Dean, Darcy Ingram, and Christabelle Sethna represents a collective effort to create a historiography of nonhuman animals and human subjects in Canada since...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 188-9
Review
Building the Power: The Labourers’ Union in British Columbia
This book tells the story of the Labourers’ International Union of North America in British Columbia since 1937 and is intended primarily for workers and retirees associated with the union. It is an insider’s perspective:...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 189-90
Review
Never Rest on Your Ores: Building a Mining Company, One Stone at a Time
How do you turn a relatively modest copper mining play on Lake Temagami in the 1950s into Canada’s largest diversified mining company, with a market capitalization in 2017 of nearly $14 billion? In telling the...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 190-1
Review
The Peace in Peril: The Real Cost of the Site C Dam
Anything written about the Site C dam in the past year or two was bound to become dated rapidly, given the pace of events, the uncertainty around the future of the project after the 2017...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 191-2
Review
Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia
In 1921 the Prince George Citizen reminded its readership that “central B.C. is not a new country” (Prince George Citizen 1921). Defining “central B.C.” as those parts of the province situated between the 52nd and...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 193-4
Review
Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough
Anyone with even the most superficial knowledge of eugenics, racism, the ‘domestication’ of women, and the history of the 20th century will know why pronatalism might ring the wrong bells. And this is setting aside...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 194-6
Review
Borderline Crime: Fugitive Criminals and the Challenge of the Border
Bradley Miller, an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, has produced an unprecedented look at the patchwork development of the law as it pertains to the Canada-U.S. border over the course...
BC Studies no. 198 Summer 2018 | Page(s) 196-7
Review
The Language of Family: Stories of Bonds and Belonging
“What does a book about family look like when everyone’s idea of family is different?” So opens Michelle van der Merwe’s thoughtfully edited volume The Language of Family: Stories of Bond and Belongings. This anthology...