Book & Film Reviews
Results (1788)
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...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 158-160
Review
The Land on Which We Live: Life on the Cariboo Plateau: 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake
In recent years, the historiography of British Columbia has burgeoned. Much of this rich and growing scholarship focuses on the province as a whole, or on its urban centres. We still have much to learn...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 156-157
Review
Raven Walks Around the World
In Raven Walks Around the World, Henley shares parts of his personal journey of activism, travel, and life long work with Indigenous peoples around the world. Through his stories, Henley illuminates the determination of all...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 180-181
Review
From Left to Right: Maternalism and Women’s Political Activism in Postwar Canada
In popular imagining, as World War II ended Canadian women were ushered back into their domestic, homemaking lives and their political voices were silenced until second-wave feminism emerged in the sixties. In the book, From Left...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 157-158
Review
Water Rites: Reimagining Water in the West
In Water Rites: Reimagining Water in the West, editor Jim Ellis has assembled scholarly writing, insightful commentary, and engaging visual imagery to better understand the myriad human connections to water in Alberta. Though geographically focused in...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 154-156
Review
Writing the Body in Motion: A Critical Anthology on Canadian Sport Literature
Writing the Body in Motion, edited by BC writers and literary scholars Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp, is an introduction and literary companion for readers wishing to delve into Canadian sports literature. The book is...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 147-148
Review
Farm Workers in Western Canada: Injustices and Activism
Shirley McDonald and Bob Barnetson’s edited volume Farm Workers in Western Canada: Injustices and Activismprovides a unique and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the role farm workers occupy in the complex industrial agriculture system. McDonald and Barnetson...
BC Studies no. 202 Summer 2019 | Page(s) 187-188
Review
Inner Ranges: An Anthology of Mountain Thoughts and Mountain People
Inner Ranges: An Anthology of Mountain Thoughts and Mountain People is a collection of mountain-inspired pieces written throughout Geoff Powter’s thirty-year career. The book guides the reader through his life’s journey as he explores mountains and...
BC Studies no. 203 Autumn 2019 | Page(s) 148-149
Review
Maker of Monsters: The Extraordinary Life of Beau Dick
The recent passing of Beau Dick makes this documentary film both a testament and an affirmation of an extraordinary life. More than a recitation of the chronology of his life, the filmmakers have created a...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 160-161
Review
At Sea with the Marine Birds of the Raincoast
Caroline Fox presents in the guise of an account of her experiences as a field biologist a wonderful memoir of coastal British Columbia. Onboard the sailboat Achiever, her job was to survey birds from Vancouver Island to...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 149-105
Review
Vancouver: No Fixed Address
What stays with you after watching Charles Wilkinson’s new documentary, Vancouver: No Fixed Address, is its beautiful cinematography. Vancouver’s ideal location at the intersection of the ocean, the mountains, and the sky is captured brilliantly: every shot...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 165-166
Review
Not Fit to Stay: Public Health Panics and South Asian Exclusion
In the spring of 2018, hundreds of people gathered between city hall and the public library in downtown Bellingham, Washington, to witness the dedication of a 10-ton granite “Arch of Reconciliation,” a monument to and...
BC Studies no. 201 Spring 2019 | Page(s) 152-153
Review
Kwädąy Dän Ts’inchį: Teachings from Long Ago Person Found
Sometime between 1720 and 1850, late in summer, an eighteen-year-old man was traveling in an icefield in the present-day territory of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, in what is now Northwestern British Columbia. Well...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 171-2
Review
Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada
We all remember them. I know that I do. Having spent a summer in my youth washing dishes at Fort Steele heritage town, I remember the wooden boardwalks, the ramshackle buildings, the yellow school buses...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 172-5
Review
British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape
Read British Columbia by the Road backwards. Or forwards. It doesn’t matter. Like the highways themselves, you can drive Ben Bradley’s bright, engaging work on automobility, identity, and landscape in British Columbia’s Interior in different directions. Stop...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 175-6
Review
Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage
“You can get anywhere if you have the time” (106). Kylik Kisoun, an Inuvialuit guide from Inuvik, said this to Brian Castner when Castner, with the help of four friends, canoed the length of the...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 176-8
Review
Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care
Medicine Unbundled by Gary Geddes is a humanistic look at the survivors from one of our nation’s most shameful institutions alongside residential schools: segregated healthcare facilities and the treatment of Indigenous peoples within these spaces....
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 178-9
Review
Entangled Territorialities: Negotiating Indigenous Lands in Australia and Canada
Over the past few decades, in settler states like Australia and Canada we have seen increased recognition of the complex nature of relations between Indigenous peoples and nations, on one side, and settler groups and...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 179-180
Review
The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties
In the 1764 Treaty of Niagara, representatives of the British Crown met with a gathering of more than two thousand Indigenous leaders and committed that North American settlement would only proceed with Indigenous consent. At...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 180-2
Review
Uncertain Accommodation: Aboriginal Identity and Group Rights in the Supreme Court of Canada
The Supreme Court of Canada’s approach to Aboriginal identity is fraudulent and harmful to Indigenous peoples in Canada. This is essentially the conclusion reached by Professor Panagos in his new book. Although this conclusion is...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 182-3
Review
Surveying the Great Divide: The Alberta/BC Boundary Survey, 1913-1917
Released in 2017 to coincide with national ‘Canada 150’ celebrations, Jay Sherwood’s Surveying the Great Divide also affords an opportunity to reflect on a period of productive inter-provincial cooperation a century ago, at a moment...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 183-4
Review
Ranch in the Slocan: A Biography of a Kootenay Farm, 1896 – 2017
Cole Harris’s Ranch in the Slocan: A Biography of a Kootenay Farm, 1896 – 2017 is delightful summer reading. It is, primarily, a history of the Harris family’s Bosun Ranch and a record of the lives of...
BC Studies no. 199 Autumn 2018 | Page(s) 185-6
Review
Emily Patterson: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse
In Emily Patterson: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse, Lisa Smith transports the reader to late nineteenth century Pacific Northwest and evocatively offers a history of an extraordinary woman living through extraordinary times. Born in...