Book & Film Reviews
Results (1791)
Review
Blue Valley: An Ecological Memoir
Luanne Armstrong is a walker. Walking the land where her ancestors farmed and where she has lived, walking the cities where she and her children have spent time, walking by rivers and lakes and mountains...
BC Studies no. 156-157 Winter-Spring 2007-2008 | Page(s) 191-3
Review
Guarding the Gates: The Canadian Labour Movement and Immigration
Understanding immigration is central to understanding Canadian working-class history and the fortunes of the Canadian labour movement. This is the case not just because immigration stocked, and restocked, the labour market but also because workers...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 145-7
Review
People, Politics, and Child Welfare in British Columbia
This is the most important book now available on children and public policy in British Columbia. Its contributions by engaged and thoughtful scholar-advocates should be required reading for all Canadians interested in the welfare of...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 137-9
Review
Sakura in the Land of the Maple Leaf: Japanese Cultural Traditions in Canada
This book, edited by the curator of Asian studies at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, is a worthy publication. It is a compilation of three research projects conducted in 1976-77 for the...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 156-9
Review
The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage
In a small, unbuilt parcel of land in East Vancouver surrounded by houses, streets, and Tyee Elementary school, a grassy gulch takes the shape, on closer inspection, of a thin, winding creek bed. At the...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 149-50
Review
Nature and Human Societies: Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History
In the three decades since environmental history burst onto the academic scene in the United States in the early 1970s, the field experienced impressive growth among American scholars and internationally in arenas such as South...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 141-4
Review
Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism
The publication of Xiaoping Li’s Voices Rising is a rare literary event, a cause for celebration. Through its analysis of the social and cultural movements of Asian Canada, especially in Vancouver and Toronto, her work...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 139-41
Review
Philip Timm’s Vancouver: 1900-1910
I first met Fred Thirkell in the late 1970s when I ran an antique store in North Vancouver. Fred was a postcard collector, and we played the familiar dance between buyer and seller in the...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 154-6
Review
‘Call Me Hank’: A Sto:lo Man’s Reflections on Logging, Living, and Growing Old
Old loggers love to tell stories, but few find their way onto paper. We are fortunate indeed, then, that in 1969 linguist Wyn Roberts visited Henry Pennier at his home near Mission and asked the...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 150-2
Review
The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast
As a study of missionary imperialism, Mary-Ellen Kelm’s edition of the letters Margaret Butcher wrote from Kitamaat between 1916 and 1919 makes an important contribution to historical conversations about the Haisla, missionaries, and residential schools...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 152-4
Review
National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s
Leslie Dawn makes an ambitious contribution to a hotly debated topic of Canadian cultural history – the role of the visual arts in the formation of the image of a modern Canadian nation. The title’s...
BC Studies no. 156-157 Winter-Spring 2007-2008 | Page(s) 179-83
Review
The Seattle Bungalow: People and Houses, 1900-1940
As Janet Ore says in the preface to this book, she seeks to overturn many assumptions associated with the bungalow. First, she wishes to reexamine the universality of its Arts and Crafts credentials and assumed...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 147-8
Review
Thompson’s Highway: British Columbia’s Fur Trade, 1800-1850
Through his publication BC Book World, Alan Twigg has contributed enormously to generating interest in BC literature. As well as drawing attention to BC writers, Twigg has also published his own work, of which Thompson’s...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 159-60
Review
Art of the Northwest Coast
PDF -Jacknis Review Essay, BC Studies 155, Autumn 2007
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 129-34
Review
Rain Before Morning
In the spring of 1913, sisters Leah and Elspeth Jamieson, seventeen and eighteen years old, respectively, travel on the Union Steamship Comox from Vancouver past Halfmoon Bay and Pender Harbour to their parents’ home at...
BC Studies no. 155 Autumn 2007 | Page(s) 144-5
Review
The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture
Tim Bowling, who spent his child-hood on the west coast of British Columbia and now lives in Edmonton, is perhaps better known as a poet than a prose writer. He has published seven collections of...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 128-130
Review
Dark Storm Moving West
“The trouble with narrative – telling stories, making histories,” Australian ethnohistorian Greg Dening says, “is that it is so easy, but thinking about it is so hard” (Performances, 1996). I suspect Barbara Belyea would agree,...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 126-8
Review
Phantom Limb
A phantom limb is an amputated arm or leg that feels like it hasn’t gone anywhere. At the end of a phantom arm, for instance, the fingers of a phantom hand still feel heat, the touch...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 123-5
Review
Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory
I live on forested acreage at the north end of the Sechelt Peninsula, surrounded by salal. I think of Gaultheria shallon as the signature plant of the landscape I have loved my whole life. The glossy...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 120-1
Review
Be of Good Mind: Essays on the Coast Salish
Be of Good Mind is promoted as revealing “how Coast Salish lives and identities have been reshaped by two colonizing nations and by networks of kinfolk, spiritual practices, and ways of understanding landscape” (back cover)....
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 120-1
Review
Recording Their Story: James Teit and the Tahltan
Judy Thompson, Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC) Curator of Western Subarctic Ethnology, has produced a lavishly illustrated book, compelling for its quality of images, clarity of writing, and elegance of design. Seventy-one rarely published and...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 118-20
Review
Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America
If you tackle this readable but detailed history of imperial rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, I recommend that you reread the preface after finishing the book. It will help to explain what you just read....
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 116-7
Review
The Freshwater Fishes of British Columbia
I have good reason to be eternally grateful to the author of this book on BC’s freshwater fishes. Many years ago in my first university post, when desperately seeking interesting material with which to enliven the...
BC Studies no. 158 Summer 2008 | Page(s) 115-6
Review