Book Reviews
Results (1858)
Book Review
Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities Through Story
Sam McKegney’s Carrying the Burden of Peace seeks to bridge the gap in between the “insistence that neither individual Indigenous men nor concepts of Indigenous masculinity are irredeemable” and the recognition that some forms of...
Book Review
Beyond Rights: The Nisga’a Final Agreement and the Challenges of Modern Treaty Relationships
Most Canadians are aware of the existence of treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. Phrases like “treaty rights” and “treaty relationships” form part of the everyday political vocabulary at every level of our federal...
Book Review
Making and Breaking Settler Space: Five Centuries of Colonization in North America
This provocative book does many things: it conceptualizes the larger spatial and historical processes of settler colonialism, it examines and critiques social movements in the context of enduring Indigenous sovereignties, and it unpacks the affective...
Book Review
Step Into Wilderness: A Pictorial History of Outdoor Exploration in and Around the Comox Valley
Drawing primarily on a photographic collection held by the Courtenay and District Museum, Step into Wilderness considers “the theme of people living in the natural world and exploring both the opportunities it provides and the...
Book Review
Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin
Marion McKinnon Crook’s Always Pack a Candle is an enlightening memoir of public health nursing in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region of British Columbia in the early 1960s. Crook’s experience as a neophyte public health nurse armed...
Book Review
Capitals, Aristocrats, and Cougars: Victoria’s Hockey Professionals, 1911-26
Historians generally agree that hockey originated in eastern parts of Canada and later spread westward. In large part, this western migration of the sport followed the pattern of demographic movements. It is then not surprising...
Book Review
Rivers Run Through Us: A Natural and Human History of Great Rivers of North America
Eric B. Taylor’s Rivers Run Through Us: A Natural and Human History of Great Rivers of North America is a synthetic survey of ten waterways. In these fluid vignettes, the author covers the foundational importance...
Book Review
Fool’s Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver’s Official Town Fool
Once upon an acid-warped time, Vancouver had its own town fool. In the late sixties, a middle-aged family man, Kim Foikis, dressed in a red and blue jester’s outfit and led his donkeys, Peter and...
Book Review
Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator
Most killer whale stories are sad stories. Jason Colby’s Orca is no exception. The nineteen short chapters take the reader on a deep and dark descent into the live-capture orca fishery that swept through the...
Book Review
Able to Lead: Disablement, Radicalism, and the Political Life of E.T. Kingsley
Eugene Thornton Kingsley, an influential socialist in early British Columbia, was 33 years old when he adopted his revolutionary stance. Employed as a brakeman on a railway in rural Montana in 1890, he fell between...
Book Review
Resolve: The Story of the Chelsea Family and a First Nation Community’s Will to Heal
The remains of residential schools are scattered throughout Canada. Indeed, there are only three provinces (Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland) that did not house residential schools. There is not an Indigenous community, family,...
Book Review
The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land
Many British Columbians today want to learn more about the history and ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. The news of unmarked graves being located at former residential school sites across Canada has prompted people to...
Book Review
Sisters of the Ice: The True Story of How St. Roch and North Star of Herschel Island Protected Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
The polar north continues to have an enduring fascination for geopoliticians, tourists and mariners. Readers of history and other disciplines attracted to this subject abound. The navigation and search for a Northwest Passage is one...
Book Review
The Wagon Road North: The Saga of the Cariboo Gold Rush, Revised and Expanded Edition
As Ken Mather reminds us in the preface to this revised and expanded edition of Wagon Road North, it is for a good reason that Art Downs’ book has remained probably the single most popular...
Book Review
On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia
No other historian has been able to capture the unique history and diversity of British Columbia as University of British Columbia professor emeritus Jean Barman, whose brilliant career is encapsulated in a select collection of...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 137-138
Book Review
Creating Indigenous Property: Power, Rights, and Relationships
Is it possible for two entirely different legal frameworks, built by ontologically diverse and frequently disparate parties, to coexist under one judicial system? This question would be difficult enough when considering two parties on equal...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 138-139
Book Review
The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada
In The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada, David Gaertner, an academic author and settler-scholar, centres Indigenous literary and artistic works to contribute to critiques of reconciliation. The book is a...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 139-141
Book Review
Against the Current and Into the Light: Performing History and Land in Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver’s Stanley Park
Coast Salish Indigenous people never ceded their lands and resources to settlers and have always asserted their sovereignty. Over time, those assertions have taken various forms: petitions, protests, litigation. There have also been cultural assertions...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 141-143
Book Review
Searching for Pitt Lake Gold: Facts and Fantasy in the Legend of Slumach
Searching for Pitt Lake Gold: Facts and Fantasy in the Legend of Slumach, from local historian Fred Braches, deconstructs the myth of Slumach’s lost gold mine. Perpetuated by a handful of “creative” journalists and seized...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 143-144
Book Review
Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer
The early history of British Columbia is replete with enigmatic and unusual figures but few rival the man popularly known as Cataline. Anyone who has spent time exploring the history of the province will have...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 144-145
Book Review
Fishes of the Salish Sea
Having studied fish for more than 40 years, I have accumulated more than 50 “fishes of…” books, latitudinally arranged on my office shelf, and none of them can compare in the quality, quantity, and aesthetics...
BC Studies no. 211 Autumn 2021 | Page(s) 145-146
Book Review
Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians
In historical memory, the forced confinement and exclusion of 22,000 Japanese Canadians from 1942 to 1949 remains one of the darkest and, unfortunately, least understood chapters in Canadian history. Although the story has been told...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 111-112
Book Review
Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation
As Hannah Turner points out in the introduction to her timely book, Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation, “Museum records are often taken to be neutral or privileged sources of knowledge, but they...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 112-113
Book Review
Decolonizing Discipline: Children, Corporal Punishment, Christian Theologies, and Reconciliation
Decolonizing Discipline is a direct response to the sixth call of action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to repeal Section 43 of Canada’s criminal code, which allows corporal punishment “to correct what is...