Book Reviews
Results (1847)
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: 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 Down’s book has remained probably the single most popular...
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...
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...
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...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 113-115
Book Review
The Object’s the Thing: The Writings of Yorke Edwards, a Pioneer of Heritage Interpretation in Canada
When we visit a nature park or a museum, do we consider how interpretation contributed to our experience? For Yorke Edwards, “the father of nature interpretation in Canada,” interpreting the object is “the thing.” As...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 115-116
Book Review
Victoria Unbuttoned: A Red-Light History of BC’s Capital City
Linda J. Eversole’s first book, Stella: Unrepentant Madam, written in 2005, was praised for its academic value and readability. The author continues her exploration of women in the sex trade with Victoria Unbuttoned, profiling ten...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 117-118
Book Review
Paradise Won: The Struggle to Create Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve
Knowing that Paradise Won: The Struggle to Create Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve would end in the establishment of a park offers no relief from the sense of urgency that reading the book elicits. Usually,...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 118-119
Book Review
Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet
In Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet, David R. Gray – with a Foreword from his long-time friends and colleagues, Nancy J. Turner and Robert D. Turner – sets out to illuminate...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 119-120
Book Review
Big Promises, Small Government: Doing Less with Less in the BC Liberal New Era
George Abbott was a cabinet minister for twelve years in the BC Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark. In Big Promises, Small Government, he reflects on his tenure in the first Campbell government...
BC Studies no. 210 Summer 2021 | Page(s) 120-122
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Book Review
Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia
The revised third edition of Kilian Crawford’s ground-breaking book on BC’s Black pioneers is timely and essential reading. It is a critical corrective to omissions and erasure in both academic histories and in popular understandings,...
BC Studies no. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 131-132
Book Review
Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story
The text of Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story extends well beyond its own parameters, both literal and figurative. Syilx, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa, and Dakelh playwright Kim Senklip Harvey offers a thoughtful, funny, and compelling exploration of...
BC Studies no. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 132-133
Book Review
Inalienable Properties: The Political Economy of Indigenous Land Reform
In Inalienable Properties: the political economy of Indigenous land reform (2020), Jamie Baxter presents his readers with a puzzle surrounding the inalienability of Indigenous land tenure systems. Baxter asks, ‘why does inalienable property persist in...
BC Studies no. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 133-135
Book Review
Captain Cook Rediscovered: Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes
On 12 July 1776 Captain James Cook, Royal Navy, sailed from Plymouth, England, in the three-master collier, Resolution, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. It was a voyage that swept Cook and the crews...
BC Studies no. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 135-136
Book Review
A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada
Historical geographer Cole Harris, professor emeritus at UBC, has in his latest book brought together a number of his articles, some previously published, to focus on the subject of settler colonialism in Canada. It is...
BC Studies no. 209 Spring 2021 | Page(s) 136-138
Book Review
Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies
“There is no single historiography of internment” in Canada, write Rhonda L. Hinter and Jim Mochoruk in the introduction of this ambitious collection of essays (9-10). Siloed histories of particular internments, they suggest, convey episodic...