Euclid’s Orchard and Other Essays by Theresa Kishkan Salt Spring Island: Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017 $22.95 / 9781896949635 Reviewed by Catriona Sandilands First published Feb. 27, 2018 * My kitchen, on this wet, early January afternoon, is saturated with the smell of apples slowly reducing to become apple butter. In the almost-forgotten autumn, my daughter…
Read more #254 Theresa Kishkan’s orchard
First published Jan. 29, 2018. Whale in the Door: A Community Unites To Protect BC’s Howe Sound by Pauline Le Bel Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017. $24.95 / 9781987915488 Reviewed by Cherie Thiessen Mink and his sister, Skunk, gave a big potlatch on Gambier Island in Howe Sound. All the animals from around the area…
Read more #241 Howe Sound advice
Refugium: Poems for the Pacific by Yvonne Blomer (editor), with a foreword by Adam Olsen Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $22.95 / 9781987915532 Review by Phyllis Reeve First published Dec. 21, 2017 * What is a Refugium? Yvonne Blomer, editor and guiding spirit of this anthology, borrows her definition from the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as…
Read more #227 Specific to the Pacific
The sacred sandbar of Squamish by Alan Twigg First published Dec. 15, 2017 * Should the B.C. publishing industry ever require validation—which it shouldn’t, given the bang for the buck it renders in return for minimal subsidization—its foremost calling card is most certainly the hundreds of superb books produced for, about and by the First…
Read more #221 The sacred sandbar of Squamish
First published Dec. 14, 2017. The Land on Which We Live: Life on the Cariboo Plateau, 70 Mile House to Bridge Lake by Barbara MacPherson Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017. $24.95 / 9781987915365 Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch * Barbara MacPherson has provided a popular oral history of the South Cariboo and North Bonaparte regions, stretching…
Read more #220 From s7istkn to dude ranches
People, Power, and Progress: The Story of John Hart Dam and the Campbell River Power Projects by Daniel Stoffman Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2017 $24.95 / 9781927958384 Reviewed by James Hull Co-published with the BC Hydro Power Pioneers. First published Dec. 11, 2017 * The John Hart Dam and generating station opened in December of…
Read more #218 One dammed river before another
First published Dec. 4, 2017. Chasing Smoke. A Wildfire Memoir by Aaron Williams Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2017. $22.95 / 9781550178050 Reviewed by Dan Gallacher The threat of terrorism is over-rated. ‘First responders’ were everywhere in 2017 dealing with hurricanes, earthquakes and forest fires. Aaron Williams’ Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour $22.95) describes the…
Read more #213 The forest smokeaters
First published Nov. 29, 2017. Our Vanishing Glaciers: The Snows of Yesteryear and the Future Climate of the Mountain West by Robert William Sandford Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books 2017. $40 / 9781771602020 Reviewed by Clayton Whitt Melting glaciers and climate change may initially seem like odd topics for a coffee table book. But…
Read more #212 Our vanishing glaciers
At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness by Rob Wood Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2017 $22.00 / 9781771602518 Reviewed by John Gellard First published November 20, 2017 * Rob Wood might have saved my life … or at least my left foot. Some years ago I fell off a log…
Read more #204 Climbing bard of Maurelle Island
Powering Up Canada A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600 by Ruth Sandwell (editor) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. $37.95 / 9780773547865 Reviewed by Dan Gallacher First published Nov. 7, 2017 Years ago I likened history to a diamond. Each time it is turned in the light, another facet is revealed….
Read more #197 Power to the people
Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea by Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley (editors), with illustrations by Matthew Wolferstan Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017 $36.95 / 9781771621731 Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski First published Nov. 6, 2017 * This is an anthology with something like a mission. In “Waypoints,” his foreword to this anthology, historian…
Read more #196 Batten down the anthology
First published October 30, 2017 REVIEW: Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics by Jessica Dempsey Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. £19.99 (U.K.). / 978-1-118-64060-9 Reviewed by Juliane Collard * In Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics, UBC geographer Jessica Dempsey considers the problem of biodiversity loss in the modern…
Read more #191 Biodiversity in the boardroom
Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by Jonathan Peyton Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017 $32.95 / 9780774833059 Reviewed by Wade Davis First published October 23, 2017 * My father came of age in the 1930s, son of a doctor in the lead zinc mining town of Kimberly in the East Kootenays. To reach…
Read more #186 Northern industrial follies
Tar Wars: Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Imageby Geo Takach Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2017$34.95 / 9781772121407 Reviewed by Nichole Dusyk First published Sept. 29, 2017 * In the first pages of Tar Wars, Geo Takach of Royal Roads University repudiates his own title and coins the term “bit-sands” to refer to the three vast…
Read more #174 Lights, camera, action, debate
Canadian Countercultures and the Environment Colin M. Coates (editor) Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016 $34.95 / 9781552388143 Reviewed by Lauren Harding First published September 17, 2017 * I read the last pages of Colin Coates’s edited collection while lying on Vancouver’s infamous Wreck Beach. Around me fresh University of British Columbia undergraduates gawked at…
Read more #170 Midwifery, bongos & blue boxes
Some Useful Wild Plants: A Foraging Guide to Food and Medicine from Nature by Dan Jason Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2017 $16.95 / 9781550177916 Reviewed by Natasha Lyons First published Sept. 13, 2017 * Reviewing a book published before you were born is an interesting historical exercise. Dan Jason’s Some Useful Wild Plants: A Foraging…
Read more #169 A hero in the garden
Beyond Mile Zero: The Vanishing Alaska Highway Lodge Community by Lily Gontard (text) and Mark Kelly (photographs) Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2017 $24.95 / 9781550177978 Reviewed by Heather Longworth Sjoblom First published September 6, 2017 * 2017 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the construction of the Alaska Highway through British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. Throughout…
Read more #165 Alaska Highway before GPS
British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape by Ben Bradley Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017 $34.95 / 9780774834193 Reviewed by Daniel Francis * In 2013 a septet of Canadian historians calling themselves The Past Collective published a study which contradicted the hoary old cliche that Canadians do not know…
Read more #163 When the rubber hit the road
Chilcotin Chronicles: Stories of Adventure and Intrigue from British Columbia’s Central Interior by Sage Birchwater Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $26.95 / 9781987915334 Reviewed by Lorraine Weir First published August 10, 2017 * Sage Birchwater credits playwright Gwen Pharis Ringwood with urging him to keep a record of his travels on the Chilcotin Plateau –…
Read more #151 Taking care of stories
REVIEW: Walking to Camelot: A Pilgrimage through the Heart of Rural England by John A. Cherrington Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2016. $22.95 / 978-1-927958-62-9 Reviewed by John Gellard First published July 12, 2017 John Cherrrington takes a 365-mile hike through southern England on public footpaths. * From Figure 1 comes John Cherrington’s Walking to Camelot,…
Read more #150 Camelot and the waste land