“Don’t be fooled by the wonderfully charming colour palette or whimsical and intricate art in these pages: this work is a unique, darkly austere look at the lives of the O’Dwyer family.” Jeffrey Stychin reviews Salt Green Death, by Katarina Thorsen (Wolfville: Conundrum Press, 2025) $30 / 9781772621068
“It identified approximately where Frederich Trump’s Arctic Hotel/restaurant/brothel had been located in 1901. The Arctic had originally been built in Bennett, BC, but when the railroad was completed to Whitehorse in 1900, he dismantled the hotel, moved the lumber to Whitehorse along with all the fixings and rebuilt on a waterfront location facing the White Pass depot and the Yukon River.” Yukon Story Laureate John Firth writes about the connection between an old BC/Yukon business venture and the current president of the United States
“When I arrived at Burnaby’s Simon Fraser University in the spring of 1970, the dust had barely settled on the previous five years of growing pains. A Magical Time took me back to the many exciting moments that would leave a lasting impression on members of my student cohort for better or worse.” Ron Verzuh reviews A Magical Time: The Early Days of the Arts at Simon Fraser University by the Simon Fraser University Retirees Association (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $38.95 / 9781998526062
“Adhiya tells us that Terry was an ordinary teenager, an athlete who dreamt of one day becoming a teacher and sports coach. He also faced many challenges as a child such as being short. He never let those things bother him.” Valerie Green reviews Hope by Terry Fox, by Barbara Adhiya (ed.) (Toronto: ECW Press, 2024) $30 / 9781770416819
“Readers of Ted Binnema’s The Vancouver Island Treaties will gain a greater insight into a formative piece of British Columbia history. For this book is history as it should be. Here is how it is done.” Robin Fisher reviews The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title, by Ted Binnema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025) $44.95 / 9781487554095
“But make no mistake—the incorporation into federal and British Columbia laws of the principles of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the recent recognition of Haida title and the Heiltsuk establishment of a constitution are not merely rumblings. They and other recent events represent a tectonic shift that will have profound legal and social implications. The results need not be catastrophic, as some might fear, but they will certainly be disruptive.” Richard Butler reviews Indigenous Intellectual Property: An Interrupted Intergenerational Conversation by Val Napoleon, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Overstall and Debra McKenzie (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024) $32.95 / 9781487558222 & Creating Indigenous Property: Power, Rights and Relationships by Angela Cameron, Sari Graben and Val Napoleon (eds.)(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020) $45.95 / 9781487523824
“Although he isn’t related to George Vancouver’s former botanist and surgeon aboard the HMS Discovery, Archibald Menzies experienced extraordinary times, times that Graeme Menzies felt had to be shared. The result was the book Bones: The Life and Adventures of Doctor Archibald Menzies, in which Graeme Menzies tells of how the doctor used reason and his senses, as well as his familiarity of the Scottish clan system, to understand what he found as the lone scientist on board that British vessel of exploration.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment featuring Vancouver author and historian Graeme Menzies.
“With the budget and size of the current gallery, it had become difficult to adequately show the collection and avoid being just a storehouse. Hence, the wise decision to have a rotating exhibition for the next five years, so that the public can appreciate the depth and breadth of the collection.” Christina Johnson-Dean reviews the exhibition A View from Here: Re-Imagining the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria Collections curated by Steven McNeil and Heng Wu.
This “compelling case study,” charts the city’s historical transformation, as the “grime of Montreal’s ‘moral decay’ was … scrubbed away by new regulations and bylaws that targeted everything from pornography to lewd or countercultural artwork to pinball machines and tarot readers—anything that might be considered offensive to or in poor taste by the international community that [the mayor] was hoping to entice.” —Logan Macnair reviews Montreal After Dark: Nighttime Regulation and the Pursuit of a Global City, by Matthieu Caron (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025) $34.95 / 9780228024774
“Adam Jones’s book can help each of us in reaching a principled position, in articulating it, and in understanding why others might rationally have arrived at and articulated a different view.” Richard Butler reviews Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (4th ed.), by Adam Jones (New York: Routledge, 2024) $61.99 / 9781032028101
“The Stories That Shape Us is a gift for readers at any stage of historical or personal exploration. It speaks to the quiet strength of every family story and the importance of listening before it’s too late. It urges us to view immigration as a policy and a lived reality. Moreover, it reminds us that history is not just something that happens—it is something we carry.” Amy Tucker reviews Lost Legacies: Learning from Ancestral Stories for Inspiration and Policy-Making Today, by Margaret V. Ostrowski (Montreal West: DC Books, 2024) $21.95 / 9781927599624
“Messamore doesn’t predict such potential outcomes. Her job, and she does it well, is to reveal the historical facts about early 20th-century elections. But we may be seeing parallels to our political past in the run-up to our April 28 federal election. Will Mark Carney be Mackenzie King and Pierre Poilievre Arthur Meighan?” Ron Verzuh reviews Times of Transformation: The 1921 Canadian General Election, by Barbara J. Messamore (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2025) $19.56 / 9780774870597
“He lived to the ripe old age of 100 and his years of ‘hardship, laughter, and recycling’ have been delightfully told by his daughter in this little book about a man simply known as Scrappy Jack.” Valerie Green reviews Scrappy Jack: 100 Years of Hardship, Laughter, and Recycling by Joan Steacy (Vancouver: Midtown Press, 2023) $24.95 / 9781988242521
“Díaz literally projects herself into the biography, frequently adding her own experiences to information about Fortes she presents. If the reader is aware of the facts known about Fortes, they do not come to know him any better or more than before she produced this biography. It is a memoir of her search, her overlay of her daily lived experiences onto the life of a man dead now more than one hundred years.” Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes, by Ruby Smith Díaz (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) $21.95 / 9781551529752
“Andruff is proud of his own successes and those of his family since their arrival in Canada as refugees in the 1920s. He is not boastful. Rather, Andruff’s goal is to demonstrate the struggles and achievements of refugees.” Duff Sutherland reviews The Russian Refugees: A Family’s First Century in Canada, by Michael Andruff (Vancouver: Heritage House, 2022) $26.95 / 9781772034196
“Lazarus researched hundreds of historic documents related to the disaster, retrieved personal letters from the families of those who had been on the ship, and investigated the reports of the inquiries held into the catastrophe.” Ian Kennedy reviews Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck by Eve Lazarus (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) $26.95 / 9781551529738
“Wilson-Raybould’s approach—based on learning, understanding, and acting—clarifies complex issues surrounding Indigenous justice and colonial history, making them approachable for readers of all backgrounds, including newcomers.” Amy Tucker reviews True Reconciliation: How to be a Force for Change, by Jody Wilson-Raybould (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2024) $22 / 9780771004407
“Their book, a collection of case studies, reveals the parallel experience of Indigenous women living on the Canadian prairie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the ‘nuance and diversity in their everyday lives, in how they responded to, resisted, and refused settler colonial intrusion, and in the ways they persisted in the face of the many transitions that infringed on their traditional ways of life.'” Linda Rogers reviews Métis Matriarchs: Agents of Transition by Cheryl Troupe and Doris Jeanne MacKinnon (eds.) (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2024) $34.95 / 9781779400116
“This important book spans five decades and a global geography. In its ten chapters, historical geographer and professor emeritus at York University, James R. Gibson weaves together the complex economic and transportation history of the maritime fur trade along the northwest coast of North America in a remarkable study.” Kenneth Favrholdt reviews the revised edition of Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: Voices of the Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841, by James R. Gibson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) $47.95 / 9780228007319
“The absence of further information is both liberating and frustrating at the same time. On the liberating side of that coin, it is a pleasure to flip through the book wondering what the next page will bring. The purely visual experience allows me to focus on personal familiar favourites, unburdened by any knowledge or misconceptions (apart from my own).” Wayne Norton reviews Classic Photographs of Song and Dance and British Columbia, by Bradford Critchley (Vancouver: South Blossom Books, 2024) $18.49 / 9798326042392