Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples and Skyscrapers by Gregor Craigie, illustrated by Kathleen Fu Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 2022 $29.95 / 9781459821880 Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy * Was the Tower of Jericho built as a defensive watchtower or a mechanism to help farmers calculate the summer solstice? What are the advantages…
Read more 1737 The sky’s the limit
Long Time Dead: My Investigation into the Unsolved Murder of Ralph Wilson Snair by Susan McIver Victoria: FriesenPress, 2022 $14.99 / 9781039151123 Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb * The great advantage a fictional murder mystery has over a true crime saga is that in fiction the detective always gets his man. Oh, okay, there was that…
Read more 1735 The matter of Snair & Weasner
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (McClelland & Stewart), 2022 $24.95 / 9780771047244 Reviewed by Daniel Gawthrop * Over the past six decades, as the People’s Republic of China has turned its brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet into the permanent subjugation of an entire…
Read more 1727 Blood, soil, and memory
Our Love Affair with Dance by Karen McKinlay Kurnaedy Privately printed, 2022 (Ingram Distributors and Karen Kurnaedy) $24.99 / 9781778111402 Reviewed by Maria Tippett * In Our Love Affair with Dance Karen McKinlay Kurnaedy makes clear that Canadian historians have given dance, and especially modern dance, far too little attention. But this is just one…
Read more 1726 For the love of dance
14 Months on Franz Joseph Land by Mykhailo Ivanychuk, edited and translated by Gloria Atamanenko Summerland: Danny Evanishen/ Ethnic Enterprises, 2002 $20.00 / 9780973242812 Reviewed by Sage Birchwater Editor’s note: Contact Sage Birchwater by email at sagebirchwater@shaw.ca or on Facebook to buy a copy of 14 Months on Franz Joseph Land for $20.00 plus $5.00…
Read more 1715 Franz Josef Land to Tatla Lake
Deadly Triangle: The Famous Architect, His Wife, Their Chauffeur, and Murder Most Foul by Susan Goldenberg Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2022 $23.99 / 9781459750302 Reviewed by Valerie Green * Anyone who lives in British Columbia’s capital city or has visited the beautiful city of Victoria and admired the Parliament buildings and the world-famous Empress Hotel in…
Read more 1705 Scandal of the century
Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed by Marsha Lederman Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (McClelland & Stewart), 2022 $35.00 / 9780771049378 Reviewed by Charlotte Schallié * “Kiss the Red Stairs. The Holocaust, Once Removed” is a deeply resonant memoir exploring the interconnectedness of history, memory and lived experience in the aftermath of the…
Read more 1703 The Holocaust past and present
Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene by Alessandra Naccarato Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2022 $23.00 / 9781771667753 Reviewed by Graeme Wynn * In the 1870s, John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Oxford, initiated a scheme to improve the rough and muddy path into the village of North Hinksey on the outskirts…
Read more 1698 On Ruskin’s road
Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867-1945 by Andrea Geiger Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022 $35.95 / 9780774867993 Reviewed by Ron Verzuh * When Empires Collide: How the Pacific Northwest was won, lost and sold Andrea Geiger takes readers to an early moment in Pacific Northwest history, one that sheds much light…
Read more 1696 When empires collide
Michael Turner reviews In My Day by Rick Waines Produced by Norman Armour, Rick Waines and Zee Zee Theatre presented by The Cultch Theatre, Vancouver December 02-11, 2022 * As a late-born North American Baby Boomer, I am not old enough to remember all the defining moments assigned to my generation. I was barely fifteen…
Read more 1694 A history play for the ages
Out of Hiding: Holocaust Literature of British Columbia by Alan Twigg (editor) Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2022 $24.95 / 9781553806622 Reviewed by Norman Ravvin * Historiographic, creative and commemorative responses to the Holocaust continue to appear in impressive and challenging ways some 75 years after the end of the Second World War. Alan Twigg’s Out of…
Read more 1690 Refuge in British Columbia
Hemingway’s Widow: The Life and Legacy of Mary Welsh Hemingway by Timothy Christian Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2022 $42.95 / 9781459750548 Reviewed by Peter Hay * Few books survive to become classics; their fame is most oft interred with the authors’ bones. Even fewer writers lead interesting enough lives to create a whole industry of biographies,…
Read more 1679 Mary Welsh’s inheritance
The Bob Dylan Albums 2nd Edition by Anthony Varesi Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2022 $34.95 / 9781771837590 Reviewed by Daniel Gawthrop * In the autumn of 1964, a precocious Bob Dylan — who had just released his fourth studio album at age twenty-three — told a writer from The New Yorker that he was moving on…
Read more 1675 A catalogue for the ages
Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda by Michael Hingston Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2022 $24.95 / 9781771964159 Reviewed by Michael Hayward * 1100 km beyond Haiti in the western Caribbean, west of the British Virgin Islands and just visible from the tiny island of Monserrat, lies an even smaller, uninhabited…
Read more 1674 A literary kingdom
Mea Culpa: A Plea of Innocence. A Memoir by Bruno Cocorocchio Victoria: FriesenPress, 2022 $24.49 / 9781039137462 Reviewed by Jane Frankish * The title of Bruno Cocorocchio’s memoir, Mea Culpa: A Plea of Innocence, has an immediate and jarring effect. It sets up a seemingly impossible concurrence of two states of being – “I am…
Read more 1670 An Italian childhood
SS Pacific found! by Richard Mackie In April 2017 we posted a story by historian Greg Stott about the short life and BC career of George Skippon (ca. 1833-1875), a farmer, labourer, and worker on CPR surveys who was one of about 275 people to perish in the wreck of the American steamer Pacific, outbound…
Read more 1660 SS Pacific found?
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Dutch Policeman Fighting the Nazi Occupation by Johanna Van Zanten Las Vegas: Histria Books (Addison & Highsmith Publishers), 2021 $29.99 / 9781592111022 Reviewed by Valerie Green * I always enjoy books set in World War Two, especially those that tell stories of lesser known aspects of the…
Read more 1651 A family divided
Heroin: An Illustrated History by Susan Boyd Winnipeg and Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2022 $34.00 / 9781773635163 Reviewed by Connor Robinson * Susan Boyd’s Heroin: An Illustrative History is a timely and illuminative record of how heroin, and opiates/opioids at large, moved from a drug with continued therapeutic relevance to a political tool for demonization…
Read more 1638 Regulating opiates & opioids
Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today by Eleanor Boyle, with a foreword by Tim Lang Victoria: FriesenPress, 2022 $19.99 / 9781039123663 Reviewed by Mary Gale Smith * Almost daily, news headlines – heat waves, drought, hurricanes, land slides, floods, fires, and so on – remind us that climate change is real. The pandemic…
Read more 1629 Return to Victory Gardens
A Brief History of the Earth’s Climate: Everyone’s Guide to the Science of Climate Change by Steven Earle Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2021 $19.99 / 9780865719590 Reviewed by Tom Koppel * “Our sun is anything but constant; it is slowly getting hotter,” writes Steven Earle in A Brief History of the Earth’s Climate. But that has…
Read more 1628 Temperature rising