Epidemics and the Modern World by Mitchell L. Hammond Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020 $54.95 / 9781487593735 Reviewed by Jody Decker * This textbook by a history professor at the University of Victoria, Mitchell Hammond, focuses on epidemics of infectious diseases which, he argues, have left the greatest impact on the modern world, even…
Read more #819 Pandemics past and present
Secrets in the Shadows by Heige S. Boehm Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2019 $14.95 / 9781553805724 Reviewed by Valerie Green * Secrets in The Shadows is the story of two boyhood friends, Michael and Wolfgang (Wolfie), growing up in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. But it is also so much more. Author Heige S. Boehm has…
Read more #810 Pawns in the Hitler Youth
The Birdcages: British Columbia’s First Legislative Buildings, 1859-1957 by Robert Ratcliffe Taylor Victoria: FriesenPress, 2020 $16.99 / 9781525547041 Reviewed by Martin Segger * This handsome, generously illustrated volume is essentially the biography of a building. Building biographies, multi-disciplinary by nature and ranging across the architectural, social , and cultural historical genres, are all too rare…
Read more #807 North Pacific Imperial Gothic
Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier by Theodore Catton Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017 $32.95 (U.S.) / 9781421422923 Reviewed by Sarah Carter * The pandemic crisis descends as I write this review and my first thought is that this book will be a welcome diversion from the anxieties and upheavals…
Read more #796 John McLoughlin of Rainy Lake
MEMOIR: The year of the bicycle, 1973: North American backroads at the end of the Indochina War by Howard Macdonald Stewart * Here, for the vicarious pleasure of the many COVID-19 shut-in readers of The Ormsby Review who are unable to travel, is a memoir of an ambitious bicycle journey taken in 1973 by Howard…
Read more #788 The year of the bicycle: 1973
Lampedusa by Steven Price Toronto: Penguin Random House (McClelland & Stewart), 2019 $32.00 / 9780771071683 Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy * From its jacket photo, which rivets the eye to the top of a stunning gilded inner courtyard in Rome, even as that sky is blocked from the reader, to the epilogue and to the narrative…
Read more #771 A tale of rubble and splendour
Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter by Robert Hutton London: St. Martin’s Press, 2019. Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books Reviewed by Julian Wake * When I first read Eric Roberts’ Salt Spring Saga, someone here on Salt Spring — my home — told me that he had been an important…
Read more #745 The secret spy of Salt Spring
The River Battles: Canada’s Final Campaign in World War II Italy by Mark Zuehlke Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2019 $37.95 / 9781771622356 Reviewed by Richard Lonsdale * Twenty-five years ago there were very few popular book-length histories of the Canadians in the Italian Campaign of World War II. We can thank award-winning author Mark…
Read more #737 Canada vs Germany in Italy
John Scouler (c. 1804-1871) Scottish Naturalist: A Life, with Two Voyages by E. Charles Nelson Glasgow: Glasgow Natural History Society, 2014 £11.00 (U.K.) / 9780956529510 Reviewed by Robert M. Galois * Naturalists’ Networks and the Northwest Coast in the Early Nineteenth Century On 25 July, 1824, John Scouler, a young Scottish naturalist, boarded the Hudson’s…
Read more #714 A naturalist on the North Pacific
Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome by Taras Grescoe Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019 $22.95 / 9781771963237 Reviewed by Angela Clarke * Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome is a timely non-fiction study of populism and historical responsibility….
Read more #708 Make Rome great again
Voices of Komagata Maru: Imperial Surveillance and Workers from Punjab in Bengal by Suchetana Chattopadhyay New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2018; New York: Columbia University Press, 2019 $35.00 (U.S.) / 9788193401583 Reviewed by Larry Hannant * Many Canadians became aware of the name Komagata Maru only in 2016, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, still in his…
Read more #685 Tracking the Komagata Maru
Mad Hatter by Amanda Hale Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2019 $29.95 / 9781771833905 See here for the audiobook Reviewed by Linda Rogers * Don’t judge a book by its cover … at your peril. That’s a song worth listening to but sometimes, and in this case, it is all there, the rabbit’s final bone crushing scream….
Read more #680 All hat and no soapbox
A Voluntary Crucifixion by David J. MacKinnon Montréal: Guernica Editions, 2019 $25.00 / 9781771832724 Reviewed by Jim Christy * If you’ve ever heard of David MacKinnon, where have you been? Certainly not around the literary scene anywhere in Canada, including his native British Columbia, even though he is arguably one of the best writers in the…
Read more #635 Go east, young man
Mad Hatter by Amanda Hale Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2019 $29.95 / 9781771833905 See here for the audiobook Reviewed by Sally Campbell * Some books are simply better than others. This fictionalized memoir, set in Britain during the Second World War, takes on big questions — mental fragility, emotional resilience, demonization of dissenters, tribalism, family secrets…
Read more #630 Breaking with the Tribe
A Promise on the Horizon by Ann Pearson Vancouver: Granville Island Publishing, 2019 $24.95 / 9781989467022 Reviewed by Valerie Green * Ann Pearson’s work of biographical fiction, A Promise on the Horizon, will be greatly esteemed by historians, academic researchers, and lovers of the Napoleonic era. Pearson takes the reader on a delightful journey of…
Read more #625 To Italy with Stendhal
Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities by Candace Wellman Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 2019 $27.95 (U.S.) / 9780874223644 Reviewed by Marie Elliott * Researching settlement history can take you in many directions, some more challenging than others. While helping people with their family histories at the Washington State Archives in Bellingham,…
Read more #599 Coast Salish women revealed
Harold Rhenisch reviews two books: Through the Whirlpool: Swept Up in the Nazi Apocalypse by Karl Koerber CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2019 $15.85 / 9781718958524 * In Other Words: A German-Canadian Story by Norbert Ruebsaat CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017 $16.20 / 9781547129027 * …
Read more #565 Postwar Germans
Passageways by Philip Resnick Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2018 $18.95 / 9781553805236 Reviewed by Andrew Parkin * This book is a selection of poems reaching back more than four decades. Unsurprisingly, we experience an array of subjects and themes expressed mainly in free verse but with very occasional rhymes. The subjects derive from Resnick’s reading and…
Read more #542 Classical, biblical, theoretical
James Cook: The Voyages by William Frame with Laura Walker Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018 $49.95 / 9780773552869 Reviewed by Robin Fisher First published April 5, 2019 * Every time I receive a new “cook book” to review I open it up in the hope that the author(s) will have something new to…
Read more #524 Just another Cook book?
The Afrikaner by Arianna Dagnino Montreal: Guernica Editions, 2019 $20.00 / 9781771833578 Reviewed by Alan Twigg * In Arianna Dagnino’s The Afrikaner, a brave and resilient woman ventures to the Kalahari Desert to find her place in Rainbow Nation. The novel arises from the author’s five-year stint as a journalist in South Africa during the…
Read more #520 Somewhere inside the rainbow