PHOTO ESSAY: Trevor Martin: Vancouver photographer by Bill Paul * Originally from Cornwall, England, Trevor Martin started taking photographs there in 1960 before coming to Canada in 1969. He is known for his images of Vancouver, the Canadian Prairies, the American Southwest, England, Paris, Rome, and Sicily. Here, Bill Paul shares a small sample of…
Read more 1412 Trevor Martin’s Vancouver
Vancouver’s Women in Blue: Trailblazers of the Vancouver Police Department, 1904-1975 by Carolyn J. Daley, with a foreword by Bev Busson Maple Bay: Ruddy Duck Press, 2020 $49.95 / 9781999279202 Reviewed by Phyllis Reeve * “I don’t remember the first time I drew my gun.” That’s one way to grab the reader’s attention. It’s the…
Read more 1411 A constabulary for women
Pizza Punks Collection by Cole Pauls Wolfville, NS: Conundrum Press, 2021 $15.00 / 9781772620535 Reviewed by Jeff Stychin * I’m sure most reading this can remember a time when skateboarding and the punk rock attitude went together like ham on rye. Cole Pauls’ Pizza Punks Collection grabs at your desire for excitement and fun while…
Read more 1401 Vancouver’s pizza punks
Heroines Revisited by Lincoln Clarkes Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2021 (revised edition; first published 2002) $48.00 / 9781772140712 Reviewed by Lani Russwurm * Lincoln Clarkes started his “Heroines Project” in the late 1990s when he began photographing women who use drugs on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It took about five years and resulted in…
Read more 1397 Portraits of East Vancouver
Hell and Gone: A Wakeland Novel by Sam Wiebe Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2021 $24.95 / 9781550179637 Reviewed by Alma Lee * Dave Wakeland and his partner Jeff Chen run a private investigation agency out of Chinatown in the heart of Vancouver. They are in the midst of expanding, and while Jeff is working at…
Read more 1386 Vancouver’s Ian Rankin
Dreamers, Skeptics, and Healers: the Story of BC’s Medical School. The UBC Faculty of Medicine at 70 years by Wendy Cairns, John Cairns, David Ostrow, and Gavin Stuart Vancouver: Page Two Books, 2021 $50.00 / 9781989603895 Reviewed by Jaime Smith * As a graduate of the UBC medical school in 1976 and after training there…
Read more 1363 Beds and infrastructure at UBC
Vile Spirits by John MacLachlan Gray Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2021 $29.95 / 9781771622776 Reviewed by W.H. New * Straight out: I loved this book. It’s lively and fast-paced, it sparkles with satire, and it’s chock full of arresting characters (and a few who get away). Vile Spirits is marketed as a mystery, and…
Read more 1360 Spirited Vancouver
Editor’s note: in January 2022, the University of British Columbia announced the acquisition of a rare copy of the first edition of the collected plays of William Shakespeare, known to scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623. One of 235 copies in existence, UBC’s copy is only the second in Canada, the other being…
Read more 1357 My kingdom for a … First Folio
Finding Nothing: The Vangardes, 1959-1975 by Gregory Betts Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021 $85.00 / 9781487505318 Reviewed by Ron Verzuh * Vancouver Poetry Rocked in the 1960s. An Already Lively Poetry Scene Got a Jolt With the Arrival of the Americans I’m a poetry fan. Whitman, Neruda, Frost, Akhmatova, Shakespeare, Atwood. Yes, Margaret Atwood…
Read more 1354 Vancouver avant-garde poets
North Delta History and Heritage: including Annieville, Upper and Lower Sunbury, Annacis Island, Part of East Delta, and Burns Bog by John Macdonald (editor) Delta: Delta Heritage Society, 2020 (4th printing, 2021) $20.00 / 9781777161705 Reviewed by Ken Favrholdt * North Delta History and Heritage is a great example of what a group of historically-minded volunteers…
Read more 1344 Rambles in North Delta
This Eden by Ed O’Loughlin Toronto: House of Anansi, 2021 $24.95 / 9781487005696 Reviewed by Zoe McKenna * As Ed O’Loughlin’s fourth novel, This Eden, closes, the still-unnamed narrator declares, “I like not knowing what’s going to happen next.” As becomes apparent within the first pages of the novel, an affection for the unknown and…
Read more 1324 A pencil & sticky note thriller
Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition (fourth edition) by Brett McGillivray Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020 $55.00 / 9780774864329 Reviewed by Ken Favrholdt * Brett McGillivray’s Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition has withstood the test of time since its first edition in 2000, which I reviewed for BC Studies…
Read more 1305 McGillivray’s essential geography
Vancouver Vice: Crime and Spectacle in the City’s West End by Aaron Chapman Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021 $27.95 / 9781551528694 Reviewed by Grahame Ware * Aaron Chapman begins Vancouver Vice by using the West End Sex Workers Memorial (dedicated in 2016) as a point of reference and meditation regarding the whole dynamics of sexual…
Read more 1295 Chapman’s high-rise history
Becoming Vancouver: A History by Daniel Francis Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2021 $36.95 / 9781550179163 Reviewed by Patricia E. Roy * Daniel Francis, a native of Vancouver, rues Vancouver’s apparent loss of its history and hopes that knowledge of the past may avoid handing it over “to the forces of global consumerism” (p. 5). This…
Read more 1240 Stumps, sawmills & speculation
MEMOIR: Chennai, a place in between by Jane Frankish * It was the last week of October 2002 and we were homeless, jobless, and rootless. This is just the way it was when we entered Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu in Southern India. Our home for the previous eight years had been Kuching, the…
Read more 1218 Chennai, a place in between
INTERVIEW: Dustin Cole with The British Columbia Review. We caught up with Dustin Cole at his brother’s house in Slave Lake, Alberta, to learn the circumstances and inspiration for Notice (Nightwood Editions, 2020), the story of Dylan Levett, a dishwasher from Alberta caught in the gears of renoviction from his apartment on Main Street. “It’s summer 2017…
Read more 1206 Interview with Dustin Cole
The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence Toronto: Penguin Random House (Penguin Modern Classics, Emblem Editions), 2017 $19.95 / 9780735252837 First published by McClelland & Stewart, 1969 Reviewed by Harper Campbell * To read Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers (1969) is to see a very different Vancouver from the one that exists today. Well, “see” isn’t really the right…
Read more 1194 Return of The Fire-Dwellers
Chinatown Stories, Volume 3 by Brooke Xiang and Tyler Mark (editors) Vancouver: Chinatown Today, 2020 $25.00 / 25611607 (ISSN) Note: a digital version of this book can be seen here; hard copies may be purchased at Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden and at About Boutique Reviewed by LiLynn Wan * In this third volume of…
Read more 1190 Resilient Vancouver Chinatown
The Age of Fentanyl: Ending the Opioid Epidemic by Brodie Ramin Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2020 $22.99 / 9781459746701 Reviewed by Jeffrey Stychin * This book is not for the faint of heart, despite its clinical examination of the devastating world of opiate addiction. Brodie Ramin’s heartfelt compassion extends through every chapter. The Age of Fentanyl…
Read more 1188 Facing the fentanyl crisis
A Brief View from the Coastal Suite by Karen Hofmann Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2021 $21.95 / 9781774390177 Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski * If, come the apocalypse, some powers wanted to recreate the style and design of white, urban life in Canada in general and Vancouver in particular, they would find material aplenty in Karen Hofmann’s…
Read more 1181 Getting & spending in Lotusland