Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction by Peter Babiak Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2016 $20.00 / 9781772140507 Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy First published October 24, 2017 * Fortunate is the reviewer who, confronting the blank page after finishing reading, finds her most pressing concern is how to do such a fine book justice….
Read more #189 Skimming is for milk, not reading
Auguries by Clea Roberts London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2017 $20.00 / 9781771314510 Reviewed by David Stouck First published October 24, 2017 * Two-time Governor General’s Award winner Don McKay described Clea Roberts’ debut collection of poems, Here Is Where We Disembark (Freehand Books, 2010), as “exquisite frost-bitten brevities,” a phrase that aptly characterizes this Yukon-based…
Read more #188 Spooked horses in a storm
First published October 23, 2017 Brother Toronto: Penguin Random House (McClelland & Stewart), 2017 by David Chariandy $25 hc ISBN 978-0-7710-2290-6 reviewed by Cherie Thiessen * The only author nominated for both the Giller and Rogers Writers Trust Fiction awards in 2017 is David Chariandy, whose second novel, Brother, concerns two siblings growing up in…
Read more #187 Brother, where art thou?
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
First published October 21, 2017 REVIEW: Wherever I Find Myself: Stories by Canadian Immigrant Women By Miriam Matejova (editor) Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017. $24.95 / 978-1-987915-34-1 Reviewed by Gillian Der * The third anthology in a series on Canadian women published by Caitlin Press, Wherever I Find Myself, edited by Miriam Matejova, is…
Read more #185 Diversity of immigrant women
First published October 18, 2017 Just over a year ago, in “Welcome to the Ormsby Review” (September 16, 2016), Richard Mackie provided his memories of Margaret Ormsby, the B.C. historian after whom The Ormsby Review is named. Mostly these referenced his conversations in two fine, old living rooms in the Coldstream Valley, near Vernon, where…
Read more #184 Margaret Ormsby remembered
Blaise Cendrars Speaks… by Blaise Cendrars. Edited and with an introduction by Jim Christy, translated by David J. MacKinnon Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2016 $24.95 / 9781771711906 First published in Paris by Denoël, 1952 and 2016 Reviewed by Serge Alternês Review first published Oct. 16, 2017 * This upcoming Remembrance Day we might recall and commemorate…
Read more #183 Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars
First published October 16, 2017 REVIEW: Beckoned by the Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadian Coast by Sylvia Taylor Victoria: Heritage House, 2017. $19.95 / 9781772031799 Reviewed by Molly Clarkson * Sylvia Taylor’s Beckoned by the Sea: Women at Work on the Cascadian Coast brings together the stories of twenty-four women whose career…
Read more #182 Reckoning the beckoned
The Seriousness Of Play: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas by Nicola Levell London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016 £19.95 (U.K.) / 9781910433119 Reviewed by Eldon Yellowhorn First published October 14, 2017 * Play, playful, and playfulness best describe the visual jazz that Nicola Levell presents in her portrait of Michael Nicoll and the Yahgulanaas experience. After a short preface…
Read more #181 Mousewoman meets Spandex
Essay: Refuge of a Scoundrel: Patriotism and William Bowser by Wayne Norton First published Oct. 13, 2017 * In this Ormsby Review exclusive, Wayne Norton reveals that in his brief term in office (1915-16), the Conservative Premier William Bowser fanned the flames of patriotism stoked by mounting Canadian war casualties and the German sinking of…
Read more #180 The first major B.C. internments
First published October 12,2017 Nanaimo journalist Julie Chadwick has helped The Man In Black’s manager in the 1960s and ‘70s, Saul Holiff, to posthumously present his recollections for The Man Who Carried Cash (Dundurn $19.95). The long-winded subtitle for this tale of a tempestuous but affectionate relationship is ‘Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making…
Read more #179 Nanaimo & Johnny Cash
ESSAY: Kipling on Vancouver Island by John F. Bosher First published October 11, 2017 * Rudyard Kipling’s first visit to the Pacific coast of British Columbia was in 1889 in the course of his journey from India via Japan and the U.S.A. to London with every intention of making a literary name for himself. He…
Read more #178 Kipling on Vancouver Island
Commemorating Canada: History, Heritage, and Memory, 1850s-1990s by Cecilia Morgan Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016 $26.95 / 9781442610613 Reviewed by Mike Starr First published October 4, 2017 * Cecilia Morgan’s Commemorating Canada is a good place to start when examining the role of historical commemoration in Canada. The book is part of the Themes in…
Read more #177 Monumental tasks
Useless Things: Redacted A novella. By Charles Tidler Victoria: Ekstasis Editions $19.95 / 9781771712002 Reviewed by John Moore First published October 4, 2017 * Jazz riffs from a leaky lifeboat. Last seen nine years ago in Charles Tidler’s novel, Going to New Orleans (Anvil Press 2004), the itinerant, deranged horn-player named Lewis King is now pursuing…
Read more #176 Sexual treachery vs. friendship
Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America by Paul Kane, edited and with an introduction by Kenneth Lister Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Press, 2016 $39.99 / 9780888545077 Reviewed by Grant Keddie First published October 3, 2017 * Between November 1846 and November 1847, the Irish-Canadian artist Paul Kane (1810-1871) visited the Columbia…
Read more #175 Artist among the Songhees
Tar Wars: Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image by 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…
Read more #174 Lights, camera, action, debate
First published Sept. 29, 2017 REVIEW: Wolf Island by Ian McAllister (photographs) and Nicholas Read (text) Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 2017. $19.95 9781459812642 Reviewed by Carol Anne Shaw * Wolf Island is a picture book co-created by photographer, author, and Pacific Wild founder Ian McAllister and author and former journalist Nicholas Read. It is…
Read more #173 Always cry wolf
First published September 18, 2017 REVIEW: The Nor’ Wester by David Starr Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2017. $11.95 978-1-55380-493-2 Reviewed by Steve Pocock David Starr’s The Nor’Wester, for young readers, introduces us to fifteen-year-old Duncan Scott, a young highlander evicted with his sister and parents from their rural cottage during the Highland Clearances in the early nineteenth…
Read more #172 Highland Clearances to BC
REVIEW: Florence, Dante and Me by Robert Stuart Thomson Godwin Books 2017 9780995876002 Reviewed by Beverly Cramp First published September 18, 2017 * It’s the summer of 1960 and a young UBC student is about to leave Vancouver, then still very much a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant city. Twenty-year old Robert Thomson had won a scholarship to spend…
Read more #171 Florence, Dante and Me
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