“Keeping the Books is a family history par excellence, the best of its genre that I have read, which traces the life of Alene Peck, a homesteader’s daughter in the Peace River district of British Columbia. It was a colourful life that Alene has chronicled and saved through a trove of letters, notes, and photographs that upon her death were bequeathed to her son, Ross Peck, who lives today in Skookumchuck, in BC’s Kootenays.” Kenneth Favrholdt reviews Keeping the Books: The life and times of a Peace River Homesteader’s Daughter, by Ross Peck (Cranbrook: Wild Horse Creek Press, 2025) $21.95 / 9781069794703
“1866 was the year he founded the American SPCA, based on the model of the Royal SPCA in London. He was 53 years old and up until a few years before he had not been particularly interested in animals. Then while in St. Petersburg, Russia he saw a driver mistreating a horse and had a revelation: animals would be his life’s work.” Sheldon Goldfarb reviews The Second Greatest Show on Earth: Henry Bergh, the Protection of Animals, and the Evolution of the Modern Social Movement, by Darcy Ingram (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025) $34.95 / 9780228025801
“This is on the order of Monty Python with its delicious absurdity. Nawrocki is at his best when he spins these deadpan, Buster Keatonesque scenes— moments of truthful memory specific to ‘50s Vancouver. This is what makes the book work. The historical details are unvarnished yet amped up with his telling. But as we go along in Joey’s story, the memoir suffers from editorializing of a predictable nature that gets in the way of the stories despite moments of excellent scenarios.” Grahame Ware reviews The East End Rules: An East Van Memoir, by Norman Nawrocki (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2026) $24.99 / 9781551648347
“As many visitors to Antarctica have remarked, time spent witnessing the stunning abundance of life beyond the polar zone of extreme cold waters and the sheer beauty of that continent is life-changing. Blight witnesses that unlike her experience of previous research sites, which include the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica forever changed her ‘understanding of the world.’ This is her account of that break from ‘The World, The Real World, The World,’ as she and most scientists working in Antarctica refer to the outside world beyond the polar seas. Antarctica is her discovery and recovery back to a saner place of nature, no matter how harsh. It is a place where life meets death and grows from it.” Loÿs Maingon reviews Where The Earth Meets The Sky: A Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica, by Louise K. Blight (Toronto: Doubleday Canada / Bond Street Books, 2026) $38 / 9780385702102
“By the time I got to Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s, Jim Harding had already left campus but his legacy lingered as SFU continued to fester with student unrest after the historic strike in 1967. That event labelled SFU a ‘radical’ campus and Harding was part of the cohort of students and faculty that openly challenged and defied the actions of the university administration. It was a bold, exciting, and educational moment. Harding was among the leaders.” Ron Verzuh reviews The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left, by Jim Harding [ed.] (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2026) $29 / 9781773638034
“Seto, mourning the past and given time to resurrect her creativity, recreated the buildings of memory and left them empty so that memory and desire could replace the ghosts inhabiting them with real lives configured with real information, the sensory details, smells and sounds that gave them life.” Linda Rogers reviews Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History, by Donna Seto (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025) $29.99 / 9781487011970
“There are more than 240 life histories of all the fishes calling the strait home for all or part of the year. Dick Beamish and Jeff Marliave are well-known scientists who have put this book together for you.” DC Reid reviews Fishes of the Strait of Georgia: More than 240 Life Stories, by Dick Beamish & Jeff Marliave (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $80 / 9781990776830
“The book is primarily a record of the concept, strategies, and outcomes from an innovative government policy-development approach proposed by then-Premier Glen Clark. At the time Clark’s financially-strapped government was facing ‘an imminent economic crisis.’ The authors explain that Premier Clark was faced with almost 240,000 public employee contracts expiring on the same day, as well as two prior years of restraint.” Richard Fyfe reviews 35 Accords: Re-imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations
by Tony Penikett and John Calvert (Cambridge, UK: Ethics International Press, 2025) $57 / 9781837112791
“If they are a choir, Genni Gunn, an Italo-Canadian poet and musician, translator of this volume, lifts it out of sea narrative to angel choir. Her sensibilities, like Maraini’s, bring harmony to the deliverance of a poetically nuanced story to universality.” Linda Rogers reviews The Ship for Kobe, by Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn (Hamilton: Guernica Editions, 2025) $22.95 / 9781778490019
“In BC, cartoonists like Len Norris, Roy Peterson, Bob Krieger, Dan Murphy, Raeside, and (more lately) Pia Guerra have demonstrated what a sharp wit can do with a sharp pencil. Nurtured for decades by daily spots on the local newspaper’s editorial/opinion page, these giants of jest created lasting and recognizable characters, styles, voices, values, and understandings of who we are.” John Belshaw reviews The Canada Handbook, by Adrian Raeside (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $22.95 / 9781550179538
“The strength of West Coast Mission is the way that Lockhart has sensitively and wisely heeded and attempted to bring the best out of the varied communities he has focussed on. The weakness of the book is the vast variety of other forms of Christianity he has simply not sat with or listened to in the Vancouver area and they are many.” Ron Dart reviews West Coast Mission: The Changing Nature of Christianity in Vancouver, by Ross A. Lockhart (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) $34.95 / 9780228022862
“Baxter had achieved years of international success for volleyball and women’s sports in general, and was celebrated around the world for her success, but at the young age of twenty-nine had been tossed aside simply because of her sexual orientation. Her internal rage at this unfairness inspired her to become an activist and expose the inequalities and flaws in elite Canadian sports. This book strongly brings out her message of hope for all men and women in sports to strive for success despite the cost.” Valerie Green reviews Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist by Betty Baxter (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026) $23.95 / 9780889715066
First published November 10, 2017 Emily Carr As I Knew Her by Carol Pearson, with a foreword by Robert Amos. Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2016. $19.95 / 9781771511742 Reviewed by Kerry Mason * Our understanding of the internationally significant artist and author, Emily Carr, is enriched by this overdue reprint of Carol Pearson’s Emily Carr As… Read more #200 Emily’s compartmentalized friend
Heckman’s Canadian Pacific: A Photographic Journey by Ralph Beaumont, foreword by John Geiger Mississauga, ON: The Credit Valley Railway Company, 2015 $60.00 / 9780978440619 Reviewed by Walter Volovsek First published November 9, 2017 * The Canadian Pacific Railway’s in-house photographer Joseph William Heckman (1854-1937) worked between Nova Scotia and Vancouver Island for three decades, photographing… Read more #199 What the Heckman
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator by Eve Lazarus Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2017 $21.95 / 9781551526850 Reviewed by Bonnie Reilly Schmidt First published Nov. 8, 2017 * In Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator Eve Lazarus rescues one of the… Read more #198 Inspector Vance, I presume?
Powering Up Canada A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600 by Ruth Sandwell (editor) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. $37.95 / 9780773547865 Reviewed by Dan Gallacher First published Nov. 7, 2017 Years ago I likened history to a diamond. Each time it is turned in the light, another facet is revealed…. Read more #197 Power to the people
Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea by Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley (editors), with illustrations by Matthew Wolferstan Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017 $36.95 / 9781771621731 Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski First published Nov. 6, 2017 * This is an anthology with something like a mission. In “Waypoints,” his foreword to this anthology, historian… Read more #196 Batten down the anthology
First published Nov. 5, 2017 A century since Vimy and Passchendaele: Two wars, two families, one message By Howard Macdonald Stewart * For Remembrance Day 2017 we offer a moving reflection by Howard Stewart on war’s impact on his family in the twentieth century. Howard touches on the personal and emotional repercussions on the families… Read more #195 Remembrance Day, 2017
MEMOIR: Lill’s Story: Reminiscences of a Country Schoolteacher by Lillian Emerson Edited by Mary Novik and Ned Young First published Nov. 4, 2017 * We are delighted to present these memoirs of Lillian Emerson (1913-2003), a Vancouver Island teacher in the 1930s who became the mother of award-winning novelist Mary Novik. Born in Victoria to… Read more #194 Lill Emerson: Raincoast educator
First published November 3, 2017 Mark Bate: Nanaimo’s First Mayor by Jan Peterson Victoria: Heritage House, 2017. $19.95. / 9781772031829 Reviewed by John R. Hinde While industrialist Robert Dunsmuir has long been recognized as the most important figure in nineteenth century Nanaimo, thanks in part to Terry Reksten’s The Dunsmuir Saga (Douglas & McIntyre, 1991),… Read more #193 Nanaimo mayor rivals Dunsmuir
