Tag: Essay

‘But it’s not just horses’

Levenson 1. feature image Animals and Language.-Painting-at-Lascaux-caves-od-horses-deer-and-aurochs

“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’

Here With Us In This Home

As the narrator faces a parent’s progressive illness, she’s beset by memories of a childhood “at the bottom tip of Africa” and adult knowledge about the legacies of Apartheid. —“Here With Us In This Home,” an essay by Deborah Vieyra

#392 From boss logger to zero

The Tree Trunk Can Be My Pillow: The Biography of an Outstanding Japanese Canadian by Tadashi Jack Kagetsu Victoria: University of Victoria, 2017. $33.95 / 9781550586114 Reviewed by Bob Griffin First published Oct. 4, 2018 * The government of Canada declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, a day after the Japanese attacks on…
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#189 Skimming is for milk, not reading

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….
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#178 Kipling on Vancouver Island

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…
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#164 Cuba from the inside

Cuba from the Inside by Alan Twigg First published September 5, 2017 * For anyone with an abiding love or interest in Cuba, there are many books about the place–more than ten of which are by British Columbians. For instance, when an American professor named Maurice Halperin met Che Guevara in Mexico, prior to Fidel…
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#124 Banning Indigenous apples, 1916

Edward Sapir's photo of the "Delegation of Indian Chiefs from Western Canada sent to Ottawa, 1916" shows John Tetlenitsa four months before his fruit was seized in Merritt and, further, that three Indigenous leaders of the land-and-rights agitations in the first years of the previous century lived in, or in the vicinity of, the Nicola Valley. Tetllenitsa is standing second from left, James Teit to his left. John Chelahitsa, a Syilx leader from Douglas Lake country, is seated immediately below Tetlenitsa

ESSAY: Chief Tetlenitsa’s Apples: Commercializing Indigenous Horticulture in British Columbia, 1907-1916 by Michael Sasges First published April 25, 2017 * In 1916, orchardist Chief John Tetlenitsa of Spences Bridge took a wagon of 40 boxes of apples into Merritt, the new town in the Nicola Valley, only to have the Chief Constable seize the apples…
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