What is democracy? Is it the movement toward united self-government in which equality is our highest value? Or is it about preserving the freedom of individuals? In Democracy: A History of Ideas, Boris DeWiel argues that neither of these popular definitions is correct. Inspired by Isaiah Berlin, he describes democracy as a contest of values. Equali …

In recent years, the forests of British Columbia have become a battleground for sustainable resource development. The conflicts are ever present, usually pitting environmentalists against the forest industry and forestry workers and communities. In an effort to broker peace in the woods, British Columbia’s NDP government launched a number of prom …

In this provocative and passionate book, Dan Russell outlines the history of Aboriginal self-government in Canada. He compares it to that of the United States, where, for over 150 years, tribes have practised self-government -- domestic dependent nationhood. Russell provides specific examples of how those institutions of government operate, and elo …

Larry Prochner and Nina Howe reflect the variation within the field by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of experts to address key issues in the field: What programs are currently available and what are their origins? How are adults prepared for work in these programs? How do children within the programs spend their day? What policies gui …

The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …

The work gathered in this anthology spans a wide range of formats and styles: essay, biography, story, prose and journalism. Pertinent pieces include "Albums That Saved My Life" by Richard Van Camp, "Iron Yells" by Gerry William and "Feast of Four Winds" by Beth Cuthand.

The Canadian Yearbook of International Law is issued annually under the auspices of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association (Canadian Society of International Law) and the Canadian Council on International Law.

In Feminists and Party Politics, the author examines the effort to bring feminism into the formal political arena through established political parties in Canada and the United States.

Two major sets of questions lie at the heart of this book. First, how have movement organizations approached partisan and electoral politics? To what extent have they …

West Coast Steelheader celebrates the sea-going species of rainbow trout. Sportfishing enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest are blessed with the opportunity to fish for one of the world's most powerful and awesome sport fish. West Coast Steelheader celebrates this sea-going species of rainbow trout. The contributing authors draw upon their years of …

This profoundly honest Holocaust memoir describes the transformation of everyday anti-Semitism into the Holocaust nightmare. Central to the story are the years Mielnicki spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Mittelbau-Dora and Belsen. Mielnicki's account is a harrowing yet powerfully redeeming human drama. Includes over 30 black and white …

In this collection of nine short stories and the powerful novella "The Sacred Travellers," Marie-Claire Blais offers an exploration of the major themes of her work: the pain of desire, the fragility and vulnerability of the human spirit, the quest for purity and generosity, and the pitiless search for truth. The characters in this new collection ar …

The essence of democracy is the peaceful and legitimate transfer of government. In 1995 in Ontario, the omens for a successful transition weren’t promising. Almost no one had expected Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution to catapult his Progressive Conservatives from third-party obscurity to victory in the June election. The Harris manifesto d …

Each year the League of Canadian Poets sponsors the prestigious National Poetry Contest. From the thousands of entries received, the judges choose three prize winners and a list of honourable mentions. These poems, the finest of the year, are then published in Vintage, the annual anthology.

For the year 2000, First-Prize Winner ($1,000) is Russell T …

This book, the first to be written about the Lake Babine Nation in north-central British Columbia, examines its traditional legal order, self-identity, and their involvement in current treaty negotiations.Changing relations between the First Nations and the Canadian state have led to a new awareness of customary legal orders. These orders can help …

Battles over human rights, curriculum issues and hiring and promotion practices reveal to what extent efforts to integrate ideas of academic freedom and the inclusive university have engendered strife and debate on Canadian campuses. For some, the concept of academic freedom has become its own myth – an icon to be revered, an article of faith, an …

The heart of this fresh and eclectic look at BC's history is an enormously popular 11-part series that ran in the Vancouver Province newspaper late in 1999. Starting with the years before the Europeans arrived, the book chronicles the life and times of BC through the decades, with plenty of photographs from public and private archives in large and …

In this thoughtful collection of essays edited by Debra J. Salazar and Donald K. Alper, forest policy in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is examined in a binational context. While US and Canadian forest policy and forest management approaches differ, the two countries face similar challenges and conflicts. Contributors discuss the e …

The author shares not only her artistic rendition of the prominent natives she paints, but stories, legends and personal experiences of these historical figures of a vanishing nation. Mildred Valley Thornton had an abiding passion which she pursued with almost missionary fever throughout her life - the preservation of Plains Indian culture. For ove …

Starting with his first patient, a horse, Ben Dlin discovered that rural doctors are called upon to do things that he never dreamed of when he was an intern.

"I learned that I had to be prepared to do anything, any time and any place, without regard for the hour, the inconvenience, the exhaustion and the absence of assistance."

Set in the post-war pe …

From the bestselling author Anne Cameron comes a novel that puts the fun back in dysfunctional - a light-hearted look at the trials and tribulations of a family that defines disadvantage.

Arguing, nagging and fighting are the main pastimes in the Lancaster household - usually over the family businesses of
bootlegging and marijuana growing. The fat …

A century ago, the steel ships working coastal waters were built elsewhere. Gradually marine engineers began migrating to the coast with their families, and the BC industry got underway.

Ships of Steel chronicles that industry from the early development of steel construction facilities, equipment and qualified personnel; to the World War II boom whe …

This intricate, sinister thriller takes place in a private geriatric hospital, where nurses and patients begin disappearing only to turn up in the local sewage system. Tense and dramatic, Maureen Foss's narrative joins a unique cast of characters with an unforgettable plot of murder, mystery, suspense - and rats.

When the hospital caretaker is found …

The poems in Ghost Children explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts," never managing to allow their childhood self to surface in their a …

This young adult historical novel, set in the early seventeenth century, tells the story of Madeleine Hebert and her brother Philippe who travel to New France to join their father after their mother dies in France. On arriving in Quebec city, they learn that their father, with the Regiment de Carignan, is at Michilimackinac, and possibly ill.

When P …

In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …

It's the 1950s, and just when Terry Belshaw -- the unlikely hero of Peter Trower's two previous novels, Grogan's Café and Dead Man's Ticket -- vows never to log again, his circumstances change and he needs to return to BC's backwoods to get a stake, and fast.

His newest adventures -- gripping and ominous -- are detailed in The Judas Hills, in which …

Our planet's oceans have provided us with an enormous array of edible delectables. But recent experiences, such as declining stocks of specific fish species, have taught us the need for responsible fishing that will enable the oceans to continue to feed us for generations to come.
The Living Oceans Society is committed to increasing public awaren …

Dr. Robert D'Amato, MD, PhD of Harvard Medical School, and recent winner of the Lew Wasserman award for his pioneering eye research, has teamed up with ARMD sufferer and writer Joan Snyder, to produce Macular Degeneration: The Latest Scientific Discoveries and Treatments for Preserving Your Sight. Endorsed by the Macular Degeneration Foundation, th …

Too often, the ideas and practices of professional foresters have been viewed as monolithic. This book argues that forestry is a more diverse and complex activity than has been generally recognized. It also underlines the political character of the profession. Difference lies at the root of politics, and Nova Scotia forestry has been punctuated by …

The world's species, genes, and ecosystems are going extinct at an alarming and unprecedented rate, largely as a result of human activities. If this trend continues, human civilization itself is at risk. Yet we remain either unaware or unconcerned. In Biodiversity and Democracy, Paul Wood looks at this dilemma from another perspective. He argues th …

In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specifi …

Over the last fifty years the nature of work and work injury has changed dramatically. Since the 1980s, workers’ compensation claims have grown steadily and insurance institutions are feeling the crunch. In Injury and the New World of Work, Terrence Sullivan emphasizes the precarious line between the expansion of needs-based justice and the prese …

This book seeks to clarify postcolonial Indigenous thought beginning at the new millennium. It represents the voices of the first generation of global Indigenous scholars and converges those voices, their analyses, and their dreams of a decolonized world. -- Marie Battiste, Author.

The essays in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision spring from an …

British Columbia's forest economy is at a crucial crossroads. Its survival, Roger Hayter argues, rests on its ability to remain flexible and open to innovation -- a future by no means assured given recent policy initiatives and the current contested nature of British Columbia's forests.

Flexible Crossroads looks at the contemporary restructuring of …

Between each birth, the family undergoes a reshaping. The experiences of a first child or an only child are very different from those of a youngest child with three siblings. This book explains how birth order affects the type of person you are, the type of spouse you choose, and the type of employer or employee you make.

Hot on the heels of his best seller, Crazy Man's Creek, Jack Boudreau writes his sequel. We go back to the small community of Penny, learn what rural kids did to amuse themselves--mother wouldn't approve--and then look over Jack's shoulder as he develops his fascination with the grizzly bear, first as a hunter, then as a photographer.The grizzly be …

British Columbia is a province of extraordinary extremes: urban areas and rural territories; lush farm terrain and mountain vistas; balmy ocean views and frozen snowscapes. Its population is equally diverse: gardeners, skiiers, bush pilots, filmmakers, fishermen, and assorted eccentrics who could have only come from British Columbia. Through it al …

William Beynon was born in 1888 in Victoria to a Welsh father and a Tsimshian mother. He was an accomplished ethnographer and had a long career documenting the traditions of the Tsimshian, Nisga'a, and Gitksan. In 1945 he attended and actively participated in five days of potlatches and totem pole raisings at Gitksan village of Gitsegukla. There he …

Money. Gobs of it. In the blink of an eye - or the drop of a ball-- it's all yours.
Everyone dreams about striking it rich by winning a lottery. We all feverishly line up to purchase our tickets, and watch TV or scan the newspapers to see if we have won, even though the odds are better that we will be struck by lightning. Still, we perservere, be …

The genre of horror has in the past been the exclusive province of heterosexual writers and themes, stereotypically involving a male antagonist and a female victim. Although the incursions into the field by such writers as Anne Rich and Poppy Z. Brite have largely blurred sexual orientation boundaries, there has never been an anthology of horror s …

Other Conundrums, copublished with Vancouver's Artspeak Gallery and the Kamloops Art Gallery, is an extraordinary collection of essays on Canadian artists of colour by Monika Kin Gagnon, one of Canada's most respected art writers and curators. The essays explore the history of cultural production in this country with an emphasis on race, cultural …

Sex, once the great unspoken, is now regularly commodified and prepackaged for wide consumer consumption, on TV, in films, on billboards. In this context in which nothing is shocking--no boundary too sacred to cross--what does sex mean, particularly to those born under these conditions? Carnal Nation collects stories about sex by an exciting new g …

Close to Spider Man marks the debut of an exciting new literary talent: a collection of connected stories whose female narrators seek out lives for themselves amidst the lonely, breathtaking landscape of the Yukon. The young people in Ivan Coyote's deeply personal stories are looking to make a break from their circumstances, but the North is in the …

Alarming - edgy, often disturbing, and superbly written - these short stories illuminate the dark, troubled heart of human existence.

A young girl escapes the bonds of her abusive adopted mother. A woman does not leave her rotting apartment for over a month. A widower passes through his wife's garden for the first time. A cosmetician slowly destroys …

By the time Al Purdy succumbed to lung cancer at his waterfront home in Sidney BC on April 21, 2000, he was universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers Canada has produced. In five decades as a published author he had produced over forty books and received innumerable distinctions, including two Governor General's Awards and the Orde …

The long-awaited sequel to BC children's classic Jason and the Sea Otter.

This delightful story of a Nuu-chah-nulth boy explores First Nations traditions and values through the making of a canoe. Jason's first canoe is crushed during a storm, and he must replace it. Through Uncle Silas, he learns the traditional methods of canoe building - plus scor …