In the mid-1800s, Victoria grew from a fur-trading post into a provincial capital—the jewel in British Columbia's golden crown. Meanwhile, many of the early residents, happy to leave the Hudson's Bay Company behind, followed simple trails from the fort or discovered new routes of their own. In her first book, Danda Humphreys introduced readers to …

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.

On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacke …

Verity Sweeny Purdy at the age of eleven was sent to England to live with an aunt and train as a classical dancer. This memoir tells of her experience crossing Canada by train, the Atlantic Ocean by ship, and her arrival in England. Her story continues as she tells about her Aunt Doffrie and her bohemian way of life. We learn about her schooling an …

This handbook describes the traditional uses by aboriginal people of more than 200 different plants from Canada's boreal forest. It is the result of original ethnobotanical fieldwork in 29 communities across the boreal forest region of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Natural resources of the boreal forest have always been essential to the diet …

The militarisation of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka began in the 1970s when attempts to reconcile by peaceful means the Tamils’ claim for basic individual and collective rights with the Sinhalese need to allay their chronic sense of insecurity finally failed. Since then the struggle has intensified, erupting successively in the burning …

The South Nahanni, one of North America's wildest and most spectacular rivers, rushes through this park in the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. John Harris and his partner, climber extraordinaire Vivien Lougheed, mount an expedition to this glorious but dangerous region. Harris's conversational account builds momentum as the party fol …

'Snatch' is a hilarious and creepy collection of poems that may not even be poetry at all. Like a comic novel from an alternate universe, or a fragmented hoax of an autobiography, 'Snatch' picks at the vacuous horror of suburbia and exposes a world of small beauty and perfect moments amid TV-induced nostalgia and impending violence. In her mysterio …

In November 1997, the world media converged on Vancouver to cover the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The major news story that emerged, however, had little to do with the crisis unfolding in the Asian economies. At the UBC campus, where the APEC leaders’ meeting was held, a predictable student protest met with an unusually strong polic …

The second novel by renowned Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong traces the life of a young Native woman on a reserve who is exposed to pesticides while working as a fruit picker in the Okanagan Valley.Whispering in Shadows provides a glimpse into the complexities of the contemporary life and psyche of Aboriginal peoples. The novel conveys an impor …

There is no longer any doubt that the earth is warming; the question remains, why? For historian Gale Christianson, the emergence of Global warming is one of the most compelling stories in the history of humankind, made all the richer for having been a slowly developing phenomenon.

In his brilliantly constructed book Greenhouse, Christianson blends …

With their towering spruces and cedars, verdant groundcover and cloaks of mist, the temperate rainforests of North America have long been a source of wonder and awe. Extending from northern California to southern Alaska, these immense and mysterious forests are home to a constellation of life that is unique on this planet.

In this magnificent photog …

Is it possible to sustain biological diversity in managed forests? Or should biodiversity strategies focus solely on reserves and protected areas? A group of well-known scientists specializing in forestry issues apply scientific expertise to the “hot politics” of the forestry debate and present compelling evidence as to the sustainability of bi …

Whether in Canada, the United States, Australia, India, Peru, or Russia, the approximately 500 million Indigenous Peoples in the world have faced a similar fate at the hands of colonizing powers. Assaults on language and culture, commercialization of art, and use of plant knowledge in the development of medicine have taken place all without consent …

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 …

With introductions, commentary and five new poems derived from Donne's elegies by Doug Beardsley and Al Purdy. In 1998, the poets Al Purdy and Doug Beardsley spent many hours in Victoria's Waddling Dog Pub discussing the often-neglected poetry of D.H. Lawrence. The result was No One Else is Lawrence!, acclaimed by readers across the country.

This ti …

This hard-hitting novel explores the gritty underbelly of contemporary urban life revealing the shocking chasm between demonized media images and the everyday life of the uneducated poor. At the centre is thirty-seven-year-old Maggie MacKinnan, a star reporter at the Montreal Tribune who is wrenched from her life of respectability when she meets Ni …

The growing popularity of the broad, landscape-scale approach to forest management represents a dramatic shift from the traditional, stand-based focus on timber production. Ecology of a Managed Terrestrial Landscape responds to the increasing need of forest policy developers, planners, and managers for an integrated, comprehensive perspective on ec …

Ten ‘translationed’ fragments from bill bissett’s new book:

Another near-life experience.

““Help, help,”“ such a classical utterance…

Can we connect? Is there time for that?

Obsession is a replacement for interaction.

they showed a cluster of, circle of, people getting back up to standing position after, perhaps, kneeling. It looked like …

The multifaceted pun in the title of Mark Cochrane’s latest book of poems (a room is a stanza, is a space, is an enclosure; in which a change, a transaction, a metamorphosis takes place) is a barbed hook of seduction for the reader in love with the body of language. And it is ever so clearly the body as a willful and skillful construct of the co …

Édouard, whom we met in The Duchess and the Commoner, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the “Duchess of Langeais,” star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance by his mother, Victoire. With this money, he sails on the ocean-liner Liberté to Paris, an idealized, glorious fore …

Mom’s the Word was created out of a Saturday morning writers’ support group. Getting together to share their experiences, six women performers struck upon the idea to write about what they were going through as mothers trying to maintain their careers, their individual identities and their relationships with their partners. The result is an eve …

Brimming with a dark and brittle humor, 15 Seconds is a play about a young female advertising copy writer, her pro-sports-fan ex-boyfriend, a Gen-X welfare-bum loser and his brother handicapped by cerebral palsy. These four characters are constantly making choices about reality and illusion; imagination and fantasy; the hale and the handicapped; a …

Heaven is George F. Walker’s ‘millennium play.’ Well, sort of, if we can free ourselves from the expectation of the usual science-fiction-based projection and imposition of our current personal, cultural and spiritual values on the future of the coming millennium, considered almost mandatory for authors working in this particular genre. As u …

Adeena Karasick’s fourth book of poetry achieves an astonishing layered complexity and maturity. Dyssemia Sleaze is at one and the same time Karasick’s most political and most personal book to date. Its performance is that of an inter-folded language, woven (shuffled) back and forth between the perpetual absence of intimations of the thing its …

Canada and the United States exchange the world’s highest level of bilateral trade, valued at $1.4 billion a day. Two-thirds of this trade travels on trucks. Heavy Traffic examines the way in which the regulatory reform of American and Canadian trucking, coupled with free trade, has internationalized this vital industry.

Before deregulation, rest …

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 …

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 …

Canadian party politics collapsed in the early 1990s. This book is about that collapse, about the end of a party system, with a unique pattern of party organization and competition, that had governed Canada’s national politics for several decades, and about the ongoing struggle to build its successor. Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics discusses …

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 …

Historians of the First World War have often dismissed the important role of poison gas in the battles of the Western Front. Tim Cook shows that the serious threat of gas did not disappear with the introduction of gas masks. By 1918, gas shells were used by all armies to deluge the battlefield, and those not instructed with a sound anti-gas doctrin …

Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to kill. Tomorrow, a life will hang in the balance. Watermelon Row, a suspenseful, intricately plotted novel, tracks a day in the life of three men on the brink of violence and ruin.
It tails Ed Harrison, a tough old man in his seventies, Scott Venn, a yuppie lawyer/sports agent, and Peter James, an unemployed l …

"When I look in the mirror, I don't know who I am."
-Kerri
Being a teenager in today's complex world is a difficult enough task, but adopted teens have a unique struggle: to discover their identity and a sense of belonging and place in the world, which often means coming to terms with their past. The Face in the Mirror, based on numerous intervi …

In this collection of poems, Kevin Roberts recreates his recent experience with cancer (non-Hodgkins Lymphoma), a cancer that is often fatal. Roberts takes us from the early feelings of denial through the doctor's fateful moment of diagnosis, onto his three years of treatment with chemotherapy and radiation, and finally into remission from the dise …

Margaret Thompson offers a powerfully moving and historically accurate account of life in Fort St. James, in northern British Columbia, in the 1820s. Through the character of Peter, a young boy who is orphaned at the Fort, Thompson presents a vivid picture of the difficult life for both the fur traders and the Natives in what was then called the "S …

A history of men who worked the rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench. Drift back in history to time when the rivermen still plied their trade through the northern rivers of BC. Crooked River Rats tells the tales of men and women who traveled the river highways living and working in the wilderness. Generations of trappers, hunters, big game guides an …

This book examines over 4000 years of culture history of the related Nuu-chah-nulth, Ditidaht, and Makah peoples on western Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. Using data from the Toquaht Archaeological Project, McMillan challenges current ethnographic interpretations that show little or no change in these peoples’ culture. Instead, by co …

Throughout the world, the cowboy is an instantly recognized symbol of the North American West. Legends of Our Times breaks the stereotype of “cowboys and Indians” to show an almost unknown side of the West. It tells the story of some of the first cowboys – Native peoples of the northern Plains and Plateau.

Through stories, poetry, art, and re …

Catherine Bauer changed forever the concept of social housing and inspired a generation of urban activists to integrate public housing into the emerging welfare state of the mid-20th century. She was one of a small group of idealists who called themselves “Housers” because of their commitment to raising the quality of urban life through improvi …

This book is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Native/non-Native relations in a small interior BC city – Williams Lake – at the height of land claims conflicts and tensions. Furniss analyses contemporary colonial relations in settler societies, arguing that “ordinary” rural Euro-Canadians exercise power in maintaining the subordina …

Once Upon an Oldman is an account of the controversy that surrounded the Alberta government's construction of a dam on the Oldman River to provide water for irrigation in the southern part of the province. Jack Glenn argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the governments of Canada and Alberta are not dedicated to protecting the environment an …

Another Kind of Justice is the first historical survey of Canadian military law, providing insights into military justice in Canada, the purpose of military law, and the level of legal professionalism within the Canadian military. After delving into the British roots of Canadian military law, Chris Madsen brings his discussion up to date with analy …

Edelgard Mahant and Graeme Mount examine details of White House policy from 1945 to the 1980s to assess the extent to which the United States could be said to have had a Canada policy. They challenge the popular nationalist view that Canada has been treated as peripheral and dependent, but also counter the opposing view that Washington has respecte …

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 …

In this book, Georges Sioui, who is himself Wendat, redeems the original name of his people and tells their centuries-old history by describing their social ideas and philosophy and the relevance of both to contemporary life. The question he poses is a simple one: after centuries of European and then other North American contact and interpretation, …

For decades, renowned Canadian artist Gathie Falk has captivated the imagination fo the public. Her art reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary, the magic in the everyday, and the witty/surreal/poignant juxtapositions of the familar objects and sights -- such as apples, shoes, chairs, clothing, gardens, sidewalks, night skies and pieces of water. …