Book Reviews

Now more than ever, the pressures of working on wicked problems such as climate change, poverty, racism and public health are immense. Indeed, a recent Alberta Ecotrust survey of environmental [...]

It’s easy to read the two main characters of Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet as archetypes. On one hand, we have Neela, the capital-A artist who cares more about authenticity than popularity. On the [...]

Benjamin Perrin’s Overdose is the first book in Canada to address a public health emergency that has claimed the lives of over 16,000 Canadians. After the Yukon and BC, Alberta has the [...]

Northern Alberta author Katie Bickell sets her debut novel, Always Brave, Sometimes Kind, mainly in Fort McMurray, Edmonton and Sherwood Park. Her characters travel the Yellowhead Highway, cross [...]

Rarely does one get to review a book for which praise and critique can be given in the same breath. Leroy Paul Wolf Collar’s First Nations Self-Government presents such an opportunity. A former [...]

The Virtues of Disillusionment (by Stephen Heighton, Athabasca University Press, 2020). “Let’s suppose,” writes Stephen Heighton early in this short book—his inaugural lecture as the 2019/2020 [...]

In his debut book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?, James Wilt, a former Calgary journalist now based in Winnipeg, systematically dismantles every conceivable anti-public-transit excuse. [...]

Vicki Laveau-Harvie was raised on a ranch near Okotoks, though she left as soon as she could, eventually settling in Australia. Now in her 70s, she has published her first book, a memoir of her [...]

In Mark Lisac’s engaging new mystery, his second novel after a long career as a political journalist, Edmonton lawyer George Rabani reopens a client’s sale of his personal photo collection to the [...]

In Tom Wayman’s latest collection, Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back, the long-time poet writes movingly of the natural world and confronts what he sees as “a surging lack of empathy” in today’s [...]