Briefly Noted: October New Books
The Scenic Geology of Alberta: A Roadside Touring and Hiking Guide (by Dale Leckie, Broken Poplars, 2021). From the Buffalo Head Hills near Peace River (where volcanic kimberlite pipes brought [...]
By albertaviews
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
Seen But Not Seen: Influential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today
Seen But Not Seen is an eminent historian’s portrait gallery: faces of the long century in which Canada was constituted, treaties made, the West settled, residential schools established and [...]
By Roger Epp
Coconut
Coconut. Brown on the outside and white on the inside. A term that has been hurled at me by South Asian brown folks who think I’m not brown enough, not South Asian or Sikh/Punjabi enough, and [...]
Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom
Ada S. Jaarsma and Kit Dobson frame this anthology with relevant questions about the time we’re in: How do we teach, and think about teaching, when in certain quarters post-secondary education is [...]
By Joe Kadi
My Own Blood: A Memoir
Being a parent, and specifically being a new mother, is in itself hard enough. Mothering a special needs child with significant and chronic disabilities is epic. My Own Blood, Ashley Bristowe’s [...]
Goth Girls of Banff
Fear not, this book isn’t—despite its title—a collection of goth fantasies or undead horrors. The setting is the Bow Valley and surroundings, and the 10 stories well capture elements of this [...]
The Way of the Gardener: Lost in the Weeds Along the Camino de Santiago
This is not my first book about the Camino de Santiago. In fact, there is a bit of a roaring industry (as much as you can use that term in travel literature) for personal accounts of walking the [...]
By Megan Clark
On Nostalgia
What is nostalgia? Is it a growing phenomenon, an increasing trend in our accelerating world? Or has it always been with us, an essential part of the human condition? These are some of the [...]
Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest
As a memoirist and occasional teacher of the form, I read Trina Moyles’ Lookout with more than a general reader’s interest, knowing that these days even the most talented writers have a hard time [...]
Pandemic Poems & We Are One: Poems from the Pandemic
Pandemic Poems and We Are One, edited by Kevin Solez and George Melnyk respectively, are complementary collections, both rising out of our shared ordeal of the last year. Each book assembles a [...]
By K.B. Thors
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...