Secret Vancouver 2010


Book Description

In 1963, Jimmy Wynn was the second most famous man in America. The comedian's uncanny impression of the President made him a star. But when the genuine article died in a hail of bullets on a sunny afternoon in New Orleans, Jimmy's career met a fate almost as grisly. What happened to the funny man afterward was a mystery no one cared to solve. Nearly 25 years later, Nathan Grant, an ambitious young journalist, discovers the trail Jimmy cut through the entertainment netherworld. He soon realizes this forgotten court jester may have played a very serious part in the country's favorite conspiracy theory. Grant's strange and increasingly dangerous odyssey takes him from a dingy New York record store to the showrooms of Las Vegas, a ghost town in the Mojave Desert, and even a dinner theatre in Niagara Falls. A dark comedy about the cost of fame, Jason Anderson's "Showbiz" is the story of a man who became a punchline and a writer who is desperate to find out how the rest of the joke goes.




Stanley Park Novel


Book Description

In this powerful debut novel from Racine Hiet, a young girl named April is chosen by fate to participate in a terrible, bloody crime. Unjustly charged and persecuted for what occurs, her life is brutally scarred and forever changed. She reinvents herself by changing her name and locking away her past. But when she falls passionately in love with a remarkable man named Markus, a fierce flame is kindled inside her--one that will illuminate her dark past while igniting a future that offers a chance at happiness and love. In the memorable tradition of "The Lovely Bones" and "White Oleander," and through the use of incisive but sensitive and irresistible prose, Racine Hiet has conjured up a haunting tale of good versus evil and of a young woman's spirited struggle to reach the pinnacle of light in what is oftentimes a dark and dangerous world.




Vancouver


Book Description

Once an almost inaccessible logging town, Vancouver has grown into a major North American urban center and a jewel of the Pacific Rim. Within a mere century, it has metamorphosed from a little-explored rain forest to a thriving and cosmopolitan metropolis that will host the 2010 Olympics. This book shares the city's extraordinary coming of age through 150 striking images. Carefully reproduced, they capture Vancouver in every phase of its growth, from the coming of the railway to the intense urban expansion that has taken place since the 1950s.




Inventing Stanley Park


Book Description

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city’s most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees, and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world’s most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park’s landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.




Stanley Park's Secret


Book Description

Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife just steps from the sidewalks and skyscrapers of Vancouver. But few visitors stop to contemplate the secret past of British Columbia's most popular tourist destination. Officially opened in 1888, Stanley Park was born alongside the city of Vancouver, so it is easy to assume that the park was a pristine wilderness when it was first created. But much of it had been logged and it was home to a number of settlements. Aboriginal people lived at the villages of Whoi Whoi, now Lumberman's Arch, and nearby Chaythoos. Some of the immigrant Hawaiians earlier employed in the fur trade took jobs at the lumber mills that dotted Burrard Inlet from the 1860s and settled at "Kanaka Ranch," which was located just outside the park's southeast boundary. Others resided at Brockton Point on the peninsula's eastern tip. Only in 1958 was the last of the many families forced out of their homes and the park returned to its supposed "pristine" character. Working in collaboration with descendants of the families who once lived in the park area, historian Jean Barman skilfully weaves together the families' stories with archival documents, Vancouver Parks Board records and court proceedings to reveal a troubling, yet deeply important facet of BC's history.




Common Ground in a Liquid City


Book Description

If we want to preserve what's still left of the natural world, we need to stop using so much of it. And, says veteran environmental activist Matt Hern, cities are the best chance we have left for a truly ecological future . . . but what does it take to make a truly sustainable city? Common Ground in a Liquid City is a fun and engaging look at the future of urban life. Hern takes us on a journey through over a dozen urban centers, from Vancouver to Istanbul, Las Vegas, and beyond, exploring the history and current composition of cities around the globe and highlighting the elements of each that make it livable. Each of Hern's ten chapters focuses on a central theme of city life: diversity, street life, crime, population density, water and natural life, gentrification, and globalism. What emerges in the end is an appealing portrait of what the urban future might look like—environmentally friendly, locally focused, and governed from below. Matt Hern is an inveterate city dweller and an environmental and education activist. The editor of Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader and the author of Deschooling Our Lives and Field Day, he founded Vancouver's Car-Free Day and is the director of the Purple Thistle Center for alternative education. These days, he lives in Vancouver with his partner and daughters and lectures widely around the globe.




On the Cusp of Contact


Book Description

“The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied,” writes Jean Barman, “and it is up to each of us to act as best we can.” The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class. Working to recognize past actors that have been underrepresented in mainstream histories, Barman’s focus is BC on “the cusp of contact.” The essays in this collection include fascinating, though largely forgotten, life stories of the frontier—that space between contact and settlement, where, for a brief moment, anything seemed possible. This volume, featuring over thirty archival photographs and illustrations, makes these important and very readable essays accessible to a broader audience for the first time.




Death of a Secret


Book Description

Private Investigator Barbara O’Grady hunts a killer in an investigation with roots deep in the past. What long-buried secrets will she uncover—and who will pay? P. I. Barbara O’Grady has a snarky sense of humor, an affinity for impossible cases, and a past she pretends doesn’t matter. When she takes on yet another cheating husband case, Barbara quickly finds herself tangled up in decades-old secrets. And chasing a killer. With a client she admires but can’t—quite—trust, and the murders piling up, nothing is making sense. Except Barbara’s uneasy feeling that she’s running out of time. As Barbara searches for answers buried deep in the past, the killer is searching for her…




Legacy of Trees


Book Description

An engaging, informative, and visually stunning tour of the numerous native, introduced, and ornamental tree species found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, combining a wealth of botanical knowledge with a fascinating social history of the city’s most celebrated landmark. Measuring 405 hectares (1,001 acres) in the heart of downtown Vancouver, Stanley Park is home to more than 180,000 trees. Ranging from centuries-old Douglas firs to ornamental Japanese cherry trees, the trees of Stanley Park have come to symbolize the ancient roots and diverse nature of the city itself. For years, Nina Shoroplova has wandered through Vancouver’s urban forest and marvelled at the multitude of tree species that flourish there. In Legacy of Trees, Shoroplova tours Stanley Park’s seawall and beaches, wetlands and trails, pathways and lawns in every season and every type of weather, revealing the history and botanical properties of each tree species. Unlike many urban parks, which are entirely cultivated, the area now called Stanley Park was an ancient forest before Canada’s third-largest city grew around it. Tracing the park’s Indigenous roots through its colonial history to its present incarnation as the jewel of Vancouver, visited by eight million locals and tourists annually, Legacy of Trees is a beautiful tribute to the trees that shape Stanley Park’s evolving narrative.




Reservations


Book Description

A personal investigation into the real price of our holidays. Travel was once a marker of sophistication. Now the tourist is just as likely to be viewed as one locust in an annihilating swarm. Tourists face tough questions: When does economic opportunity become exploitation? How do we justify the use of climate-changing jet fuel? And can we be sure our tourist dollars aren’t propping up corrupt and brutal regimes? Now, as the world returns to travel, Steve Burgess asks: Is satisfying our own wanderlust worth the trouble it causes everyone else? Or is the tourist guilty of the charges—from voyeurism to desecration—levelled against them by everyone from environmentalists to exhausted locals to superior-feeling fellow tourists who have traded in the tour bus for “authentic experiences”? In this smart and sharply funny interrogation of our right to roam, Burgess looks into the traveller’s soul, sharing the stories of some of his most personally-significant travels, from Rome to Tana Toraja, and looking to studies and experts around the world for insight into why we travel and how we could do it better. And throughout, he tells the story of a month in Japan—his first trip outside North America—and the whirlwind cross-cultural romance that brought him there, and took him on a journey around the country in search of wonder and maybe even love.