November 2020
While waiting for my next book, Becoming Vancouver: A New History, to be published -- delayed by the COVID situation -- I thought I'd introduce the project by telling some "tales of the city."
You'll recall the mega explosion that destroyed much of downtown Beirut back in August, killing more than 200 people and leaving 300,000 homeless. The cause was the careless...
Back in the day I worked for a while as an oral historian. For three summers I drove the length of the Trent-Severn Waterway in south-central Ontario, interviewing people who had lived and/or worked along the waterway. It was so long ago that I was actually using an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. One summer I got cheap digs in an old house with a group of university students. The house had...
Like so many others, my friends at The Ormsby Review are finding it difficult to navigate these troubled times.
The Ormsby is an online collection of book reviews featuring informed opinion about every book that is published in British Columbia or written by a British Columbian. If there is another such ambitious site in the country, I don't know about it.
Editor Richard Mackie runs a stripped down operation but even to do this he needs...
I wrote earlier in this space about Frederick Varley's sojourn in Vancouver, 1926-36. Not long ago I took a stroll to see if I could locate any sites in the city associated with the artist.
When they arrived in the fall of 1926, the Varley family settled into a rented bungalow on the grounds of a much larger home on...