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The Ormsby Review, Canada's only provincial on-line book review site, has turned five years old.

Named for the pioneering BC historian Margaret Ormsby, the site was the brainchild of its founding editor, Richard Mackie, and his co-conspirator Alan Twigg. Five years after they launched it, Ormsby has published 1250 reviews of books by British Columbia writers and about British Columbian...

The new book is out and, I hope, selling briskly. As well, the first reviews are appearing. Here is a very nice one by Patricia Roy on the Ormsby Review website.

Professor Roy has written a great deal about Vancouver, including her own illustrated history published back in 1980. In other words she knows whereof she...

For the past couple of years a group of young filmmakers has been hard at work on a documentary series about the history of British Columbia to commemorate the 150th anniversary of 1871, the year the province became a province.

(Full disclosure: I played a very small part in the project, as a consultant and appearing briefly as one of the talking heads.)

The result, a four-part series titled British Columbia: An Untold History, will be premiering on the Knowledge...

No matter how many times it happens, the arrival on the doorstep of a new book is always special.

Well, it happened again today. My new history of Vancouver is out. Look for it in your favourite bookstore within a couple of weeks.

When I was a kid growing up on Vancouver’s west side the book shelves in the living room of my family’s home contained the usual middle-brow reading of the 1950s – Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic nuclear novel On the Beach; the odd Thomas Costain and Pearl Buck title; some volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. But the only book of my parents that I ever took down from the shelf was a copy...