Years ago we were driving along the causeway through Stanley Park talking about what to name the new dog when my (then) young son piped up from his booster seat in the rear, "What about Stanley Bark?" It was his first joke.
What brings this reminiscence to mind is that a new issue of Geist magazine has arrived on the newsstands -- making 95 times that the Vancouver-based cultural quarterly has made its way into print since it was founded in 1990 -- and it contains my regular books column, which this time considers Sean Kheraj's very fine history of Vancouver's most famous landmark, Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History.
"The City of Vancouver has always existed in tension between two ideas of itself. Stanley Park embodies this tension."
If you want to know more, you'll have to buy the magazine, which I urge you to do.