Bologna’s success is just one of several interesting stories in Judith Dellheim and Jason Prince’s engaging, if at times frustrating, Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay to Ride Elevators. The chapters, written by academics, journalists, and activists, delve into the “political side” of the question of how best to address the mobility needs of a city.
As editor Andy Brown sets out in the foreword of this collection of essays and interviews, BDQ refers to Quebec comics or bande dessinée québécoise, just as manga refers to comics from Japan. The collection is divided into four time periods, with the longest section devoted to “The Nineties,” evidently an ebullient period for sequential art, particularly in Montreal.
This playful nihilism roots Jonah Campbell’s writing in Eaten Back to Life, a collection of forty-four short essays, each a rambling meditation on food, booze, and philosophy. It’s the follow-up to 2012’s Food and Trembling, also from Invisible Publishing, and both volumes cull pieces from Campbell’s long-running blog, Still Crapulent After All These Years.
In Wrestling with Life, his stirring memoir written with Richard King, George Reinitz looks back on a life coloured by both tragedy and triumph. His story reveals the horrors of Auschwitz, the loss of family, struggles in a new country, and achievements won through hard work, determination, and an open heart.
But behind the lofty reasons for establishing a national park – preservation of the environment, educational opportunities – are the coarse politically and economically motivated attempts at creating “a coherent national story,” some of them as cringe-worthy as they are fascinating. It is this forging of a national story that Claire Elizabeth Campbell, associate professor of history at Bucknell University, deciphers in Nature, Place, and Story.
On the cover of Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids, a portrait of author Zebedee Nungak appears superimposed on a photo of what Hydro-Québec calls “the giant’s staircase.” This spillway for the Robert-Bourassa Dam on the La Grande River boasts ten steps blasted from bedrock that each exceeds the span of two football fields. It is a tourist attraction of the James Bay region – symbolic of the monumental scale and technological prowess of a power-generating system that the Quebec government trumpeted as “the Project of the Century” when announcing plans to build it in 1971. For the Inuit of Nunavik, however, the giant’s staircase conjures up the provincial Goliath that once threatened their homeland in northern Quebec with proposed hydroelectric installations on the Great Whale and Caniapiscau Rivers.
Smitten by Giraffe is very readable, even for those who don’t gravitate towards books about science. It can feel disjointed, jumping as it does from Dagg’s research to her feminist activism and back again, but it is a memoir, after all: life doesn’t move in a straight line, especially for trailblazers.
Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian Classic is a fascinating read for anybody interested in Canadian domestic history and cooking.
Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life, edited by Concordia University professor Sherry Simon, collects scholarly perspectives on the multilingual city, ranging from historical and political to activist and creative points of view.
What does it mean when images of femininity are staged as near clones or repeating figures? That’s the question novelist and UQAM professor Martine Delvaux tackles in Serial Girls: From Barbie to Pussy Riot, recently translated into English by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood.
Songs Upon the Rivers engages readers in an important and timely conversation about the legacies of French colonialism in North America, but its unorthodox methods and questionable historical approach should leave readers with more questions than answers.
Considering the complexities and difficulties surrounding questions of Indigeneity and non-Indigeneity in Canada, few would have the expertise and courage required to write “A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues.” But this is exactly what Métis author and educator Chelsea Vowel has done.
