A stunning art book featuring twenty-three west coast artists and craftspeople who work in metal as their primary medium. Out of the Fire: Metalworkers along the Salish Sea is a breathtaking celebration of a diverse group of contemporary artists and artisans, who explore the creative possibilities of an ancient medium. From sculptors to farriers, forgers to blacksmiths, jewellers to metalsmiths, and weapons makers to welders, the twenty-three people featured in this book reflect the wide range of talent, skill, and ingenuity that exists on Canada's southwest coast. Miran Elbakyan captures movement and whimsicality in his Surrealist-inspired sculptures. Nycki Samuels earned the moniker "Tough Tiny Welder" on the road to artistic freedom, as she fought her way through the male-dominated world of industrial metalwork. Ts'uts'umutl Luke Marston began making jewellery when he was still a teenager, honing the skills of his craft at the same time as he was learning about the imagery and oral narratives of the Coast Salish Peoples. Combining a love of technology, fashion, and the industrial arts, Bev Petow has the remarkable ability to transform cold, hard steel into delicate-looking dresses. With over one hundred spectacular colour and black-and-white photographs of the artists and their works, this book is a stunning behind-the-scenes look at those who choose fire as their tool and metal as their raw material.

The book draws on the evidence of landscape archaeology, palaeoenvironmental studies, ethnohistory and animal tracking to address the neglected topic of how we identify and interpret past patterns of movement in the landscape. It challenges the pessimism of previous generations which regarded prehistoric routes such as hollow ways as generally undatable. The premise is that archaeologists tend to focus on ‘sites’ while neglecting the patterns of habitual movement that made them part of living landscapes. Evidence of past movement is considered in a multi-scalar way from the individual footprint to the long distance path including the traces created in vegetation by animal and human movement. It is argued that routes may be perpetuated over long timescales creating landscape structures which influence the activities of subsequent generations. In other instances radical changes of axes of communication and landscape structures provide evidence of upheaval and social change. Palaeoenvironmental and ethnohistorical evidence from the American North West coast sets the scene with evidence for the effects of burning, animal movement, faeces deposition and transplantation which can create readable routes along which are favoured resources. Evidence from European hunter-gatherer sites hints at similar practices of niche construction on a range of spatial scales. On a local scale, footprints help to establish axes of movement, the locations of lost settlements and activity areas. Wood trackways likewise provide evidence of favoured patterns of movement and past settlement location. Among early farming communities alignments of burial mounds, enclosure entrances and other monuments indicate axes of communication. From the middle Bronze Age in Europe there is more clearly defined evidence of trackways flanked by ditches and fields. Landscape scale survey and excavation enables the dating of trackways using spatial relationships with dated features and many examples indicate long-term continuity of routeways. Where fields flank routeways a range of methods, including scientific approaches, provide dates. Prehistorians have often assumed that Ridgeways provided the main axes of early movement but there is little evidence for their early origins and rather better evidence for early routes crossing topography and providing connections between different environmental zones. The book concludes with a case study of the Weald of South East England which demonstrates that some axes of cross topographic movement used as droveways, and generally considered as early medieval, can be shown to be of prehistoric origin. One reason that dryland routes have proved difficult to recognise is that insufficient attention has been paid to the parts played by riverine and maritime longer distance communication. It is argued that understanding the origins of the paths we use today contributes to appreciation of the distinctive qualities of landscapes. Appreciation will help to bring about effective strategies for conservation of mutual benefit to people and wildlife by maintaining and enhancing corridors of connectivity between different landscape zones including fragmented nature reserves and valued places. In these ways an understanding of past routeways can contribute to sustainable landscapes, communities and quality of life

"The son of a prominent Japanese mathematician who came to the United States after World War II, Ken Ono was raised on a diet of high expectations and little praise. Rebelling against his pressure-cooker of a life, Ken determined to drop out of high school to follow his own path. To obtain his father’s approval, he invoked the biography of the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom his father revered, who had twice flunked out of college because of his single-minded devotion to mathematics. Ono describes his rocky path through college and graduate school, interweaving Ramanujan’s story with his own and telling how at key moments, he was inspired by Ramanujan and guided by mentors who encouraged him to pursue his interest in exploring Ramanujan’s mathematical legacy. Picking up where others left off, beginning with the great English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914, Ono has devoted his mathematical career to understanding how in his short life, Ramanujan was able to discover so many deep mathematical truths, which Ramanujan believed had been sent to him as visions from a Hindu goddess. And it was Ramanujan who was ultimately the source of reconciliation between Ono and his parents. Ono’s search for Ramanujan ranges over three continents and crosses paths with mathematicians whose lives span the globe and the entire twentieth century and beyond. Along the way, Ken made many fascinating discoveries. The most important and surprising one of all was his own humanity."

"In this wonderfully bold and speculative anthology of writings, artists and critics offer a highly persuasive set of argument and pleas for imaginative, socially responsible, and socially responsive public art.... "--Amazon.

This book is the culmination of significant multi-disciplinary work carried out by a variety of specialists, from conservators to woodworking and boatbuilding experts, exploring the history of the Poole Iron Age logboat (today imposingly displayed in the entrance to Poole Museum in Dorset) and also its functionality – or lack of – as a vessel.

Out of the Woods: Woodworkers along the Salish Sea profiles twenty-six dynamic artists who use wood to create an amazing range of work--from traditional crafts to textured bowls, from handcrafted guitars to furniture, and from ships to places of meditation.--

In Community Besieged Garth Stevenson describes the unusual circumstances that allowed English-speaking Quebecers to live in virtual isolation from their francophone neighbours for almost a century after Confederation. He describes their relations with Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale and their ambivalent response to the Quiet Revolution. New political issues - language policy, educational reform, sovereignty, and the constitution - undermined the old system of elite accommodation in Quebec, causing conflicts between anglophones and francophones and creating a new sense of anglophone identity that transcends religious differences. The changing relations of Quebec anglophones with the major political parties, as well as the role of newer entities such as Alliance Quebec and the Equality Party, are also examined. Stevenson concludes with a look at the future of anglophones in Quebec. Based in part on interviews with more than sixty English-speaking Quebecers who have played prominent parts in Quebec's political life, Community Besieged is a comprehensive and up-to-date description of the political life of this unique minority at both the federal and provincial level.