Finalist for 2006 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Shortlisted for George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing Each year, over eight million people visit Stanley Park, a 400-hectare (1000-acre) haven of beauty that offers a backdrop of majestic cedars and firs and an environment teeming with wildlife just steps from the sidewalks and skyscrapers of Vancouver. But few visitors stop to contemplate the secret past of British Columbia's most popular tourist destination. Officially opened in 1888, Stanley Park was born alongside the city of Vancouver, so it is easy to assume that the park was a pristine wilderness when it was first created. But much of it had been logged and it was home to a number of settlements. Aboriginal people lived at the villages of Whoi Whoi, now Lumberman's Arch, and nearby Chaythoos. Some of the immigrant Hawaiians earlier employed in the fur trade took jobs at the lumber mills that dotted Burrard Inlet from the 1860s and settled at "Kanaka Ranch," which was located just outside the park's southeast boundary. Others resided at Brockton Point on the peninsula's eastern tip. Only in 1958 was the last of the many families forced out of their homes and the park returned to its supposed "pristine" character. Working in collaboration with descendants of the families who once lived in the park area, historian Jean Barman skilfully weaves together the families' stories with archival documents, Vancouver Parks Board records and court proceedings to reveal a troubling, yet deeply important facet of BC's history.

If we want to preserve what's still left of the natural world, we need to stop using so much of it. And, says veteran environmental activist Matt Hern, cities are the best chance we have left for a truly ecological future . . . but what does it take to make a truly sustainable city? Common Ground in a Liquid City is a fun and engaging look at the future of urban life. Hern takes us on a journey through over a dozen urban centers, from Vancouver to Istanbul, Las Vegas, and beyond, exploring the history and current composition of cities around the globe and highlighting the elements of each that make it livable. Each of Hern's ten chapters focuses on a central theme of city life: diversity, street life, crime, population density, water and natural life, gentrification, and globalism. What emerges in the end is an appealing portrait of what the urban future might look like—environmentally friendly, locally focused, and governed from below. Matt Hern is an inveterate city dweller and an environmental and education activist. The editor of Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader and the author of Deschooling Our Lives and Field Day, he founded Vancouver's Car-Free Day and is the director of the Purple Thistle Center for alternative education. These days, he lives in Vancouver with his partner and daughters and lectures widely around the globe.

In 1963, Jimmy Wynn was the second most famous man in America. The comedian's uncanny impression of the President made him a star. But when the genuine article died in a hail of bullets on a sunny afternoon in New Orleans, Jimmy's career met a fate almost as grisly. What happened to the funny man afterward was a mystery no one cared to solve. Nearly 25 years later, Nathan Grant, an ambitious young journalist, discovers the trail Jimmy cut through the entertainment netherworld. He soon realizes this forgotten court jester may have played a very serious part in the country's favorite conspiracy theory. Grant's strange and increasingly dangerous odyssey takes him from a dingy New York record store to the showrooms of Las Vegas, a ghost town in the Mojave Desert, and even a dinner theatre in Niagara Falls. A dark comedy about the cost of fame, Jason Anderson's "Showbiz" is the story of a man who became a punchline and a writer who is desperate to find out how the rest of the joke goes.

An engaging, informative, and visually stunning tour of the numerous native, introduced, and ornamental tree species found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, combining a wealth of botanical knowledge with a fascinating social history of the city’s most celebrated landmark. Measuring 405 hectares (1,001 acres) in the heart of downtown Vancouver, Stanley Park is home to more than 180,000 trees. Ranging from centuries-old Douglas firs to ornamental Japanese cherry trees, the trees of Stanley Park have come to symbolize the ancient roots and diverse nature of the city itself. For years, Nina Shoroplova has wandered through Vancouver’s urban forest and marvelled at the multitude of tree species that flourish there. In Legacy of Trees, Shoroplova tours Stanley Park’s seawall and beaches, wetlands and trails, pathways and lawns in every season and every type of weather, revealing the history and botanical properties of each tree species. Unlike many urban parks, which are entirely cultivated, the area now called Stanley Park was an ancient forest before Canada’s third-largest city grew around it. Tracing the park’s Indigenous roots through its colonial history to its present incarnation as the jewel of Vancouver, visited by eight million locals and tourists annually, Legacy of Trees is a beautiful tribute to the trees that shape Stanley Park’s evolving narrative.

“The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied,” writes Jean Barman, “and it is up to each of us to act as best we can.” The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class. Working to recognize past actors that have been underrepresented in mainstream histories, Barman’s focus is BC on “the cusp of contact.” The essays in this collection include fascinating, though largely forgotten, life stories of the frontier—that space between contact and settlement, where, for a brief moment, anything seemed possible. This volume, featuring over thirty archival photographs and illustrations, makes these important and very readable essays accessible to a broader audience for the first time.

Urban parks are a much-loved feature of the city environment. However, our knowledge of the true scale of their impact remains uneven. Much work has been done on their origins and design features, but this book aims to extend this beyond the nineteenth century, examining the fuller flowering of these valuable spaces in the early decades of the twentieth century. Encompassing themes such as social and political usage, parks as employers and the dangers posed by such freely accessible spaces, the book examines a range of parks in cities such as Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Leeds, Preston, Hull and Cardiff and challenges the prevailing myths about their meaning for their users. This study's timeframe spans almost 100 years of unprecedented social, cultural, political and economic changes and allows for the consideration of the expansion and commercialisation of leisure opportunities for the public. Urban parks played a significant role in this — the book places parks firmly in the context of the evolving city and examines the importance of green space to the urban citizen during this most fascinating of historical periods.

Private Investigator Barbara O’Grady hunts a killer in an investigation with roots deep in the past. What long-buried secrets will she uncover—and who will pay? P. I. Barbara O’Grady has a snarky sense of humor, an affinity for impossible cases, and a past she pretends doesn’t matter. When she takes on yet another cheating husband case, Barbara quickly finds herself tangled up in decades-old secrets. And chasing a killer. With a client she admires but can’t—quite—trust, and the murders piling up, nothing is making sense. Except Barbara’s uneasy feeling that she’s running out of time. As Barbara searches for answers buried deep in the past, the killer is searching for her…