$7.95 1 2 KELVIN BROWNE Baroness Black MARIANNE ACKERMAN Dramatic Solutions 0 2 Y R SANDRA MARTIN Animal Tracts DAVID MACFARLANE John Lennon and Me A U R B E F / Y R A Literary Review of Canada U N A J A JOURNAL OF IDEAS Celebrate the new year with AWARD WINNERS from UBC Press ançoi Don Fr s-Xav ald an ier G nadia Smil J.W C adian arne Ca n Poli ey Pri . Da Histo au Medal tical ze foe rical Scien J.W. Book Associa ce Associ on Dafo Prize tion ati e Fou ndation Best Bo ok in Cana an Pol eration da C adian itica Fed for t Priz Hi l Hist he Hu e stori ory mani cal A ties an ssociation d Social Science A Bes lbert t Edit Cana Core Ca ed C dian y Priz nadia ollect Histo e n Stu ion rical A Indigenous dies N ssociation Histo etwork Canadian ry Bo Histo ok Prize rical A ssociation Joh Atla n T. S ntic Osgoo ayw Boo Th e de Soc ell Pr Atla k Aw iety fo ize ntic B ard r Cana ook dian Leg ry Awards al Histo Sign up for our newsletter at ubcpress.ca to receive the latest UBC Press news, including events, specials, and new releases. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 ◆ VOLUME 29 ◆ NUMBER 1 A JOURNAL OF IDEAS FIRST WORD CLIMATE CRISIS BYGONE DAYS Shot in the Arm Paws for Thought In the Eye of the Historian Kyle Wyatt The costs of man’s best friends Three takes on Louis Riel 3 Susan Crean Christopher Dummitt FURTHERMORE 13 24 Murray Angus, Tamsin Tahoma, An Arctic Fable Comfort Foods Heather Menzies, Sharon Hamilton Once upon the melting ice The tragic tale of a cookbook 5 Sandra Martin Hattie Klotz 15 PLAYTIME 27 The Magical History Tour COMPELLING PEOPLE Front-Line Worker A family’s postwar trials It was the summer of ’69 Lives Less Ordinary John Fraser David Macfarlane Peter Mansbridge’s unsung heroes 28 6 J. D. M. Stewart 17 THE PUBLIC SQUARE THE ARTS Her Little Black Book A Maritime Murder Stage Management Barbara Amiel doesn’t give a damn Fourteen fixes for a broken theatre The final book by Silver Donald Cameron Kelvin Browne Marianne Ackerman Frank Macdonald 18 30 9 The Colossus LITERATURE Je me souviens de quoi? Notes on our twelfth prime minister A fresh take on the beautiful province J. L. Granatstein No Country for Young Women Graham Fraser 20 The latest from Ava Homa 10 Keith Garebian THIS AND THAT RUMINATIONS 34 Cobbled Together Home Is Lagos The Great Cover-Up Me and the shoemaker Our pandemic wasteland Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel Michael Humeniuk Marlo Alexandra Burks Brett Josef Grubisic 21 11 35 For Your Reference BACKSTORY OUR NATURAL WORLD Citing foreign influence On the Banks of the Miramichi Michael McNichol Metaphor Surrendered Fire seized upon the town 22 Harriet Alida Lye Margaret Conrad Graphic Narrative 36 12 Drawn-out dramas of the North J. R. Patterson 23 POETRY Kate Marshall-Flaherty, p. 7 Jocko Benoit, p. 14 Betsy Struthers, p. 16 Maureen Hynes, p. 29 OUR CONTRIBUTORS Marianne Ackerman watches from Montreal. John Fraser is the executive chair of the David Macfarlane has published several books. National NewsMedia Council. His new memoir, Likeness, is due out in May. Kelvin Browne is the executive director of the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto. Keith Garebian wrote Mini Musings: Sandra Martin is the author of A Good Death: Miniature Thoughts on Theatre and Poetry. Making the Most of Our Final Choices. Marlo Alexandra Burks is working on a book on the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal. J. L. Granatstein writes on Canadian political Michael McNichol serves as co-chair of the and military history. Forum for Information Professionals. Margaret Conrad wrote At the Ocean’s Edge: A History of Nova Scotia to Confederation. Brett Josef Grubisic will publish his fifth novel, J. R. Patterson divides his time between My Two-Faced Luck, in 2021. Canada and Portugal. Susan Crean authored Finding Mr. Wong. Michael Humeniuk daydreams in Toronto. J. D. M. Stewart is a teacher at Bishop Christopher Dummitt hosts the podcast 1867 & Strachan School, in Toronto, and the author of All That and teaches history at Trent University. Hattie Klotz is a writer, journalist, and Being Prime Minister. gourmet in Ottawa. Graham Fraser is a senior fellow at the ◆ Graduate School of Public and International Frank Macdonald reads and writes in Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Cape Breton. His latest novel is Tinker and Blue. On the cover: “Damn Yankees,” by Salini Perera. WITH THANKS TO OUR SUPPORTERS Made possible with the support of Ontario Creates Winner of the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A CBC Best Book of the Year An Apple Best Book of the Year A Kobo Best Book of the Year “A WILD ADVENTURE SPUN IN EXALTED PROSE: THE BOOK I’VE BEEN WANTING TO READ FOR YEARS.” — Marina Endicott, award- winning author of The Difference “A BRILLIANT LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT.” — Michael Redhill, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of Bellevue Square @HOUSEOFANANSI ANANSI PUBLISHES HOUSEOFANANSI.COM VERY GOOD BOOKS FIRST WORD Shot in the Arm N TO-MORROW, DATED AUGUST 1803, THE Sadly, V-Day never arrives for Basil and Lucy’s Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth young son. Basil appreciates the urgency of the portrays a couple weighing the pros and situation, but he has Rousseau’s Emilius and cons of various preventive measures Sophia to finish and some errands to run. He against smallpox. The wife, Lucy, wants thinks he can buy some time. He soon finds Ito have her only son inoculated in the “ common out, though, that “a few hours may sometimes way,” by which she means variolation, a mild make all the difference between health and sick- but (hopefully) preventive infection. Her hus- ness, happiness and misery.” His son contracts band, Basil, knows there’s something a little smallpox and dies. more cutting-edge out there: “I think we had So far in this pandemic, we have lost more better have him vaccined.” than a million and a half people, and the daily Edgeworth, a literary celebrity in her day, was case numbers climb yet higher and higher. We’ll writing just five years after Edward Jenner first continue to skeptically eye strangers who sneeze described vaccination, in An Inquiry into the in public for months to come, just as we’ll con- Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, and tinue to wear masks (yes, even the vaccinated the technique’s efficacy was still under review by among us). But the banner headline is hard to the Royal College of Physicians. In her novella, ignore: “A Fix to the Crisis Is Near.” she paints Basil as a learned man who keeps up Transfixed as we are by the cure that is, still with the papers, a man who sees tremendous too many of us are blind to the cure that isn’t. potential in medical advancement. But despite “To put it simply,” the secretary-general of the being informed of current events and despite his United Nations, António Guterres, said in a wife’s desperate urging —“Oh, my dearest love, major climate address at Columbia University on do not put it off till to-morrow”— Basil takes a December 2, “the state of the planet is broken.” rather unhurried approach. “My friend, Mr. L–, The symptoms of this other sickness are legion: has had all his children vaccined,” he tells Lucy, We are losing our ice, our wetlands, our for- “and I just wait to see the effect.” ests, our coral reefs, our fish stocks. Even with We are all Basil now. lockdown measures in place for much of 2020, In a head-spinning turn of events, so-called carbon dioxide levels are climbing, methane V-Day arrived sooner than many of us expected is pouring out of the thawing permafrost, and and mass vaccination against COVID-19 is now nitrous oxide emissions have gone up 123 per- under way, with a ninety-year-old retired shop cent — once again threatening the ozone layer. clerk from Coventry receiving the first dose of The fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the torna- the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 8, does, the heat waves are more biblical with each at 6:31 in the morning. (Eighty-one-year-old passing season. And, as Guterres reminds us, William Shakespeare, of Warwickshire, received “there is no vaccine for the planet.” the second injection: “A mark marvellous well No tomorrow comes in To-morrow, because shot, for they both did hit it,” indeed.) Basil ignores the increasingly grim reality that Pfizer should soon be joined by Moderna, stares him in the face. So confident is he in AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson in deliv- human ingenuity to solve a crisis on a timeline ering millions of doses around the world, and of his own making, so caught up with his own it seems that most Canadians are willing to get affairs, that he ignores the well-being of the next in line and roll up their sleeves — after they’ve generation. But once the mistakes really start to had a chance to see the effect, of course. In early compound, there is no going back. “I felt the December, an Ipsos/Radio-Canada poll found consciousness that they were all occasioned by that while 63 percent of respondents plan to my own folly,” he finally admits.