Tags – Review
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Not help, but solidarity
Book review
The Silence of Our Friends asks important questions. How are racist attitudes internalized or rejected by children? What does it take to earn the trust of others across boundary lines marked by race privilege? And, how can we make progress in the struggle against oppression?
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Tales of heartbreak, fury and hope
Book review
Toronto-based author Kristyn Dunnion dubs herself a “Lady Punk Warrior.” Reading The Dirt Chronicles, her most recent book, one easily grasps the aptness of the moniker.
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On to Ottawa in marvelous, meandering prose
Book review
In June 1935, hundreds of unemployed men took to the rails in what was dubbed the On to Ottawa Trek. The Time We All Went Marching is the story of one woman on the cusp of change.
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Re-envisioning reconciliation
Book review
What does reconciliation look like for Indigenous peoples in what is currently Canada? In part, argues Leanne Simpson in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, it must take the form of the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ political traditions in their nation-to-nation relationships with Canada.
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Community organizing
Book review
Those of us who are active in our communities, whether dealing with issues like homelessness or fundraising for a high school basketball team, have much to learn from the thoughts and insights of Joan Kuyek, whose experiences as a community organizer span some 30 years.
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Peak oil for preteens
Book review
Claudia Dávila’s debut graphic novel, Luz Sees the Light, sets Luz and her friends on a path to transform their fossil-fueled world.
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Our way to fight
Book review
In this book, you’ll meet Palestinians and Israelis whose struggles for peace, justice and an end to more than half a century of illegal dispossession and brutal occupation, belie the racism and harmful homogenising of history that fuel the current policies of the Zionist state.
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Witch hunts past and present
Book review
In the classic zine Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers, republished as a book with a new introduction in 2010, authors Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich provide an overview of the repression and exclusion of women lay healers in Europe and the United States. The authors explore the connection between the witch hunts in Europe and attempts to eliminate and discredit women healers, as well as the rise of an elitist and male-dominated medical establishment in the United States.
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Twenty years since the blockades
Book review
Leanne Simpson and Kiera Ladner’s new edited collection, This is an Honour Song, seeks to recognize the significance of the events at Kanehsatake for Indigenous peoples, as well as for Canada. The collection does not focus on rehashing the details of events at the pines (a number of good books already exist in this regard), but explores the broader resonance and echoes of the Kanien’kehaka resistance.
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Pubs, pulpits and prairie fires
Book review
Between 1929 and 1935, the Great Depression triggered Canada’s descent into what remains the worst economic downturn in the country’s history. By 1935, the number of jobless had topped one million. On June 3, 1935, over 1,200 unemployed and single men from British Columbia relief camps left Vancouver to “ride the rail” to Ottawa and deliver demands for work and wages to the Conservative government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett.
