Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, women were going missing at an alarming rate from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area. But despite the best efforts of the women’s families, friends and others – like the community workers who came into contact with them – to report them missing, and despite warnings from experts within the law enforcement community that Vancouver had a serial killer problem, the Vancouver Police Department would choose to ignore that for nearly twenty years, often lying to concerned relatives about their missing loved-ones’ […]
Passion Play
I had hoped to have this review in for Canada Day, but if I’m lucky, I’ll have it ready before Robbie Robertson’s birthday (July 5) is over. Robertson is a musician perhaps best known for his songwriting and guitar playing for the Band, and in this memoir, he describes his journey from a 16-year-old school drop out on the road with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks through his successful but tumultuous years with the Band. I picked up the book because I was already familiar […]
Well I, see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein is apparently one of the classic books on the sixties. After reading it, I can see why it’s garnered so many accolades. Prior to picking this up, I only really had vague notions of who Edie was, that all centred around her position as muse/decoration to Andy Warhol. Painstakingly compiled from interviews from the many that knew her, whether they be family, friends, or hangers-on (both famous and non-famous) covering her family history, childhood, explosion on to the New […]
When the author outshines her subject…
Usually the research leading to a book is a means to an end. But with this one, I feel like the book is the means, and the real story lies in the lead up to the book. We could talk about a man so evil he is believed to be responsible for more than 50 rapes and at least 12 homicides. A man who terrorized California for a decade…whose dauchebaggery was low enough to taunt a child, saying he was playing with mommy and daddy. […]