Content area
Full Text
Texada Tapestry: A History Heather Harbord Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2011. 288 pp. $32.95 cloth.
Edge of the Sound: Memoirs of a West Coast Log Salvager Jo Hammond Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2011. 272 pp. $24.95 paper.
The Sunshine Coast from Gibsons to Powell River Howard White Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2012. 160 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Heather Harbord 's Texada Tapestry: A History is the only one of these three books that calls itself "a history." Yet together they illustrate the remarkable range of local histories coming out of coastal British Columbia. Jo Hammond's Edge of the Sound: Memoirs of a West Coast Log Salvager is an intensely personal history of forty years of life, love, and death while chasing stray logs on the shores of Howe Sound. Howard White's updated Tèe Sunshine Coast from Gibsons to Powell River is another in Harbour's series of "coffee table books with content" on different regions around the inland sea, and it offers the usual bit of history along with everything else - geography, current affairs, gossip, and just plain interesting tidbits. Together the three tomes present a rich collage of settler life on the east side of the Strait, north of the big smoke.
"Texada Tapestry" is a misnomer; it is more of a well-written patchwork than a tapestry: first a tiny bit of pre-contact Aboriginal history and natural history, then a detailed history of resource exploitation on the Strait's largest island, and finally an extensively researched social history. Harbord's own deep history as a former geology librarian at London's Royal School of Mines serves her well. The long list of mining and quarrying operations that have transformed the face of Texada Island since the 1880 s - iron, gold, copper, limestone - is richly documented. We learn of the overblown "Texada iron scandal" that brought down Premier Amor de Cosmos moments after British Columbia had joined...