Bøker av John Belshaw

Literary Nonfiction. Photography. Vancouver Sun books list: 30 best reads from B.C. and beyond. It was an era of gambling, smuggling rings, grifters, police corruption, bootleggers, brothels, murders, and more. It was also a time of intensified concern with order, conformity, structure, and restrictions. VANCOUVER NOIR provides a fascinating insight into life in the Terminal City, noir-style. These are visions of the city, both of what it was and what some of its citizens hoped it would either become or conversely cease to be. The photographs--most of which look like stills from period movies featuring detectives with chiselled features, tough women, and bullet-ridden cars--speak to the styles of the Noir era and tell us something special about the ways in which a city is made and unmade. The authors argue that noir-era values and perspectives are to be found in the photographic record of the city in this era, specifically in police and newspaper pictures. These photographs document changing values by emphasizing behaviours and sites that were increasingly viewed as deviant by the community's elite. They chart an age of rising moral panics. Public violence, smuggling rings, police corruption, crime waves, the sex trade, and the glamorization of sex in burlesques along and nearby Granville Street's neon alley belonged to an array of public concerns against which media and political campaigns were repeatedly launched. VANCOUVER NOIR: City comes of age in fascinating text...City outgrew its steam-age industrial economy, but the changes didn't come easily or overnight...This is a book about working-class Vancouver in the three decades between, say, the opening of the Marine Building in 1930 and the death, in 1959, of Errol Flynn, in the arms of his teenage girlfriend after an enthusiastic evening at the Penthouse Cabaret on Seymour Street. It's illustrated with about 150 maps and black-and-white photos, including shots of murder victims and other crime scenes: the sort of images that always contain a great deal of visual information. --Vancouver Sun Much like a ride on the Giant Dipper rollercoaster at Happyland (the 1930s precursor to Playland), VANCOUVER NOIR is chock full of informative thrills, spills, and chills.--BC Studies The atmosphere of the mean streets is conveyed in the book's many photographs: black-and-white images of rain-slick pavement, crime scenes, nightclubs, mobsters and hookers...VANCOUVER NOIR retrieves this disreputable side of the city's history and presents it in all its black-and-white glory.--Geist

Literary Nonfiction. Canadian History. BC Books for Everybody selection. PRIVATE GRIEF, PUBLIC MOURNING is a historical investigation of mourning sites and practices within the context of the province of British Columbia. The authors are concerned, primarily, with the rise of the roadside death memorial in the late twentieth century. They argue that RDMs are not a marginal, quirky phenomenon but part of a longer and complex story about the meaning of both death and grieving, one more thread in a long tapestry of public exhibitions of grief that serve to announce to the watching world who we are. PRIVATE GRIEF, PUBLIC MOURNING is an important contribution to the study of vernacular and popular culture in British Columbia. It provides an insightful, sensitive, yet rigorous treatment of a delicate topic. Historians, geographers, and anthropologists of British Columbia will want to have this book on their shelves, and its images, accessible prose, and familiar topic also make it of interest to a broader, non-academic audience.--BC Studies A catalogue of the form and evolution of grieving rituals and associated public memorials in BC's history, with a particular emphasis on the common, diverse and often whimsical roadside memorial.--Vancouver Review With vivid images of a variety of different shrines and monuments built across BC, this book helps to delve into the human emotion of grief and why taking it into a public space can provide such comfort to one mourning individual and such discomfort to others.--Broken Pencil

Becoming British Columbia investigates critical moments in the demographic record of British Columbia, including catastrophic epidemics, immigrant rushes, forced migrations, the fertility transition, and the baby boom, in an accessible yet scholarly and provocative way.