Uncategorized Archives - Daniel Gawthrop

Stuck in the middle with you

Post published:August 27, 2023

Book review by Daniel Gawthrop posted on British Columbia Review on August 27, 2023 Almost Brown: A Mixed Race Family Memoir by Charlotte Gill Toronto: Penguin RandomHouse, 2023 $36 hardcover / 9780735243033 The author of various fiction and narrative non-fiction titles, including the tree-planting memoir Eating Dirt, Sunshine Coast-based Charlotte Gill is a gifted storyteller. Her new memoir explores how the author’s self-image and sense of the world were shaped her family’s experience of multiple…

So, how do you like him now?

Post published:March 18, 2022

The people knew nothing about Putin. And in three months he became president. Of course, we thought it was cool. We thought we’d saved the country from the Communists, from Primakov and Luzhkov. But now it’s not clear which outcome would have been worse. —Former Kremlin banker Sergei Pugachev, quoted in Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on The West, by Catherine Belton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) …

Reconciliation: What’s next?

Post published:March 11, 2020

Since the issue of Wet’suwet’en land rights and title has landed where it truly belongs—in a discussion amongst the Wet’suwet’en people themselves, the only ones who ought to be determining the relationship between hereditary and elected leadership—I’ve done some more reflecting on the meaning of “reconciliation,” a word that’s been thrown around a lot during the ongoing Coastal GasLink pipeline dispute. Last month, I was in Ottawa on business when I happened to drop in on one…

Indigenous lives, white agendas: A lesson

Post published:February 20, 2020

Twenty-one years ago, when I was far less cynical about the potential of journalism to wake people up about climate change, I wrote a book called Vanishing Halo: Saving the Boreal Forest (Greystone/Douglas & McIntyre, 1999). Commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation, the book’s purpose was to raise awareness about the coniferous crown that serves as the earth’s northern lungs: the array of plants, wildlife and people that inhabit the boreal region, the forest’s importance in…

Reading 2019: A catholicity of interests

Post published:December 30, 2019

NEW WESTMINSTER—The last time I posted a blog about my previous year’s reading (2016), the list was comprised of eleven books written by men. All but four of the authors were white, and the top two have since been “cancelled.” (The first, already in hot water for profiting from dubious claims to Indigenous ancestry, was Joseph Boyden; the second, two years before publishing a self-exculpatory essay by serial sex abuser Jian Gomeshi in The New York Review…