Sobering Dilemma

A rowdy, rollicking popular history that celebrates the tales of Victoria’s drinking establishments in their heyday. From the raunchy saloons that lined Victoria’s notorious Johnson street to the lavish high-class hotel-bars like the Driard and the Empress, Aqua Vitae is a collection of fascinating true stories from the days of swinging doors, smoky bars, and five-cent beers. Read about how the quick actions of an employee of the Bee-hive saloon saved a young Emily Carr from possible death. Discover the gruesome secret uncovered by a startled worker who was prying up the floorboards of the Omineca saloon. And find out about the grisly murder of Mike Powers, the proprietor of the Garrick’s Head, a pub that still does a thriving business today. Carefully researched and accompanied by 70+ archival photos, Aqua Vitae covers the time from when the first saloon appeared in Victoria in 1851 to 1917 when prohibition shut the party down.

In the second edition of her landmark book Negotiating at an Uneven Table, Phyllis Beck Kritek explores the process of resolving conflicts in situations where unacknowledged inequity influences disputes and their outcomes. Substantially revised and expanded, this new edition will help open minds and balance the negotiation process. Throughout the book, Kritek challenges traditional approaches to dealing with inequities at the negotiation table and offers alternatives for reframing the process.

Although drinking, smoking and obesity have attracted social and moral condemnation to varying degrees for more than two hundred years, over the past few decades they have come under intense attack from the field of public health as an 'unholy trinity' of lifestyle behaviours with apparently devastating medical, social and economic consequences. Indeed, we appear to be in the midst of an important historical moment in which policies and practices that would have been unthinkable a decade ago (e.g., outdoor smoking bans, incarcerating pregnant women for drinking alcohol, and prohibiting restaurants from serving food to fat people), have become acceptable responses to the 'risks' that alcohol, tobacco and obesity are perceived to pose. Hailing from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA, and drawing on examples from all four countries, contributors interrogate the ways in which alcohol, tobacco and fat have come to be constructed as 'problems' requiring intervention and expose the social, cultural and political roots of the current public health obsession with lifestyle. No prior collection has set out to provide an in-depth examination of alcohol, tobacco and obesity through the comparative approach taken in this volume. This book therefore represents an invaluable and timely contribution to critical studies of public health, health inequities, health policy, and the sociology of risk more broadly.

Homage Rhyme is scenic memoir spanning seven decades as tag along lad of farming mom and dad at wilderness riverside during the American great depression, drought and dust bowl, as home-front kid hand during World War II, as high school scholar, athlete, actor, as casualty of disabling disease requiring alternate course, as college student, romantic, baseball coach, sports writer, as college union program director, as husband and father of two daughters and a son, as director of university centers, student activities and auxiliary services, as executive director of a bicentennial commission, as producer of world premiere stage dramas and arts expos based on rich heritage of Native American cultures, as director or residency and day camps, as executive director of an American Indian theatre company, as producer of a foundation for arts and humanities, as author of eight books, as grandfather of six children, as serene elder and kid at heart sharing my dawning, ascent, resurgence, plunges, rescues, and serendipity of memorable and sometimes incredible seventy years since 1931 emergence.

Between 1920 and 1933 the issue of prohibition proved to be the greatest challenge to Canada-U.S. relations. When the United States adopted national prohibition in 1920—ironically, just as Canada was abandoning its own national and provincial experiments with prohibition—U.S. tourists and dollars promptly headed north and Canadian liquor went south. Despite repeated efforts, Americans were unable to secure Canadian assistance in enforcing American prohibition laws until 1930. Bootleggers and Borders explores the important but surprisingly overlooked Canada-U.S. relationship in the Pacific Northwest during Prohibition. Stephen T. Moore maintains that the reason Prohibition created such an intractable problem lies not with the relationship between Ottawa and Washington DC but with everyday operations experienced at the border level, where foreign relations are conducted according to different methods and rules and are informed by different assumptions, identities, and cultural values. Through an exploration of border relations in the Pacific Northwest, Bootleggers and Borders offers insight into not only the Canada-U.S. relationship but also the subtle but important differences in the tactics Canadians and Americans employed when confronted with similar problems. Ultimately, British Columbia’s method of addressing temperance provided the United States with a model that would become central to its abandonment and replacement of Prohibition.