B. C. NON- FICTION PRIZE NOMINEES TALK SHOP
A conversation with the five writers whose books are up for B. C. Non- Fiction Award
The winner of the British Columbia National Award for Canadian NonFiction will be announced at a ceremony in Vancouver on Feb. 21. The shortlist was chosen by jury members, Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham, Jared Bland, books editor at The Globe and Mail, and Anna Porter, author and Canadian publisher. This is the tenth year for the $ 40,000 award, which is funded by the British Columbia Achievement Foundation. Here’s a look at each of the five nominated books.
THE JUGGLER’S CHILDREN: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us
by Carolyn Abraham
Random House
Why did you write this book?
The reasons were deeply personal in the beginning. I wanted to understand where my family had come from and the forces that had shaped our conflicted identity. I’d had those questions since childhood. But once I had my own child, finding the answers took on a kind of urgency. My parents were in their 70s then, and I knew that if there was to be any hope in learning more about our ancestry, for myself, and generations to follow, I had better get started before all their stories — and their cells — were lost to us.
I’d been writing a lot about genetics by then and I was also eager to see if DNA testing had the power to solve my family’s mysteries, particularly around the origins of two of my greatgrandfathers, a sea captain from Jamaica, and a circus juggler, said to be from China. Family stories, historical documents and genetic tests all helped to piece our past together in the end. But as test results repeatedly led me to unexpected “genetic relatives” in surprising places, I came to see the underlying story was much bigger than me and my family.
What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?
I hope readers learn from my book what I learned in the course of writing it. I hope it helps people to see and appreciate the smallness of our world. DNA really does connect all families. It doesn’t divide clans, or racial groups, no matter what stories we tell ourselves about “the other.” We’re all blood, we’re all kin. Our cultures and identities might be distinct, but our histories all overlap.
THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
by Thomas King
Anchor Canada
Why did you write this
book: As North Americans, we tend to have a poor understanding of our own history and almost no understanding of Native history.
The Inconvenient Indian was written to provide readers with a critical and accessible overview of that history and to begin a serious and sustained conversation around the whole of Native/ nonNative relations and federal Indian policy. A great many people believe that colonialism and racism are artifacts of the past. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The negative attitudes about Native people that were formed and fostered in the 16th and 17th centuries have, with only minor modifications, followed us into the 21st, and they continue to inform social opinion and federal Indian policy in Ottawa and Washington.
While there are a plethora of serious issues that need to be addressed by the governments of both countries and by Native nations — treaty violations, residential schools, sovereignty — the central question that has been constant in the sweep of Native/ nonNative history is the question of Native land. Who owns it. Who controls it. Who decides how it is to be used.
What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?
My hope is that readers will come away from the book with a better understanding of the history of Native people and with a more precise appreciation for the role and importance of land in that history.
THE DOGS ARE EATING THEM NOW:
Our War in Afghanistan
by Graeme Smith
Knopf Canada
Why did you write this book?
I recently saw video footage of myself from those years in Kandahar, and wow — I look rough.
I’ve got dark circles under my eyes and my voice sounds like it comes from an older man.
The daily job of collecting the news in southern Afghanistan, tallying up the awfulness and stupidity ... it broke me.
I needed to get away from the war. The Globe and Mail gave me a book leave and I spent most of a year sitting in cafes, staring out the window, listening to my audio recordings.
I wrote the book as a way of digesting all the things that happened.
What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?
I want readers to care about Afghanistan.
Not just in the general way that rich people are usually exhorted to care about poorer parts of the world — no, I want Canadians to feel a sense of responsibility for southern Afghanistan. We spilled a lot of blood in that place.
We had great ideas about how to bring peace and stability. The result was less peace, uncertain stability.
Canada is leaving serious unfinished business in the south.
I’m not saying we need to send more troops, because we’ve seen that a huge presence of foreign soldiers did not work.
But there’s a lot that Canada could be doing to support the Afghans who are now coping with this ugly mess.
THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be
by J. B. MacKinnon
Random House
Why did you write this book?
This book came out of a pretty typical modern experience: I went back to my hometown and found that a favourite patch of nature had been replaced by a housing development. It was a personal encounter with the way the natural world disappears, inch by inch and year by year, and it made we want to know exactly how much that place had changed over time.
I went digging in old pioneer diaries and explorers’ journals, and discovered that my childhood landscape had been missing a whole menagerie of animals — elk, caribou, wolves, grizzly bears, maybe even bison. From there, I went on to realize that people today have lost sight of what nature really looks like.
What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?
I want readers to come away from this book seeing nature with new eyes. The natural world as we know it is a shadow of what it was, even here in a province that is wilder than almost anywhere on earth. We used to have grizzlies in the Okanagan. There used to be caribou all over the Cariboo. The south coast was as wild as the north coast, and the north coast was wilder than anything we know today. We need to recognize these losses, but not be depressed by them. Instead, we can use this awareness to set a higher bar for what nature can be in the future.
THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE:
The Road to 1914
by Margaret MacMillan Allen Lane
Why did you write this book:
The outbreak of the First World War is one of the great puzzles of history. There are so many possible explanations whether nationalism, imperial rivalries, or the pre- 1914 arms races, and so many possible culprits from the military with their plans to political leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Or was there something in European civilization itself that made it reckless and belligerent?
The debate over its causes started almost as soon as the war broke out and has gone on ever since. We still cannot agree on how or why that dreadful and destructive conflict started. There may be as many as 30,000 works on the subject in English alone.
I thought the time had come, 100 years later, to take a fresh look and that perhaps I, as a Canadian historian, might bring some additional distance to it. I have no axes to grind as a British or German historian might.
What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?
It was not foreordained that there would be a war. There were as many forces pushing for peace as for war. So I hope to remind readers that very little in history is inevitable — that there are choices. Europe’s leaders made the wrong ones in 1914.