We would like to introduce some of the great local books that have come out thus far in 2020. (With so many, this will be the first of two installments.)
Silver Rush Cover
Photo Credit: SilverySlocan.ca
Our best seller this year is Silver Rush: British Columbia’s Silvery Slocan 1891 – 1900 by former New Denver resident Peter J. Smith. Writer and historian Greg Nesteroff calls the hefty tome, “By far the most detailed and accurate account of the Silvery Slocan mining rush ever written. Highly entertaining too.” For more information, see Greg’s Nelson Star article: NelsonStar.com/community/new-book-reappraises-silvery-slocan-mining-rush.
Prize-winning poet Tom Wayman, a longtime Slocan Valley resident, recently came out with his newest collection entitled, Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time. Writing in the Vancouver Sun, Tom Sandborn prefaces his review of the work by saying, “Wayman clearly wants to demonstrate that even if poetry cannot change the world, it can provide comfort and courage – even in times as dark as our own.” Sandborn concludes, “Wayman is still at work creating poems that are as astringent and individual as human pain, and as universal as our highest hopes for a beloved community. Readers will be grateful for this record of his latest labours.”
When We Are Broken is the latest work from prolific author Luanne Armstrong, who has spent most of her life on her family’s 100-year-old Kootenay Lake farm. Writes Armstrong about this lovely book – her 22nd – that includes many photos from her farm, “Part of my life’s work has been to truly understand the place where I live and the other creatures that dwell there with me. In my daily walks, I focus on the quiet, always changing occurrences of nature. Every day, I stand, watch, listen at the margins of things, the line between mountains and sky, lake and mountains, the ragged roughness that separates human from non-human. When something snags my attention, I stop and look, I try to bring such moments home with me in the form of words or photographs. This book is a small compilation of these meditations.”
