A GLOBE 100 Best Book of the Year
In the grand tradition of Michener's Alaska and Rutherford's Sarum, bestselling authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths have captured the essence of one of Canada's richest settings. Beginning in the dying era of the last Ice Age and spanning thousands of years, Vancouver starts with the story of the last survivor of a Siberian people and moves through history in a dynamic tapestry. Fascinating characters come to life, including a Russian cartographer, a Scottish trapper, a Chinese peasant boy and a young woman from the desperate streets of Vancouver's downtown eastside. All share a powerful attraction to this unique, storied place.
An absorbing historical chronicle, Vancouver is a tale of human struggle and adventure, and a dazzling feat of storytelling.

Vancouver: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Cruise, David

Griffiths, Alison

Genre Fiction

Harper-perennial

VANCOUVER A Novel (Signed)

World Literature

HarperCollins Publishers Canada, Limited

Vancouver

HarperCollins Canada, Limited

Follows the human history of the city of Vancouver from the viewpoints of coastal tribes who are driven out by treasure seekers, marooned Russian explorers, Scottish fur trappers, Chinese peasants, and penny-stock promoters.

Harper

Vancouver is a startlingly beautiful city of dreams and desires. Its mountains, rivers, ocean, and islands are arresting to the eye and exciting to the soul. The long and varied human history of this magical place is irresistibly grand and eventful. Vancouver -- the city, the land -- has al-ways been a place of appetites, of licenses offered and liberties taken. Since the time the humans crossed the Bering Strait and journeyed down the Pacific Coast seeking a fabled land of plenty, Vancouver, caught between soaring mountains and a vast ocean, has been a destiny for the spirit.Beginning in the dying era of the last Ice Age, Vancouver unfolds with the story of Tooke, the last survivor of a Siberian people and ancestor to the first nations of Vancouver. Moving through history in a rich, ever-expanding tapestry, Vancouver reveals a fascinating cast of characters. Long before recorded history, a young girl faces the terrifying prospect of marriage into a faraway tribe. Hundreds of years later, a Georgian cartographer aboard a Spanish exploration fleet nearly meets his end at the hands of her descendants. In the passing of the next centuries, a Scottish trapper becomes the reluctant leader of a fur-trading outpost on Vancouver's shores, and a Chinese peasant boy seeks an elusive fortune. The burgeoning colony of Vancouver lures a turn-of-the-century British adventurer and a German noble. In modern times, a superstar singer and film actress meets her destiny in the form of a young native girl struggling to free herself from the city's impoverished downtown eastside. The characters of Vancouver are all vastly different, yet they all share something -- a powerful attraction to a grand and giving land. Their stories intertwine, touching the extremes of human experience: riches, bravery, betrayal, crime, passion, and forbidden love.

The ethical and ideological implications of cross-cultural image-making continue to stir debate among anthropologists, film scholars, and museum professionals. This innovative book focuses on the contested origins of ethnographic film from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, vividly depicting the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, the book examines museums of natural history, world's fairs, scientific and popular photography, and the early filmmaking efforts of anthropologists and commercial producers to investigate how cinema came to assume the role of mediator of cultural difference at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Wondrous Difference

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Columbia University Press

The ethical and ideological implications of cross-cultural image-making continue to stir debate among anthropologists, film scholars, and museum professionals. This innovative book focuses on the contested origins of ethnographic film from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, vividly depicting the dynamic visual culture of the period as it collided with the emerging discipline of anthropology and the new technology of motion pictures. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, the book examines museums of natural history, world's fairs, scientific and popular photography, and the early filmmaking efforts of anthropologists and commercial producers to investigate how cinema came to assume the role of mediator of cultural difference at the beginning of the twentieth century.

From the architectural spectacle of the medieval cathedral and the romantic sublime of the nineteenth-century panorama to the techno-fetishism of today's London Science Museum, humans have gained a deeper understanding of the natural world through highly illusionistic representations that engender new modes of seeing, listening, and thinking. What unites and defines many of these wondrous spaces is an immersive view-an invitation to step inside the virtual world of the image and become a part of its universe, if only for a short time. Since their inception, museums of science and natural history have mixed education and entertainment, often to incredible, eye-opening effect. Immersive spaces of visual display and modes of exhibition send "shivers" down our spines, engaging the distinct cognitive and embodied mapping skills we bring to spectacular architecture and illusionistic media. They also force us to reconsider traditional models of film spectatorship in the context of a mobile and interactive spectator. Through a series of detailed historical case studies, Alison Griffiths masterfully explores the uncanny and unforgettable visceral power of the medieval cathedral, the panorama, the planetarium, the IMAX theater, and the science museum. Examining these structures as exemplary spaces of immersion and interactivity, Griffiths reveals the sometimes surprising antecedents of modern media forms, suggesting the spectator's deep-seated desire to become immersed in a virtual world. Shivers Down Your Spine demonstrates how immersive and interactive museum display techniques such as large video displays, reconstructed environments, and touch-screen computer interactives have redefined the museum space, fueling the opposition between public and private, science and spectacle, civic and corporate interests, voice and text, and life and death. In her remarkable study of sensual spaces, Griffiths explains why, for centuries, we keep coming back for more.

Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Film and Culture Series)

Business & Money

Industries

Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View

Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (Film and Culture Series)

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griffiths, Alison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Griffiths, Alison

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griffiths, Alison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Vancouver: A Novel

VANCOUVER A Novel (Signed)

Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver

Wondrous Difference

Wondrous Difference

Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Film and Culture Series)

Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View

Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (Film and Culture Series)