Book Reviews

Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, offers a timely categorical takedown of the artificial and increasingly indefensible notion of the settler nation-state. Contemporary forces like the climate crisis and the coronavirus pandemic have irreversibly disrupted the free-market economy and socio-political status quo. Walia speaks to these phenomena…

Finding Refuge in Canada: Narratives of Dislocation is a collection of stories that provide insightful perspectives from refugees, settlement workers, and refugee advocates. This book provides technical language and historical and political underpinnings that contextualize Canada’s evolving immigration policies. In so doing, these narratives emphasize the human toll that refugees endure, covering topics about arriving…

What Does Justice Look Like and Why Does God Care about It? is part of the Small Books of Radical Faith series published by Herald Press. Judith McCartney is pastor at Soul House, a congregation in Toronto focusing on those disenfranchised from the church. Judith and Colin are also co-founders of Connect City, an inner-city…

The pandemic has revealed significant issues related to the ways that many seniors are cared for in our society. Much has been exposed regarding overworked and underpaid staff and the undignified conditions that are experienced in many institutionalized care settings across our country. André Picard in his book Neglected No More provides in-depth research on…

One of the surest paths to success on a complex issue is to find common ground with allies in adjacent areas. That makes Evelyn Forget’s Basic Income for Canadians a fantastic reference for anyone concerned with the economic shifts resulting from an effective response to the climate emergency. Rapid decarbonization done right is about opportunity…

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC) recently engaged in a project of community hearings on poverty, meant to produce a report on the state of poverty in Ontario and a tool to help the public understand the multi-faceted complexity of the problem—and potential solutions. I spent around a decade of my life living with…

The Response of Weeds is both striking and evocative. While a brief read, Bertrand Bickersteth paints a concise and poetic picture of the experience of being Black on the Prairies. Raised in Alberta, Bickersteth effortlessly relays the experience of feeling like a foreigner even in a place that one is intimately acquainted with; the sideways…

How should the church respond to the large number of refugees around the world? In Refuge Reimagined, Mark and Luke Glanville show how a Biblical understanding of kinship calls Christians to welcome refugees in their communities and advocate for refugee rights nationally and internationally. The book opens with a rich discussion of kinship in the…

Seth Klein’s A Good War, is a book about solutions. Big, broad, whole-of-society, our-house-is-on-fire-and-we-must-act-like-it pathways to a better future. He asks, “If climate change is truly an emergency (and it is), how must we respond?” and “What lessons can be drawn from the ways that Canada has responded to emergencies in the past?” Ironically, A…

This book provokes questions about how (and why) we settle for failure: the failure of our society to ensure people’s rights and dignity are honoured, the failure of our current “solutions” to homelessness to bring about real social inclusion, and even the presumed “failure” of people who are marginalized by our social structures and systems….