Vancouver [Hardcover]

David Cruise (Author), Alison Griffiths (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Married coauthors Cruise and Griffiths, who have written several nonfiction books about Canada, tell the history of Vancouver from 16,000 years ago to the present in this ambitious, deeply imagined novel. In 12 parts, 12 protagonists make their ways in the region, from Manto, a boy of the peaceful Yupick tribe who settles in the area with his Tlingit wife in 13,811 B.C., to Ellie Nesbitt, a young woman ...dreaming of escape in 2003. In between these two stories, the authors loosely link 10 other tales: of Gistula, in A.D. 212, who fights to stay with her family rather than become a whaler's bride; of Soon Chong, a Chinese immigrant in search of gold in 1844; of the changing fortunes of Konrad von Shaumberg in the early 20th century. Though the authors offer much in the way of background information-they cover, for instance, primitive fishing strategies, climate change and mining techniques-they never lose sight of the human story. The contrast between the epic history and the individual stories of the authors' finely drawn characters moves the narrative forward; it leaps over millennia in a sentence and then stops to reveal the thoughts of a marooned Russian explorer. Despite the book's length, the story is surprisingly of a piece, as these singular tales-connected sometimes by related characters and sometimes simply by geography or rumor-weave together to recount the saga of a city and its people.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Credited with being one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Vancouver also boasts a fascinating history, which is brought to vivid life in this epic novel by a popular Canadian husband-and-wife writing team. Successfully avoiding the dry tone of a lecture, the authors present an admirably dynamic pageant of Vancouver history from prehistoric times to today's headlines. Each epoch on which they focus springs off the pages in precise, almost poetic prose--not a customary trait for epics like this. What is imparted here--effortlessly, to be sure--is an elaborate but absolutely compelling anthropological picture of the evolution of Canadian, particularly "Vancouverian," customs, with special focus on family and religion. From the indigenous population of the area in the Ice Age, to European explorers, to the proliferation of the trader population, to the influx of Asian immigrants, to participants in the business and commercial center the city has become, the authors create viable characters to tell the tale of Vancouver's colorful development. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1St Edition edition (July 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060197870
• ISBN-13: 978-0060197872
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,537,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Cruise and Alison Griffiths began writing together in 1983 and are the authors of seven bestselling books, including Fleecing the Lamb, Lords of the Line, Net Worth, On South Mountain, and The Great Adventure. Griffiths hosted the acclaimed financial television show "Maxed Out," for three years and she writes the nationally syndicated columns, Alison on Money and Me and My Money. They have two daughters and divide their time between their small farms in southwestern Ontario and Brooksville, Florida.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vancouver, September 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Vancouver (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I love the Pacific Northwest, and I enjoy historical fiction. The book is well-researched, and holds your attention fairly well. The problem was, I just didn't like any of the characters very much. I just wanted them all to fail and die (which is rare for me in books), with the exception of the Indian girl Gitsuli, and the story drops her right when her life is getting interesting. If you realize that many characters in real history are unlikeable, the read will be easier. Definitely not a comfort read. One of the other problems was that so many of the characters come from such divergent places, the Arctic Circle area, England, India, China, California, even Europe -- and the book spends a huge amount of time on those places, not on Vancouver. Vancouver ends up being somewhat incidental compared to the stories of all the other places -- and I wanted to know more about stories that happened in Vancouver itself, that being the title of the book. If you'd like to read a book that seems to not have much to do with Vancouver itself, you might find it interesting. Perhaps if I'd known the book was like that, I might not have been as disappointed. Can't help but think it might have been more aptly named, "Fictional Lives of People Before They Came to Vancouver, with brief follow-up of their Vancouver Lives."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The peoples of Vancouver, May 4, 2004

By 

Michael S. Toot (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vancouver (Hardcover)

Historical fiction can be tough to do, but David Cruise and Alison Griffiths have put together a very solid read that relies less on history and more on fiction. With historical fiction, writers can dip into a character's point of view and write down the nuances of thought and motivation -- something that biographies and histories rarely get to do. "Vancouver" covers numerous individuals who form the cultural basis for modern-day Vancouver. A narrative hook (actually two different ones, but they share the same origin) runs through the stories, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in passing, echoing to different effect in each major section of the book.

To the authors' credit, they do not try to be politically correct or present an activist screed for the various peoples in the guise of story. They describe the people and their conditions as best as possible, despite the inevitable guesswork needed when researching the journals or writings of less-than-objective contemporaries.

If the story has a flaw, it is that the characters become flatter and more two-dimensional the closer they get to contemporary times. This is in part by necessity, since the characters are fictionalized and must be squeezed into an existing world of people and politics. There is less freedom to create interesting characters out of whole cloth, and as a result the latter third of the book feels less compelling than the preceding sections. In the end, the book doesn't celebrate the vibrant, patchwork quilt that is Vancouver; instead, it looks backward to the past with bittersweet remembrance, rather than forward to the future.

If you are looking for more history about Vancouver and less fiction about people, then you may want to look elsewhere. This is not a "Cliff's Notes" history of the city; in my opinion, a dash of historical reference would have helped tremendously. I've been to Vancouver several times, yet I wanted to refer to a map in order to have a mental anchor for the places mentioned. Without a map in the book, geographical references like "across the bay" or "next to the smaller mouth of the river" were turned into abstractions, which was a shame; since so much effort went into creating the characters, they deserved a more concrete setting. A few historical maps scattered throughout would have been invaluable, at least for my own sense of curiosity.

Despite my nitpicking, the book warrants four stars. I've recommended the book to various friends and relatives who have high standards and who enjoy well-written works. It's tough to write this type of book, and David and Alison have done an excellent job bringing the various stories together.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great read....but many flaws, January 6, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Vancouver (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this book from cover to cover...it really did hold my attention. However, there were many flaws, mostly in the flow of time. For example...if a person is stated to be 35 years old in a certain year...well he is NOT, then, 59 years old just 14 years later. Stuff like that drives me nuts. The other flaw in this book....and this may or may not be considered a flaw...is that most of the characters are really unlikable...even the likable ones have serious character defects.