It is the golden era of cancer writing. Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a bestseller in 2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s magisterial Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won the Pulitzer in 2011 and this year we have When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul…
Kevin Patterson
Kevin Patterson has sailed the British Columbia coast for 19 years. His last book was the novel Consumption, published by Random House in 2010.
Articles by
Kevin Patterson
Focusing on the Small Picture
A new book looks at the communities that will be affected by the Northern Gateway pipeline November 2013
The coastal temperate rain forest that stretches for a thousand kilometres north of Vancouver is a kind of geographical basilisk. It simply stalls anyone who pauses to study it. Eventually, one has to look away. Orcas plunging through schools of salmon; cedars the size and age of European cathedrals; saw-toothed mountains like the borderlands of Mordor—even a measured attempt to describe the preposterous beauty of the place lapses into…
In the March issue of the Atlantic, Ken Stern writes about a central puzzle of philanthropy: members of the top quintile in earnings, in the United States, gave, on average, 1.3 percent of their income to charity; those on the bottom gave 3.2 percent. Stern quotes Paul Piff, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody…