A page from the brilliant ‘Town is by the Sea’, by Joanne Schwartz and Sydney Smith, which I reference in the review.
I have just had my first book review published in Visual Studies. The book is Derrick Price’s (2018) Coal Cultures: Picturing Mining Landscapes and Communities, which I jumped at reviewing when the call came around. I had been puzzling over some strange results around support for coal in Canada that emerged during our national survey. Connection to the coal industry through seeing it or working for it respectively doubled and quadrupled support for that energy source, much more than similar variables influenced support for other energy sources. More surprising was that support was higher among the young and females. We’re working out the cause of that now – in fact male and female support is the same, but women are more ambivalent and men are more opposed – but Coal Cultures helped me understand the embeddedness of this energy type here in Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. For many, coal itself is home, as richly conveyed by the evocative children’s book Town is by the Sea (see above), which I reference in the review.
