Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s Favourite Books of 2022

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I need to tell you this--there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: A deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.’

Jeopardy! super-champion Mattea Roach is ready for their next

The run turned Roach from a recent University of Toronto grad and aspiring law student into a household name in Canada. If I'm rigorously honest with myself, I perhaps felt a twinge of disappointment that this doesn't play to some of her key strengths. Not to say that this is a humourless book – it isn't – but her sights are clearly set on different things here. It invites comparison not with her earlier history strips, but with other great comics memoirs of recent years like Fun Home or Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. She's shown that she can absolutely produce that kind of work with the best of them, though to be honest what I liked about her stuff is that she always seemed to be trying things that were completely different from that. The author touches a bit upon the environmental impact of the oil sands, but her focus is predominantly on the human impact of living in isolation and being expendable... all to make a decent wage. While I hadn't heard of this before, I doubt I'll be forgetting about it. In 2016, this landscape prompted another news story when huge wildfires closed the town of Fort McMurray, which serviced the camps, underlining a bigger issue of environmental breakdown to which the oilfields contribute. But Beaton holds her focus on the two years she spent there, when her mettle was tested up to, and beyond, its limits by the more local threat of social and behavioural breakdown, which landed her in many difficult situations. a b c d Thielman, Sam (2022-09-23). "How Kate Beaton Paid Off Her Student Loans". The New Yorker . Retrieved 2022-10-05.Best Books 2022: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved 24 October 2022.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands: One of Barack Obama’s

At times the narrative is a little choppy the large cast starts to blur together, but the book held my attention throughout, making me so mad and sad and sympathetic. Thankfully, there is just one incident mentioned, and it's not very graphic (pun intended). Otherwise, I would have had to DNF this. As one of a handful of women in a camp full of men, she was under constant threat of sexual assault. She’s keen not to give away the details. “I’ve always worried, putting this book out, that this would be what people took away from it the most, and then what it would be reduced to, because that’s what happens to women’s stories. Only then do they become ‘great,’” she says. “But I also hope to build empathy and fear; I want them to worry about my character being in a dangerous place, and feel as scared for her as I felt at the time. If readers know, off the bat, what is going to happen, it robs it of that power.” We all know these are bad times. Sometimes the forces buffeting the world–capitalism, globalism, white supremacy–seem like faceless unstoppable powers; other times the faces inflicting monstrous violence are all too human. They are the faces of politicians and CEOs, but also uncles and neighbors. It often feels like there are only two options: to tolerate the intolerable, or to be overwhelmed by anger and hate. Either option I move toward, something precious inside me gets lost. Kate Beaton and I are the same age, and we hit the indy comics scene at roughly the same time. Like everyone else in the world I became a fan of her work - the funny historical stuff and the (also funny, but serious too) autobio stuff. We made friends, another one of those weird internet friendships that feels both intangible and invaluable.

Shimo, Alexandra (13 March 2009). "Making fun of Canadian history". Maclean's . Retrieved 28 March 2009. Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America.