Review of \u3ci\u3eMavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta\u3c/i\u3e By Aritha van Herk

Aritha van Herk\u27s well-written and fast paced Mavericks provides an excellent introduction to Alberta. Served up without footnotes, Mavericks is not history, at least in the academic sense. What Aritha van Herk, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, provides instead is a fascinating personal view of Alberta\u27s past. It contains valuable insights into how many Albertans view themselves and describes particularly well many Albertans\u27 views about their relationship with the rest of Canada. The first chapter, Aggravating, Awful, Awkward, Awesome Alberta, is all about the Albertan attitude. What propels the book, what glues it together, is an intense animosity toward what the author terms the Centre, undoubtedly Ontario, and most definitely Ottawa, the federal capital, and Toronto, Canada\u27s financial capital. At the outset she declares: It\u27s the Centre we hate. Throughout the book she decries the West\u27s position as colonial property, to be traded and exploited. Chronology determines the form of the next nine chapters which clearly review the geological background of the province; First Peoples; early European visitors; the arrival of the Mounties, ranchers, settlers, then politicians. Four final chapters review other topics: Alberta\u27s two largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton; the history of women; and Alberta\u27s twentieth-century culture and society. The author compares Albertans to mavericks, range calves without owners, individuals resistant to being caught, owned, herded, taxed, or identified. Yet in her political chapters she confesses her confusion as to why the tough, hard to intimidate Albertans often behave like a herd of lemmings, electing one party governments. Van Herk, one of Alberta\u27s best novelists, regales the reader with well-crafted word pictures. Tightly she describes the political philosophy of the transplanted American, Henry Wise Wood, an important Alberta farm leader: He maintained that the world was divided into nasties and heroes; the nasties were competitive aristocrats who persistently tried to tread on the heroic co-operative democrats. Excellent job on Wise Wood, but her limited historical background occasionally trips her up. Her description of Dr. Walter Cheadle, an early English traveler, as one of an influx of romantic ninnies slights an acutely perceptive and reliable mid-nineteenth century observer. In England he later became one of the first supporters of the right of women to a medical career. Putting down this wonderfully-written book, so full of bluster against the Centre, one profound question remains: Why did the author choose a firm in the bad place to publish it? Yes, Mavericks was brought out by Viking Penguin in Toronto