The breadth and incisiveness of Lamrani’s research is on display, as before. And yet – or therefore – the author slips at times into the role of apologist. Fair enough, when deployed in the right argument – but here it only saps the book of its force.

The valuable glimpses here are at once both personal and mundane, drawing parallels between the drudgery of suburban, workaday life and the grinding prison routine – a window into what the author terms “the dehumanizing power of institutions”.

To lament the subjective truth of art is, for Sacco, to miss the point.

Digital Disconnect seeks to strip away this benign patina by challenging the notion that the internet is fundamentally apolitical.

Even if the occasional sob story comes off feeling a bit caricatured, the book succeeds in avoiding a descent into histrionics.

Were it not so immediate, this shift to an ideologically-driven politics and civil service might seem like the stuff of a bleak Dickensian satire.

Joining the chorus of Canadian voices offering alternative economic prescriptions and critiques in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the contributors to Neoliberalism and Everyday Life offer one of the more sweeping and varied contributions to date.

Both a call to arms and a guide towards broader points of redress for the hard times within Canadian women’s movements.

William Deverell’s Snow Job and Martin Duberman’s Haymarket.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is never far from the news.