Description

Talonbooks [Published Date: 1999]. Hard cover, 176 pp. Stated First Printing: August 1999. Very good in good+ dust jacket. Green paper over boards with silver lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges and corners. Binding tight. Previous owner's gift inscription in ink on front paste-down. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a 1/2" tear on the top corner of the rear cover and a few other smaller nicks and tears and light creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. Black and white illustrations; References; Index. [From front jacket flap] Arching over the entrance to Vancouver's harbour is a beautiful web of intricately suspended steel. Day and night, its taut steel strings sing the original hymn to progress, hope and riches first composed in the hearts and minds of its builders. Celebrated in Douglas Coupland's paean as a bridge to heaven, the Lions Gate Bridge has become an icon of the city, not only to heritage conservationists, but to citizens of and visitors to Vancouver from around the globe. Like all great historic landmarks, the Lions Gate Bridge remains a source of powerful, sometimes illuminating, sometimes mysterious stories of the people and times which gave birth to it. In addition to celebrating this bridge and its grand design, Lions Gate sets out to reveal these stories for the first time, including the unresolved violation of nationhood the building of the bridge on Native land entailed. Most mysterious of all is the figure of the man who both conceived and built this great enterprise. A.J.T. Taylor is a character straight out of Ayn Rand: ambitious, shrewd, visionary, fearless, competitive, a man given to great economic and political risk, he appears to triumph in the embrace of Britain s nobility, high society, and financiers he has courted, and who appear to make the completion of his project both physically and politically possible. Yet at the royal opening ceremonies, he is not represented among the dignitaries, but watches from the sidelines with the ordinary citizens, having earlier surreptitiously sealed his story into one of Charles Marega's lions who guard the south approach to this bridge of mystery.