Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Insurgent Beaver

This is from a review by Peter Coates of three books on the fur trade, in the TLS:
Nearly thirty years ago, Jim O'Brien rose to the challenge of dislodging human actors from their privileged position at stage centre. In his essay, "The History of North America from the Standpoint of the Beaver" (published in 1982 in the gloriously named ephemeral journal, Free Spirits 1, Annals of the Insurgent Imagination), he took the social historian's study of the fleeced to new heights.
Ah, the New Left.

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