Founder/Editor Howard White predicts that Raincoast Chronicles 17 will come to be known as the "bad medicine" issue. From the queasy feeling that pioneer medicine inspires in Margaret McKirdy's "The Doctor Book" to Robin Ward's profile of Francis Rattenbury - British Columbia's favourite architect - whose chequered career ended in a classic "Agatha Christie" murder, to epidemiologist Douglas Hamilton's "The Great Pox," which casts a horrifying perspective on the small pox epidemics that decimated BC's native peoples, this Raincoast Chronicles treads lightly the thin line between life and death.

But 17's lighter side is just as strong. It "rushes into history" the bygone days of Opportunities For Youth grants, as Mark Bostwick recalls guiding hikers onto the newly-christened West Coast Trail in the summer of '72. Petra Watson celebrates Victoria's ground-breaking photographer Hannah Maynard, whose portraits of BC life from 1862 to 1912 have become invaluable artifacts of provincial history. Howard White takes us to the early days of the Sechelt Nation, when the great wooden city Kalpalin gave Pender Harbour a bigger population than it has today. Native history and legend are recalled in Gilbert Joe's tale of the last battle between the Kwakiutl and the Sechelt, and in Dick Hammond's eerie true story of two hunters pitted against "the-deer-that-is-not-a-deer." Along with Lynn Ove Mortensen on August Schnarr, Jack Springs' poignant tale of unrequited love on a fishboat, Paul Lawson's poem "The Rock Bandits" and Arthur Mayse's don't-try-this-at-home recipe for "Donkey Boiler Coffee," Raincoast Chronicles 17 is truly an issue to remember.

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens`), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Howard White's profile page