Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadowby Robin F. HansenPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Toby A. Welch$32.95 ISBN 9781779400079 Did I ever learn a lot from Prison Born! I’m humbled to admit that so much goes on in our blessed country that I am clueless about. This book left me feeling like I’d been walloped upside the head with a battering ram of information. (Although none of that surprises me as this is a University of Regina Press book, a publishing house that puts out well-researched, thought-provoking books that have an impact and educate readers.) Saskatchewan has a policy – it’s been applied for decades – that every baby born to an incarcerated woman is immediately removed from its mother’s care. (The same policy is in play in most of Canada as well as most states in the US.) A true scenario involving Jacquie, an Indigenous woman from a Treaty 6 First Nation who is in her third trimester, carries throughout the book. Incarcerated in Prince Albert, she is terrified about what will happen to her child when he is born. Her story kept me glued to the pages, eager to discover the outcome. You’ll find so…

Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equatorby Ben BrisboisPublished by University of Regina PressReview by Shelley A. Leedahl$34.95 ISBN 9781779400345 Dole. Chiquita. Del Monte. These banana empires are household names, and as a frequent consumer of bananas, I read Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator, by Montreal academic Ben Brisbois, with great interest. Frankly, though I’ve consumed a bunch of bananas in my lifetime, I’ve never peeled back their long and troubling story. Ben Brisbois has. Over about fifteen years, Brisbois—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health—researched, analyzed, and wrote about pesticides’ dangerous health effects on the often exploited workers at banana plantations and farms, with his PhD fieldwork centred in the self-proclaimed “banana capital of the world,” Machala, Ecuador. He ”laboriously designed a project that would try to bring about real change by valuing the lived experiences of pesticide-affected banana workers and farmers, and by being realistic about the political and economic power relations [both globally and locally] affecting coastal Ecuador.” There was much to unpack, and this reader got an education, beginning with the nefarious ecological and political history of…