Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 and continued her reign for 63 years. As the longest ruling female monarch in history, she left her name to an era. It was during Victorian times that the United Kingdom became a global power to reckon with. One may view Queen Victoria as a wise, stately woman - but she was only eighteen years old when she ascended the throne and only twenty-one when she married the love of her life, Prince Albert.
Victoria & Albert is a 200-minute DVD portraying the romance between young Victoria and the man who would one day become "king in all but name." Beginning with her extremely secluded life in Kensington Palace, actress Victoria Hamilton convincingly plays the part of a young, emotional girl forced to confront her mother and take the reins of authority in her own hands.
The movie follows Victoria as she meets Albert and falls in love with him; covers their disputes over leadership, and concludes shortly after his death from typhoid fever. There are some factual errors throughout, but the period costumes and beautiful settings more than make up for any errors in the drama. This DVD stars Victoria Hamilton, Jonathan Firth, Diana Rigg, David Suchet, and Peter Ustinov, among others. Find it at the Prince George Public Library in the adult DVD collection.
reviewed by Rachel Huston
marketing and development assistant
at the Prince George Public Library
Beyond the Bubble
by James Laxer
In Beyond the Bubble, James Laxer argues that the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 has undermined the ideology of free markets and deregulation. Furthermore, the crash has ended the American dominated age of globalization. In its place will be a multi-polar world and regional trading blocks, where no single country or region dominates international trade or sets the rules.
James Laxer starts his book by describing the causes of the crash. Because the Bush government was deeply committed to the expansion of house ownership in the U.S. for ideological reasons, regulations were loosened and banks were deregulated. Greed did the rest. He argues that the underlying cause of the housing collapse was the growing inequality in household incomes. While the economy had grown, family incomes adjusted for inflation had stagnated for the past thirty years. Meanwhile, the income and wealth of the upper class had exploded. Today, the top 300,000 American income earners receive as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.
A further cause was the fact that Americans were encouraged to borrow to grow the economy. Stagnant incomes for the average American limited economic growth since 70 per cent of the U.S. economy depended on household spending. The lower and middle classes drove the economy as they spent most of their earnings. Laxer notes there are too few upper wage earners to support the economy and they, in any case, tend to save and invest their money. Only by borrowing could the middle class maintain the illusion of the "American Dream" and sooner or later, the game would come to an end.
The game ended spectacularly. Plunging house prices and falling consumer spending created most of the conditions necessary for depression, the bogeyman of economists. Governments responded by dumping money into their economies, incurring record deficits in the process. Canada could afford to play that game after the federal government nearly hit the wall in 1995 and ended up changing its ways.
However, the United States and European countries were already up to their eyeballs in debt and couldn't afford the stakes. Unlike the 1930s, when the United States was the world's creditor, our southern neighbour is now the most indebted country in history. The crisis in Greece is only the first in a series of debt crises in the developed world, forcing governments to slash spending and to reduce the living standards of their citizens.
The second half of Beyond The Bubble explores policy options for Canadians. James Laxer stated that in the autumn of 2008 all the Canadian federal parties fought for control of the government and denied the crisis until job losses and federal deficits mounted. No political parties offered a coherent economic plan and the federal government dumped money in an ad hoc fashion.
The author describes the need for a coherent economic plan. Letting the markets do their thing is not a viable option. A quarter of our economy is based on exports to the United States, a troubled and declining market for the foreseeable future. Since NAFTA, our exports to the US have grown, while those to the rest of the world have stagnated.
There is a critical need for Canadians to reduce our dependence on natural resource exports and on the U.S. markets. Becoming an energy superpower, which was the stated goal of Harper's government, is not only risky but counterproductive. The dollar has become a petro currency that fluctuates wildly with the price of oil, damaging other Canadian export industries in the process. Unfortunately, the leadership necessary to create a national economic plan and to make the hard choices has not yet materialized.
Readers can find this book in the non-fiction section at the Bob Harkins Branch of the Prince George Public Library.
reviewed by John Shepherd
former board of trustees member
for the Prince George Public Library
