As a way to celebrate our anniversary, Acquisitions Editor Randy Schmidt reached out to fifty UBC Press authors and asked them to talk about their favourite UBC Press book. This is what we heard.

Written by Professor Douglas E. Delaney

My favourite book from the UBC Press collection is Serge Durflinger’s Fighting from Home: The Second World War in Verdun, Quebec. It’s a deep-dive history of a bicultural Montreal-area community during the Second World War, a history that shines light on how Canadians responded, at the local level, to the challenges of war. Only a historian with Durflinger’s insight and keen sense of logic could have made so much of the retrospectively humorous Mayor’s Cigarette Fund, and used it to illuminate the importance of civic identity and pride in the mobilization effort – without making false generalizations about other communities across the country. Durflinger’s book set the standard for all the local wartime histories that followed. I’m not entirely unbiased in this selection, mind you. I’m a native Montrealer, so I naturally loved the story.”

Professor Douglas E. Delaney holds the Canada Research Chair in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC). He is the author of The Soldiers’ General: Bert Hoffmeister at War (2005) and Corps Commanders: Five British and Canadian Generals at War, 1939–1945 (2011), both UBC Press publications, and The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India, 1902–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is also the co-editor of four volumes on military history, three with UBC Press and one with Cornell University Press.