Reclaiming the Don: 2nd Edition Book Launch

Join us in celebrating the 2nd Edition launch of Jennifer Bonnell’s award-winning book: Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley, published by the University of Toronto Press

Get a drink from the bar, pick up a 2nd Edition copy of Reclaiming the Don from the Spacing Store, and explore the city’s wild side in the Toronto Gone Wild exhibition. Light refreshments will be served.

Globe & Mail architecture and urbanism critic Alex Bozikovic will join the author to reflect on changes to the river and its relationship with the city over the past ten years.

A small river in a big city, the Don River Valley is often overlooked when it comes to explaining Toronto’s growth. With Reclaiming the Don, Jennifer L. Bonnell unearths the missing story of the relationship between the river, the valley, and the city, from the establishment of the town of York in the 1790s to the construction of the Don Valley Parkway in the 1960s.

Demonstrating how mosquito-ridden lowlands, frequent floods, and over-burdened municipal waterways shaped the city’s development, Reclaiming the Don illuminates the impact of the valley as a physical and conceptual place on Toronto’s development.

Jennifer Bonnell is a historian of public memory and environmental change in nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University, where she teaches courses in Canadian and environmental history. She is the author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley, which won the Heritage Toronto Book award, the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Award, and the Ontario Historical Society’s Fred Landon Award in 2015. Her most recent book, Stewards of Splendour: A History of Wildlife and People in British Columbia, won the Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing from the BC Historical Federation. She is currently working on a new book project on the history of beekeeping and environmental change in the Great Lakes Region.

Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic for The Globe and Mail. He is an author or editor of three books: Toronto Architecture: A City Guide; House Divided; and the bestseller 305 Lost Buildings of Canada. He won the 2019 President’s Medal for Media in Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

• Winner of the Canadian Historical Association’s 2015 Clio Prize for best book in Ontario history
• Winner of the Ontario Historical Association’s 2015 Fred Landon Prize for best book on local or regional history in Ontario, published in the past three years.
• Winner of Heritage Toronto’s 2015 Book Award for written work that engages with aspects of the Greater Toronto Area’s heritage.
• Short-listed for the Canadian Historical Association’s Prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History, 2015.

Host or Publisher Myseum of Toronto