Review of <i>Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta</i> By Aritha van Herk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aritha van Herk's well-written and fast paced Mavericks provides an excellent introduction to Alberta. Served up without footnotes, Mavericks is not history, at least in the academic sense. What Aritha van Herk, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, provides instead is a fascinating personal view of Alberta's past. It contains valuable insights into how many Albertans view themselves and describes particularly well many Albertans' views about their relationship with the rest of Canada.\nThe first chapter, "Aggravating, Awful, Awkward, Awesome Alberta," is all about the Albertan attitude. What propels the book, what glues it together, is an intense animosity toward what the author terms the "Centre," undoubtedly Ontario, and most definitely Ottawa, the federal capital, and Toronto, Canada's financial capital. At the outset she declares: "It's the Centre we hate." Throughout the book she decries "the West's position as colonial property, to be traded and exploited." Chronology determines the form of the next nine chapters which clearly review the geological background of the province; First Peoples; early European visitors; the arrival of the Mounties, ranchers, settlers, then politicians. Four final chapters review other topics: Alberta's two largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton; the history of women; and Alberta's twentieth-century culture and society. The author compares Albertans to mavericks, range calves without owners, individuals resistant "to being caught, owned, herded, taxed, or identified." Yet in her political chapters she confesses her confusion as to why the tough, hard to intimidate Albertans often behave "like a herd of lemmings," electing one party governments.\nVan Herk, one of Alberta's best novelists, regales the reader with well-crafted word pictures. Tightly she describes the political philosophy of the transplanted American, Henry Wise Wood, an important Alberta farm leader: "He maintained that the world was divided into nasties and heroes; the nasties were competitive aristocrats who persistently tried to tread on the heroic co-operative democrats." Excellent job on Wise Wood, but her limited historical background occasionally trips her up. Her description of Dr. Walter Cheadle, an early English traveler, as one of an influx of "romantic ninnies" slights an acutely perceptive and reliable mid-nineteenth century observer. In England he later became one of the first supporters of the right of women to a medical career.\nPutting down this wonderfully-written book, so full of bluster against the "Centre," one profound question remains: Why did the author choose a firm in the bad place to publish it? Yes, Mavericks was brought out by Viking Penguin in Toronto!
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".