Formerly with the curatorial staff for the Museum at Campbell River, Jeanette Taylor, as the executive director of the Campbell River Art Gallery, wrote Tidal Passages: A History of the Discovery Islands (Harbour 2008 $36.95). Unofficially known as the Discovery Islands, Read, Cortes, Sonora, Maurelle, Hardwicke, Stuart, Redonda and Thurlow Islands are sparsely populated today but bristled with life in earlier times. In Tidal Passages, Taylor delves into the history of these places, also covering many smaller islands and the surrounding mainland inlets (though not Quadra Island, which is the subject of a future book by the author). Taylor introduces many inspiring characters in these pages and a few rogues and scoundrels, too. We meet Edgar Wylie, one of the most notorious of the many eccentrics, rebels, bad guys and intellectuals who have made Read Island their home over the past century; old George McGee, born around 1850, who survived several slave-taking raids as a child and managed to live through the 1862-64 smallpox epidemic that killed many of his relatives on Cortes; Bonnie (Whittington) Brown, a famous cougar hunter from Read Island who had ten kills to her credit when she was still just a girl; Dan McDonald, who was rumoured to have been part of the infamous Jesse James Gang before he relocated to Twin Island, then called Ulloa, in 1889; and Mike Manson, the resilient and charismatic pioneer and businessman who helped shape present-day Cortes Island.