Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement, by Steven High. Vancouver & Toronto, University of British Columbia Press, 2014. xi, 441 pp. $34.95 Cdn (paper). From 2005 to 2012, Steven High, the director of Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, was the ringmaster of a sprawling, ambitious, and highly generative collaborative project called Montreal Life Stories. Supported by a CURA (Community-University Research Alliance) grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council as well as hundreds of dedicated university and community volunteers, the project was a collaborative effort to document and curate the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide, and other mass human rights violations. This book is both a testament to the culmination of that work and a structural ethnography of the process. It does not offer closure or any grand conclusions to the big questions of mass violence in the 20th century--an impossible task given the scale and scope of atrocity and the inherently irresolvable nature of trauma--but focuses on the continuum of reflection, dialogue, commemoration, and research (p. 300). Michael Frisch's notion of is the moral spine of the book and of the project as a whole. As interpreted and manifest by High and the MLS team, this principle was not only a literal application of the CURA mission of ongoing collaboration and mutual learning between community and academic partners, but evolved into a broader model of practical ethics in public scholarship. Unusually for an oral history project, where the main deliverable is a data dump into the archives, as much attention was given to curation of the life stories as their collection, The book's two main sections detail these aspects of the project, though this analytical separation belies the degree to which they overlapped and were mutually implicated in practice. After an introductory overview of the project--appropriately anchored by the testimony of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide--the book's first section examines the interviewing process from a variety of perspectives. Chapter one details the long process by which the ethical and methodological considerations of interviewing survivors of trauma and mass violence were unpacked and negotiated. The careful ways the project was collectively imagined (p. 18) ultimately framed a theory and practice of sharing authority in the design, training, tone, and implementation of the larger project. Other chapters in this section detail the activities of the Rwandan, Jewish, Haitian, and Cambodian working groups. Each confronted unique challenges and developed best practices that were shared among other working groups to inform an increasingly sophisticated praxis across the project. The final chapter in this section examines an individual case study in detail, a close critical forensic reading that also functions as a useful step-by-step guide through the interview process. The second section focuses on the working groups dedicated to curatorial praxis (what CURA calls knowledge mobilization) with refugee youth, education, and performance. …