For the Georgia Straight’s 17th annual Best of Vancouver issue, our editorial team has spent months on the lookout for good deeds, weird urban details, and various howlers to highlight. Here’s our contributors’ picks for Best of Vancouver 2012.

Best father-and-son author combo

Gary Engler and Yves Engler

Left-wing firebrand Yves Engler lives in Montreal, but the prolific author on Canadian foreign policy was born and raised here. His newest book, The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy, will be released next month and promises to shine a disturbing light on the current occupant of 24 Sussex Drive. Earlier this year, he released a damning revisionist biography of a Liberal prime minister, Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt. Most families would be proud to produce two books in a year. But Yves’s father, Gary, an East Vancouver resident, has also written a novel, which was published in 2012. The Year We Became Us tells the story of the 1962 Saskatchewan doctors strike and the Cuban Missile Crisis through the eyes of a progressive 12-year-old boy and a reactionary 13-year-old girl.