It might reasonably be assumed that a prime ministerial memoir such as this would be titled “How I Lead,” and it is to his credit that Joe Clark, as he did in his first book, A Nation Too Good to Lose: Renewing the Purpose of Canada, has opted not to make himself the primary…
Christopher Pennington
Christopher Pennington teaches history at the University of Toronto Scarborough and is the author of The Destiny of Canada: Macdonald, Laurier and the Election of 1891 (Penguin, 2011).
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Christopher Pennington
Readers with a fondness for well-crafted narrative history will be sure to enjoy Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation, the fourth book by Toronto historian John Boyko. The story unfolds in the midst of an extraordinary historical event, the American Civil War, and is filled with all manner of fascinating individuals from both sides of the Canadian-American…
No Canadian prime minister experienced a more grotesque transformation of his public image while in office than Richard Bedford Bennett. In 1930, the voters saw him as a self-made millionaire whose financial know-how and can-do spirit could pull the country from the mire of the Great Depression, and they awarded him a Conservative majority government. After five years in power he had become an almost cartoonish…
The primary job hazard for Laurier biographers has always been falling in love with their subject. It has happened to most of them to some degree, the most infamous example being that of O.D. Skelton, whose official two-volume biography in 1921 was so hagiographic that J.W. Dafoe, a devotedly Liberal journalist, was compelled to protest. For all his admirable…