The first thing that strikes you about Margaret MacMillan’s new book is the unusual selection of personalities she profiles. Her chapter headings are also unconventional: “Hubris,” “Daring,” “Curiosity,” “Observers” and “Persuasion and the Art of Leadership.” The latter focuses on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Otto von Bismarck and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Her chapter on hubris more conventionally studies…
Mark Starowicz
Mark Starowicz is executive director of documentary programming for CBC Television and the author of Making History: The Remarkable Story Behind Canada: A People’s History (McClelland and Stewart, 2003).
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Mark Starowicz
With the current paucity of heroic Italian sea captain stories, Douglas Hunter’s The Race to the New World: Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and a Lost History of Discovery comes not a moment too soon. It intertwines the expeditions of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), each of whom reached the New World, within five years of each…
The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which took only a morning to fight a short distance from Quebec City in September of 1759, was an improvised, even desperate affair with world-shaking consequences: It determined the fate of the North American continent, led to the American Revolution, allowed the global ascendancy of the British Empire and the decline of the…