Anyone interested in Canada and the United States should buy and read American Myths: What Canadians Think They Know about the United States. Editor Rudyard Griffiths, the co-founder and outgoing executive director of the Dominion Institute, has assembled a volume that is both meaty and readable, containing a number of strong essays by important thinkers.
The Dominion Institute’s mission is to build “active and informed citizens through greater knowledge and appreciation of the Canadian story.” Griffiths concedes that producing a book “all about America” does not fall obviously within this mandate, but defends the choice with the argument that “too many of our political discussions and too much of our analysis of how best to tackle the major forces transforming our country are hamstrung by a knee-jerk and unproductive anti-Americanism that permeates our national conversation.”
Happily, most of the essays in American Myths...
Michael Adams is the president of the Environics group of companies, which he co-founded in 1970. He is the author of six books, most recently Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism (Penguin Canada (2008).
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