“Canada has been the death of him,” wrote John Stuart Mill on the passing of John Lambton, Lord Durham, in 1840, at the age of 48, the year after the Englishman completed his famous Report on the Affairs of British North America.
I was reminded of Mill’s terse comment when I opened the review copy of Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada, written by Sandra Martin of The Globe and Mail. I wondered if its author might make the same claim about any of the men and women whose lives—and deaths—she describes so vividly and readably in her new book. But after reading her 50 short biographies, I came to the conclusion that Canada has “done in” nobody who is discussed in these pages.
In his foreword, William Thorsell, former publisher of The Globe and Mail, praises the author for writing “portraits” rather than obituary notices, noting that she is “speaking truth to grief, exposing intimacies at the precise moment when...
John Robert Colombo, author and anthologist, compiler of The Penguin Dictionary of Popular Canadian Quotations (Penguin, 2006) and other reference works, is completing The Canadian Adventures of Jules Verne, The Big Book of Canadian Jokes and the first-ever collection of Sax Rohmer’s occasional writings.
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