Born in upstate New York in 1856, Eugene Thornton Kingsley was a driving force in British Columbia’s left politics for the first two decades of the twentieth century. And, though he is the subject of Able to Lead, he remains elusive. The result is not so much a biography or a full-fledged history but rather a series of faded snapshots accompanied by commentary.
It’s not for lack of effort by the authors. Ravi Malhotra, a disability rights and law professor, and Benjamin Isitt, a historian, have painstakingly combed through a prodigious amount of material to find their man: contemporary newspapers (including those that Kingsley edited and published), court documents, census references, intelligence reports, labour histories, and numerous other sources help describe his times.
The recurring problem in tracing Kingsley’s life, however, is that he was notoriously reticent about it and had few close friends whose accounts might have filled in some of the...
John Baglow reads and writes in Ottawa. His latest poetry collection is Murmuration: Marianne’s Book.
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