Stars and Swipes

This past April, in a lengthy speech at the Sorbonne, Emmanuel Macron asserted that Europe should “never be a vassal of the United States.” In those eight words, the French president inadvertently summed up two centuries of Canadian history, as shown in this fresh look at the complicated tango of two countries, the latest volume in scores — no, hundreds, possibly thousands — of meditations on the special North American relationship.

Just as there always seems to be room for another look at Lincoln, Bismarck, Churchill, Hitler, Kennedy, Macdonald, and Trudeau père, there is always room on Canada’s national bookshelf for an additional examination of the love-hate, romance-resentment relationship that is obsessed over in one country and ignored in the other. So we have North of America, comprising a dozen unusually provocative essays. Think of it as a Laura Secord box of historical perspectives on the early Cold War period or — in the unlikely event...