Canada is in many ways a country of limits, a paradox for a place that enjoys virtually unlimited space. Most of that space is uninhabited, and much of it is uninhabitable. It is a country with a huge north but with most of its population in the south, hugging the U.S. border. An uneasy and difficult country, Canada has nevertheless defied the odds: it remains, in the 21st century, a haven of peace and a beacon of prosperity. Erudite yet accessible and marked by narrative flair, The Pengui...

From the preface:"A visitor seeing Canada for the first time since 1939 might well conclude that Canada, even more than nations devastated by war, has become another country. On the surface so much remains the same: the Liberals prevail in Ottawa; the provinces quarrel with Ottawa and among themselves; and we worry about Americans in our future. But most of the pieces have been rearranged, and the effect of the picture is quite different...This is a book about our own time...

Canada: land of hockey, terrible weather, unfailing politeness-and little else, as far as many Americans are aware. For Canadians, the United States is seen as a land of unparalleled opportunity and unparalleled failure, a country of heights and abysses. The straitlaced country in the north could hardly have much to tell about its powerhouse of a neighbor to the south, eh? Not so, according to historian Robert Bothwell. In this witty and accessible book, Bothwell argues that the shared his...

Through war, depression, and social upheaval, the first half of the twentieth century was a period of unprecedented turbulence in Canada. In this lively and contentious survey, Robert Bothwell, lan Drummond, and John English explore the political and economic forces that shaped this era of change.As in their earlier work, the highly acclaimed Canada since 1945, the authors focus on the political context of events. Beginning at the turn of the century, they consider the status of Ca...

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of President Kennedy and Prime Minister Pearson. In a career that spans the Canadian foreign service and international organizations, he was fortunate ...

Once voted the greatest Canadian of all time, Tommy Douglas was a prairie politician who believed in democratic socialism, the crucial role of civil rights, and the great potential of cooperation for the common good. He is best known as the “Father of Medicare.” Born in 1904, Douglas was a championship boxer and a Baptist minister who later exchanged his pulpit for a political platform. A powerful orator and tireless activist, he sat first as a federal MP and then served for 17 years as pr...

Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in 19th-century Lyme Regis, England—the seaside town that is the setting of both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jane Austen's Persuasion.More than 40 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, 12-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-...

Love him or hate him, Pierre Trudeau has marked us all. The man whose motto was "reason over passion" managed to arouse in Canadians the fiercest of passions of every hue, ones that even today cloud our view of him and of his place in history. Acclaimed novelist Nino Ricci takes as his starting point the crucial role Trudeau played in the formation of his own sense of identity to look at how Trudeau expanded us as a people, not in spite of his contradictions but because of them.

Stephen Leacock's satiric masterpiece Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town captures "the Empire forever" mentality that marked Anglo-Canadian life in the early decades of the twentieth century. Historian Margaret Macmillan—whose books Women of the Raj and Paris 1919 cast fresh light on the colonial legacy—has great affection for Leacock's gentle wit and sharp-eyed insight. The renowned historian examines Leacock's life as a poor but ambitious student who rose to become an economist, celebrat...

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know is how Victorian society dismissed Emily Carr. Lewis DeSoto, a painter and novelist, sees Emily Carr as a woman in search of God, freedom, and the essence of art. Her quest to be an independent woman and a modern artist takes her from the studios of Paris to deep inside the remote Native villages of the West Coast forests. It is a lifetime journey of almost mythic proportions in which she struggles to define not only herself but also her country. A creator o...

A Washington Post Notable Book: A Japanese Canadian man is haunted by childhood memories of WWII internment camps in this "evocative and cinematic tale" ( Maclean's).In 1942, in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government removes young Bin Okuma and his family from their home at a British Columbia coastal fishing village and forces them into internment camps. Allowed to take only the possessions they can carry, Bin watches looters r...

Big Bear (1825–1888) was a Plains Cree chief in Saskatchewan at a time when aboriginals were confronted with the disappearance of the buffalo and waves of European settlers that seemed destined to destroy the Indian way of life. In 1876 he refused to sign Treaty No. 6, until 1882, when his people were starving. Big Bear advocated negotiation over violence, but when the federal government refused to negotiate with aboriginal leaders, some of his followers killed 9 people at Frog Lake in 188...