We’re not likely to get a more thorough biography of Calixa Lavallée than Anthems and Minstrel Shows, Brian Christopher Thompson’s huge and meticulous account of the life and times of the composer of “O Canada.” It’s exhaustively researched, even if sometimes the bigger picture is lost in the denseness of facts.
Enter Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier’s masterful investigation into the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing. Originally published in French in 2013, this fascinating, carefully constructed volume has been translated with precision and grace by Debbie Blythe in time for April’s centennial.
There is no shortage of writing on the events surrounding the conquest of Canada by the British Empire during the Seven Years’ War. Roch Carrier’s Montcalm and Wolfe: Two Men Who Forever Changed the Course of Canadian History, originally published in French, is a recent contribution to the genre, focusing on the lives of the two military leaders whose armies clashed during the siege of Quebec City in 1759.
Women, as Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America describes, have been practising architecture for decades. If women still struggle in “a profession that traditionally functioned more like a gentlemen’s club,” one can only imagine what it was like in the late 1800s – the period in which this story unfolds.
For its complexity, rigour, and insight, Brian Massumi’s work tends to engender sheepish admiration from grad students and scholars alike. His name is ubiquitous in several branches of the academy – among them philosophy, communication studies, and affect theory. Although his influence within the humanities runs deep, he’s not read with anything near the same enthusiasm outside. His work is dense, self-referential, and erudite; his most recent book, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, is no exception.
Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter integrates research about human community and social interaction in a perceptive and timely study. But in Pinker’s impulse to serve readers straightforward prescriptions for this troublesome human condition in which we flail about, she occasionally neglects to balance her thesis with more subtle insights into our minds and bodies.
Brave New Canada argues that our country’s foreign policy requires decisive change. The book’s authors, Derek H. Burney and Fen Osler Hampson, urge us to stop lamenting the bygone age of Pearsonian diplomacy. Instead of “looking at the world from a rear-view mirror,” we are advised to survey the fast-changing political landscape and seek pragmatic policies that advance Canadian interests.
Germain returns now with Of Jesuits and Bohemians, an equally charming reminiscence of his slightly older youth spent at the long-gone, Jesuit-run Collège Sainte-Marie on Bleury Street in Montreal, and his joyous discovery of sights and sounds just beyond its walls.
Imagine Lima, Peru, in the 1800s. In this city of slaves, “free” persons, and colonial elites, a majority of the medical practitioners – doctors, surgeons, nurses – were of African ancestry. José Ramón Jouve Martín’s latest book, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru, highlights this era’s most prominent black male physicians: José Pastor de Larrinaga, José Manuel Dávalos, and José Manuel Valdés.
The highbrow McCord Museum, on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, and the more lowbrow Taschereau Boulevard on the South Shore have something in common: both are named after members of two prominent Quebec families whose power was established in the eighteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth. In Patrician Families and the Making of Quebec, Brian Young traces the history of these two families over four generations marked by conquest, wars, rebellions, revolutions abroad, and the piecemeal democratization of Quebec society.
John Dunning's memoir, You’re Not Dead until You’re Forgotten, paints a portrait of a man who would have preferred to remain out of the public eye. Born in 1927 in Montreal’s Verdun suburb (“the Brooklyn of Montreal,” to hear him tell it), Dunning had a life marked by poor health, frequent automobile accidents, and a crippling stage fright that plagued him until his death in 2011. The memoir, unfinished at the time of his passing, has been collected by Bill Brownstein and bookended with testimonials from Brownstein and a coterie of industry names who owe at least part of their fame to Dunning, one-half of a pair dubbed “the Roger Cormans of Canada.”
It began in 1931 in Manchuria. The Fascists won that time. Then it got going again in Abyssinia, and the Fascists won again.” In the spring of 1937, as Canada’s Mackenzie King government joined in keeping Republican Spain under effective embargo during the civil war against General Franco and his coup, the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune made the point as clearly as he could: “the world war has started. In fact, it’s in its third stage – Manchuria, Ethiopia and now Spain.”
