Is it all right to say that Mel Hurtig – bookseller, publisher, author, public speaker, and (in the best sense) patriot – has been one of my minor heroes? As Canada’s first real regionally based national publisher, he generated many of the books in my library that help explain this complex country, none more so than his multi-volume monument, The Canadian Encyclopedia, often the first (if not the last) stop in my research forays as journalist and author.

So it is a pleasure to report that much of his overlong autobiography, At Twilight in the Country: Memoirs of a Canadian Nationalist, is revealing and rewarding. The tales of his bookselling days, when Hurtig Books of Edmonton was Canada’s largest bookstore, and his two dozen years as an instantly successful publisher of non-fiction (from Colombo’s Canadian Quotations to The Unjust Society), are plump with surprising backroom detail, the very best of which pertains to Hurtig’s remarkable experiences with The Canadian Encyclopedia and the Junior Encyclopedia of Canada.

But as the punning title suggests, the memoir of this Jewish furrier’s son is mostly a chronicle of his passionate nationalism. In 1972 he was a failed federal Liberal candidate who refused to accept any funds from the party because it accepted donations from American corporations. Two decades later he helped found the National Party of Canada, to be bankrolled by mercurial Winnipeg businessman Bill Loewen. Although Hurtig became leader, he gives the sense that he was somehow not responsible for the comic opera the short-lived party became.

Hurtig is not a natural writer; imagery and description are not the strongest arrows in his quiver. Nor is he given to deep personal reflection. There is little here of his private life: the end of his first, long marriage rates one brief, unrevealing paragraph; the random shooting of one of his four daughters little more. But he is always a lucid and straightforward storyteller.

A major weakness of the book is also a paradoxical strength. The facts and statistics about the increasing American domination of Canada’s corporate body and cultural soul litter the manuscript. Yet this litany – if ever paid attention to by the fellow Canadians who are selling us out – should be chilling enough to give pause to the greediest of our business and union executives and political leaders.

For this alone, I expect to keep At Twilight in the Country close at hand as a source book, a first (if not a last) stop on my research forays as a Canadian nationalist.