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Stone Country: An Unauthorized History of Canada

by George Bowering

What teachers didn’t tell you in Canadian history class – or maybe did tell you but put you to sleep in the process – makes up the bulk of irreverent British Columbia writer George Bowering’s Stone Country. Though he is now in his sixties, Bowering’s humorous and breezy style is ideal reading for the attention-span-challenged younger generation. Gone are the stentorian and pedagogical tones of textbooks in favour of accurate but shoot-from-the-hip commentary.

The book has the kind of wit and brevity teens and undergrads accustomed to joysticks and five-second microwave bacon will love. It’s the fur trade made cool. On Toronto’s incorporation in 1834, Bowering writes, “Toronto quickly became the commercial and political centre of Upper Canada, on its way to becoming the centre of the universe in the late twentieth century.” All the names, places, and terms are there – Samuel de Champlain, James Wolfe, Louis Riel, Hochelaga, the Plains of Abraham, the Iroquois Confederacy, United Empire Loyalists, the British North America Act – but the delivery and timing is that of a raconteur or comedian.

Bowering gleefully points out the shortcomings of certain military operations, isn’t afraid to call many early white settlers racists in their attitudes toward aboriginals, and reminds us – several times – that John A. Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister, was, among other things, an inveterate drunk.

Bowering has a soft spot for John Diefenbaker, Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963, and a problem with John F. Kennedy, “the rich crook’s son.” “If Canada were a Spanish-speaking country,” Bowering declares, “[Kennedy] could just have the PM shot.”

The post-Trudeau era hasn’t been sufficiently fermented by time, and Bowering’s treatment of this 20-year period is cursory and drifts occasionally from contrarianism to leftist polemic. But for a concise and occasionally hilarious summary of Canada’s origins from the time of European settlement to about 1980, Stone Country is as useful as a toque in January.

 

Reviewer: Stephen Knight

Publisher: Penguin Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $36

Page Count: 352 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-14-301397-1

Issue Date: 2003-6

Categories: History