It’s finally June and you can safely banish all thoughts of slush and sleet and dive into the season of sun and sangria. Here’s hoping that you’ll soon be enjoying a breather from the demands of your office in-box. Whether you’re headed to Lisbon, Lake Louise or Parc La Fontaine for some R&R time in the weeks to come, here are a few recent books by (or about) McGillians that would make for fine travelling companions.
The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped
by J.D.M. Stewart, BA’92, BEd’94
How well do we know Canada’s prime ministers? Historian J.D.M. Stewart opens with a telling anecdote. During his presentation to Canadian high school students at a Model UN event, none of them recognized Lester B. Pearson, the country’s 14th prime minister and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
This inspired Stewart to write his most recent book, a veritable primer on our prime ministers. It opens with Sir John A. Macdonald and ends with the incumbent Mark Carney, who was only six months into his term at the time of publishing (and thus whose legacy remains to be seen).
Stewart recounts each leader’s professional and personal lives, giving us an idea of the people behind the politicians. He pays particular attention to their relationships with Indigenous peoples, a topic that typically received little mention in previous biographies. We see how they managed in times of crisis and get a glimpse at their relationships with other world leaders. There’s even some intriguing trivia – including a vinyl record of Arthur Meighen’s 1936 speech on Shakespeare (the album’s release marked a first for anyone who had ever been prime minister) and R. B. Bennett’s secret acts of kindness.
Canada’s prime ministers have been nuanced, complicated figures. Far from a hagiography, Stewart describes legacies that have aged well, some not as much, and others that deserve a second look. He concedes that he had to make some omissions for length (e.g. there was little mention of the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II), but each leader gets their due.
The Prime Ministers is a great read for those wanting to learn more about the 23 men and one woman – including three McGill alumni – who have helped to make Canada what it is today. To quote Stewart, “If we want to understand the country, it is imperative that we understand those who led it.”
Diandra D’Alessio
The World of Leonard Cohen
edited by David R. Shumway
A decade after Montreal’s most famous son left us, David R. Shumway, a professor of English, literature and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, brings together more than 20 academics and journalists for an ambitious exploration of Leonard Cohen’s art, life and cultural impact.
The World of Leonard Cohen is arranged in five themed parts, though the same familiar topics and debates transcend these demarcations. Questions such as whether Cohen, BA’55, DLitt’92, was primarily a musician or a poet, if his albums should be viewed as collections of individual songs or single cohesive pieces, and how he reconciled his Jewish faith with his adoption of Buddhism and the Christian imagery so rife in his songwriting, all arise repeatedly. Other common recurrences include inevitable comparisons to the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, but more revelatory are the references to literary figures such as Charles Beaudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and James Joyce, all mentioned by different authors across several chapters.
While it’s largely written by academic experts and published by Cambridge University Press, this is a mercifully accessible book, requiring on the part of the reader little more than an interest in Cohen’s work. Only Eliot R. Wolfson’s chapter “Judaism: At the Peripheral Center” is notably dense in esoteric theological language, but his insights are among the collection’s most enlightening and well worth repeat readings.
In a particularly charming chapter, Ontarian turned Montrealer Erin MacLeod, BA’99, PhD’09, examines Cohen’s complicated relationship with his home city while gently weaving in her own experience of moving to Montreal to study at McGill. She considers how the iconic songwriter’s image has shaped “the way Montreal sees itself”, not least through the Cohen-based tourism industry that has arisen since his passing. MacLeod’s marriage of the personal and the intellectual is typical of The World of Leonard Cohen, a quite refreshing take on a much-discussed figure.
Louis Roberts
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts
by Kim Fu, BA’09
If it had been up to Eleanor, the protagonist of Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, she wouldn’t have bought a house to begin with. But this was her mother Lele’s dying wish, and Eleanor now finds herself signing a contract she doesn’t understand, moving her few belongings into a model home that is suspiciously cheap, and living alone in the middle of the woods.
At the centre of the novel is a close-knit yet fractured mother-daughter relationship. When Eleanor’s promising career in graduate school is derailed, it is her mother who cooks all her meals, cleans her apartment, and manages her finances. Over time, Eleanor grows accustomed to her mother’s presence, while constantly blaming herself for being so reliant on others.
After her mother passes away, Eleanor stumbles through her days, barely holding onto her job as an online therapist. To make matters worse, her new home begins to fall apart — a broken door lock, a leaky roof, a buck smashing through her once picturesque floor-to-ceiling windows.
As she watches her life fall apart, Eleanor begins to see ghosts: the ghost of her mother, who haunts her everywhere she goes; the ghost of the man who built her house before taking his own life; the ghosts of her patients, all of whom are still living. She even sees visions of herself, a version of an Eleanor she dearly wishes she could be.
The world that Fu constructs is haunting and punishing, but amidst the constant disaster, we catch glimpses of Eleanor’s courage. In this bewildered protagonist, readers might initially see a young adult stumbling through the challenges of adult life (relatable!). As the story progresses, we learn the truths behind many of her obstacles, and our empathy for Eleanor grows larger.
Despite the pool of rainwater soaking through her bedroom floor, maybe, just maybe, Eleanor is doing better than she believes.
Victor Wang, BA’24
Canada in the Age of Rum
by Allan Greer
Rum played a surprisingly important role in the early history of what would become Canada. Millions of litres of it were imported each year even though the population of settlers and Indigenous people was quite sparse at the time.
In his recent book Canada in the Age of Rum, Allan Greer, an emeritus professor of history at McGill, examines the often-disastrous impact of the sugar-based liquor, cheaply produced in the Caribbean. “In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the colonies that would later become Canada were awash in a sea of rum,” Greer writes.
Greer explains how rum became an invaluable tool for employers to utilize. Often unable to pay for the services of fishermen and fur trade voyageurs for a full season’s work, these employers would encourage their workers to drink the copious rum they provided on credit, which served not only to reduce wages but, in many cases, created substantial amounts of debt instead. These debts often forced workers to continue labouring for low wages – exactly as their employers intended.
The book also explores the use of rum in trading between colonists and Indigenous communities, and how misunderstandings would often arise due to different cultural perspectives and expectations on debts. Greer focuses on how rum was used by First Nations communities for their own purposes, and how Indigenous temperance movements emerged (earlier than similar movements among European settlers) to counter what was increasingly seen as a dangerous social problem.
Canada in the Age of Rum offers a thoughtful look at an underexplored aspect of the early colonizing project of Canada, from British, French, and Indigenous perspectives. The extensively sourced book also doesn’t ignore the horrors of the slave trade, which played a pivotal role in the production of the rum that made its way to Canada.
Zachary Sykes, BA’17
A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life
by Gillian Deacon, BA’88, DipEd’92
In her latest book, broadcaster and writer Gillian Deacon delves into learning to live with uncertainty. The backdrop to this exploration is Deacon’s struggle with a mysterious constellation of symptoms that began in 2022. Turns out she had long Covid – a diagnosis that was a long time coming. (Happily, we learn in the book’s epilogue that Deacon returned to her vibrant, healthy self in March 2024.)
Deacon, who hosted CBC Radio’s Here and Now show for 10 years, shares some of her medical journey – including previous go-arounds with cancer – but makes it clear from the opening sentence that the book isn’t about health. The upending of her world is the springboard “to explore why we all struggle so stubbornly for resolution and clarity, and what opportunities we are missing by being intolerant of uncertainty.”
She draws on insights and observations from a disparate range of sources: everyone from the Stoic philosopher Seneca and William James, often considered the father of American psychology, to magician and endurance artist David Blaine, who performs dangerous stunts.
She also highlights the possibilities that can emerge from uncertainty. While it often doesn’t feel great, “uncertainty is the only real space where new information can come into view.”
Her serious, thought-provoking book leaves readers with lots to chew on. It may well inspire you to better navigate uncertainty and even embrace this inescapable feature of our existence.
Brenda Branswell
The Age of Extraction
by Tim Wu, BSc’95
As Tim Wu notes in his recent book The Age of Extraction, the internet was once widely hailed, not so long ago, as a democratizing force that would “empower the little guys.” Influential pundits like Seth Godin and Jeff Jarvis foresaw a new age in which small mom-and-pop operations could leverage the fresh possibilities presented by the digital world to go head-to-head with huge corporations.
“Not very often are so confident a set of predictions so wrong,” Wu writes. “What these writers did not predict is that it would not be the little guys who prospered, but their hosts – a new generation of [tech] platforms that would find ingenious ways to take the lion’s share of the internet economy for themselves.”
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and a handful of others have emerged as dominant behemoths – in large part, because they control the platforms that the rest of us are so dependent on. These platforms function as the contemporary version of the ancient town square or bazaar – a crucial meeting place for vendors and buyers. But the tech giants aren’t neutral players in that role – they very much have their thumbs on the scale to the detriment of everyone else.
These tech platforms are also providing a worrisome model for other fledgling monopolies – with a disquieting impact already felt in sectors that include medical care and housing.
Wu outlines the dangers associated with the major tech platforms (they are very adept at sidelining any potential competitors, for one thing), while arguing the case for why government action is sometimes necessary to create a fairer playing field (and pointing to instances where it has successfully done so in the past).
Wu, the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University, served in Joe Biden’s White House as one of the chief architects of its antitrust policies.
He is also an engaging writer. As he crisply outlines his policy arguments and examines relevant historical precedents, he nimbly avoids making the weighty subject matter a slog.
Daniel McCabe, BA’89
