Not sure if it's worth reading...

The Ottawa writer's festival is coming up this month, so I thought I'd write a little bit about books. I've started reading another of the extraordinary Canadians series, this time on Glenn Gould. It's been interesting to read the whole series, not as much because it gives a good overview of some important Canadians, though it does, but more as a meditation on the biography as a form. There is much in the Gould biography that speaks to the more philosophical and intellectual challenges the biography produces. This is not perhaps particularly surprising as the author is Mark Kingwell a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto.

The biographies themselves are relatively short, but interesting and the series is really about giving you a quick, taste of this particular cast of characters.

The other book that I guess has made quite a splash in some circles is Fearful Symmetry by Brian Crowley.The premise seems interesting if misguided. It's all Quebec's fault because Canada started engaging in trying to buy Quebec nationalists in the 1960s, and so we moved from a nation of 'makers' to a nation of 'takers', and the various regions of Canada now engage is trying to capture their fair share of national wealth.

This kind of claim, and book could only be written by an economist. Fittingly Crowley is President on the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) [think Fraser institute for Atlantic Canada].

The reason I say that it could only be written by an economist, is because of its lack of historical understanding and nuance. Now to be fair I haven't read the book. I was seriously thinking about it, but having read the review in the LRC, I'm not sure I want to.

The premise is based on the idea that we had strong work Anglo protestant values before the 1960s and now we don't. Or some variant of this idea.

According to the review he refuses to engage in a debate about how society has changed since the 1960s. He doesn't engage with the fact that the development the welfare state is actually a Western phenomenon. He doesn't talk about multiculturalism and how this has impacted our ability to have a 'cohesive' national 'character'. These are important factors!

Canada in 2009 cannot go back to the old boy's club that it was earlier in the 20th century.

That being said I think that he may be on to something interesting in terms of the idea of buying off the nationalists. But to ignore the cultural impacts of the quiet revolution, to ignore the international context in which these things occur, to pretend that the huge amounts of immigration from outside Europe we have experienced have not changed our ability to have a 'national character' seem to me to be pretty serious omissions.

Not sure if it's worth my time reading the book, but we'll see.

I've got quite a few other books on my shelf for the moment.