Canada

A Very Short Introduction

By: Donald Wright

Narrated by: Matthew Josdal

Canada is not one nation, but three: English Canada, Quebec, and First Nations. Yet as a country Canada is very successful, in part because it maintains national diversity through bilingualism, multiculturalism, and federalism. Alongside this contemporary openness Canada also has its own history to contend with; with a legacy of broken treaties and residential schools for its Indigenous peoples, making reconciliation between Canada and First Nations an ongoing journey, not a destination.

Drawing on history, politics, and literature, this very short introduction starts at the end of the last ice age, when the melting of the ice sheets opened the northern half of North America to Indigenous peoples, and covers up to today's anthropogenic climate change, and Canada's climate politics. Donald Wright emphasizes Canada's complexity and diversity as well as its different identities and its commitment to rights, and explores its historical relationship to Great Britain, and its ongoing relationship with the United States. Finally, he examines Canada's northern realities and its northern identities.

©2020 Donald Wright (P)2020 Tantor

Interesting

This was simultaneously a bit dry and an easy listen. I would have kept listening if it was longer. I grateful I found this. Perhaps an alternative perspective, not a classic history book.

A very clear, succinct history presented…

History presented so engagingly that book was over before I knew it and kept my full attention the entirety of listening…I was left wanting to hear more

Ideologically driven screed

A tortured telling of a nation’s history with emphasis in the most vapid points while papering over key developments, periods, and people.
An author who is touting for brownie points with each paragraph.

Revisionist history, Left wing, Narrow, Banal

if you like your history unabashedly politicized on the political Left and don't like your closed mind challenged, this book is for you.

It leaves out a serious engagement with all sides of Canadian identity, and it does not engage with the full fruitful tensions that makes for the best history writing. The "neo-liberals" are the enemy, nationalism becomes "nationalisms," there is complete silence on pro-life perspectives of the abortion debate. I could go on. So much is left out. Banal.

This will quickly become a dated book on account of the author's mind being entirely enslaved to the merely ephemeral opinions of the narrow and uneducated prejudices of his own time. It is not good history; not a great book. don't waste your time.

If you can find nothing better, then hold your nose and use this book to glean some chronological facts of Canadian history. It could provide a sophisticated reader a glimpse into the cramped narrowness of the shadows of a closed-mind. But you get this from any newspaper or merely popular blog. It is Left-wing political revisionist "history," quickly dated pulp.