I’m making a break from my usual rule of “if I didn’t like a book, I don’t write a review” because, for the most part, what I didn’t like about this book felt mostly like an issue of incorrect expectations.1 Because I came to this book after reading The Shortest History of Italy, and so I was expecting this to, similarly, cover all of the history of Canada. Admittedly, the title did encourage that assumption.
Rather than being a short history of Canada, this book was an exhaustive history of every vote held above the municipal level in Canada. The actual “history of Canada” part was left as the occasional bit of window-dressing, or as context for the recounting of which party won how many seats at the cost of which other parties. As an example of what this did to my ability to actually glean any knowledge about the history of Canada: so far as I can recall, the only mention of Canada adopting a Prohibition was a passing reference to Prohibition ending in Canada shortly after it did in the United States.2
So, like, if you already know Canadian history and want the political science professor’s take on it, this is the book for you. If you, like me, know next to nothing about the history of Canada… this won’t help.
- The one exception is Morton’s remarks about Y2K:
> The world in the new millennium offered plenty of challenges. Despite mobilizing immense preparations and precautions, the so-called Y2K phenomenon was not one of them. Changing the date on millions of computers around the world from 12/31/99 to 01/01/00, insisted experts, would cause sudden massive breakdown on the countless machines that controlled everything from buses and aircraft to stock markets and hospital life-support systems. Essentially, nothing happened by dawn of New Year’s Day, 2000, beyond a worldwide illustration of technological hysteria. (V.5)
This absolutely infuriated me. Arguing that, because the Y2K bugs were solved, they actually weren’t a challenge all along? That’s fundamentally misunderstanding how addressing problems works. ↩ - I think. It might’ve been before. I still don’t know, is the point. ↩