Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa

Canadian Nordicity is a pioneer work in more than one sense. It covers - the entire Canadian North: not only the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, but also seven provinces of Canada with northern territories. The North is at once the most extensive and least known region of Canada.

The author, who won both the Governor General's Award and the Prix Scientifique de la Province de Québec for this volume, introduces a novel concept: nordicity. Nordicity signifies the level of awareness and the degree of northern or polar consciousness in the minds of Canadians, as well as in the policies and actions at various levels of Canadian government.

Professor Hamelin has shown great skill in presenting the dynamic interplay of geography, ethnology, industry, settlement, and communications, as well as corporate and governmental policies as they influence contemporary life and development in the Canadian North. The treatment reflects skillful melding of fact and concept from the mind of an outstanding Canadian scientist.
Hamelin is concerned that many, probably most, Canadians know very little about their North. This is a time when major decisions are being made concerning the Canadian North that will affect the whole country, and this book provides excellent background against which to debate our course there.

"... I consider that Professor Bryant has produced
an extremely valuable study of problems of development related to the use and ownership of land within the laws, customs and usages of western society. This is very pertinent at the present time in its discussion of the achievements of planned development by both private and public agencies against a background of ownership and interests in land. To my knowledge there is no other comparable work covering this field. The solution to the urgent problems arising from rapid urbanization is being frustrated by the rapid increase in development land values which is a cause of concern both to public and private agencies." Malcolm Reece, Deputy County Planning Officer, County of East Sussex, England

"The theme is extremely timely at this particular juncture ...because this is a time when governments are starting to take some initiative in shaping our environments... The acquisition of land on an unprecedented scale... inevitably faces public authorities with a classical dilemma — the very actions they contemplate raise land prices and erect barriers to the fulfillment of the programmes." L. O. Gertler, Director-General, Research, Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Ottawa

The Demilitarized Society diagnoses the economic and allied decay caused by militarism, and formulates a set of proposals — political and economic — for demilitarizing our societies. It argues for building a coalition to challenge the power of the war-making institutions, composed of those occupations and interests which are deprived by the misapplication of resources to armaments. The deterioration of the infrastructure and productivity of society can only be reversed by the proper use of social capital. Adequate housing, health services, education, roads, public transportation, environmental cleanup, urban renovation, care of our children and the aged are all frustrated by the misuse of the capital fund to build weapons that are too terrible to be used and whose use would result in omnicide.

Industrialized nations - East and West - face this dilemma in common with much of the less developed world. Once the superpowers embark on the simultaneous course of disarmament and economic conversion, it will be in their interest and essentially within their power to ensure that the blocs they control and other nations within their spheres of influence do likewise.

The author provides a reliable "road map" to disarmament which would secure the jobs of those presently employed in military production and administration, and even the legal framework necessary for all nations to follow.

It's Greek to the Computer should help to settle some very old and central issues that have nagged Classical scholars for a long time. These issues concern the authenticity and the authorship of certain texts that have been attributed to Plato, to Aristotle, to both Plato and Aristotle, and to third parties. The fascinating question: was there a Homer? is also dealt with in a most original and provocative way.
In contrast to the older stylometrics which studied uncommon words, the new stresses the study of the most common words, for these lend themselves to statistical analysis. Professor Morton has presented a thorough introduction to the method of the new stylometrics in this volume.

The kind of investigation represented here can best be carried out by a "team" of computer specialists, statisticians, and Classicists. The team in this case is composed of A.Q. Morton of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, his colleague Professor Sidney Michaelson, Professor A.D. Winspear, the well-known Classicist from the University of Calgary who has recently been working at Oxford, and Dr. Michael Levison, formerly of Birkbeck College in the University of London, now Professor of Computing and Information Science at Queen's University, Kingston.
It's Greek to the Computer is a book that will interest a wide variety of scholars, and all those who relish a good puzzle.

The history of sixteen extant medical schools by a distinguished surgeon-historian glows with biographical sketches of their pioneers, "movers and shakers". Setting out to expose the elements necessary and common to all modern medical education, the author's zest for the unique, the colourful and spontaneous, has actually encouraged him to render the accounts of the several schools in novella-like form.
Each account reflects the rich, cross-grained Canadian variety of religion, language, culture and personality. In the end, shared overall experience and need — and generous federal support, especially after the second half of the twentieth century — created a remarkably interlinked and unified set of medical institutions.

Contributing to the flavour of this saga is the paradox that against long odds a nation still less than thirty million, inhabiting the largest land mass in the world, has produced a medical system and serving personnel second to none; while its record of research, discovery and precocious clinical application is no less remarkable in most fields of modern medicine. Over and above this achievement is the striking fact that a quarter of a century ago this country was able to extend quality publicly funded health care to all its people.

The author did not set out to write a brief history of medicine in Canada. It is for the reader to judge whether the recounting of two centuries of social and scientific history incident to the assembly and refinement of the medical schools — with their collegial linkages to Edinburgh, London, Paris and the USA — is the closest thing to it. Be that as it may, he has contrived to tell his story with measured grace, wit, candour and authority, while his summations in broad interpretive chapters, fore and aft, cast much additional critical light on the whole process

French Canadians are more historically minded than most other North Americans. The historians Gagnon has chosen to feature— Garneau, Ferland, Sulte, and Groulx—have a special significance because they were widely read by generations of their compatriots. They shaped the French Canadians' view of their own past and imprinted their own social and "national" identity.

Gagnon has given attention to the methodology of his historians, their access to sources, and their assessment of historical evidence. His major emphasis, however, is on their historical interpretation, on the values and ideology which explain their selection of events, the importance they give to personalities and to the events themselves. He has also made a sustained effort to put each author in his historical context, to show how the society in which they lived led them to stress certain values and to draw the lessons they did from the past. The analysis of the socio-historical context of each historian's writings, as well as those of their critics and out-riders, is comprehensive and informative. There is no other comparable study of French-Canadian historiography.

Parks for Profit is a lively contribution to a relatively neglected field of Canadian history. Beginning with the creation of Canada's first national park in Banff in 1885, the author provides a sympathetic story of the historical tension between conservation and profit which has marked Canada's national parks policy. She traces this motif from the era of Macdonald and Van Horne, through that of Mackenzie King to the initiatives of Trudeau and Chrétien, to the present day.

Canada's national parks have been consistently in jeopardy, whether from resource exploitation, commercialization, boundary erosion, federal-provincial jurisdictional conflict or budget cuts.
Yet, for more than a century, Canadian environmentalists, and certain politicians and civil servants, have continued to fight for, create, and maintain new parks—though frequently against great odds. Supported by meticulous documentation, this book chronicles the displacement by the automobile of the railroad from its dominance in the older parks, and it reveals the way the need for national highways influenced the financing and location of new parks. It also analyzes the conflicts between the railroad, mining, lumbering, hydro, and townsite interests, and those who worked to preserve the land in a more natural state. Native land claims too are proving to be an integral part of the contemporary park-making process.

The author's independent assessment of the striving for park creation over the last century, as well as her recommendations for the future, make Parks for Profit vital reading.

The readers of Gunnar Myrdal and His Works are getting two books in one. Part I deals with the biography of our subject and his contribution to social democracy, the "Swedish model," the famous (or notorious) "third way," to amelioration of the race problem in the USA, and to development in Southeast Asia, and the world over.
Part Il illuminates Myrdal the economic theorist, his transit to institutionalism, and his enduring concern for the methods of social science... but there is biography and charming anecdote in both.
Above all, Gunnar Myrdal's life and work represents a human and humane reaction to the austerity of unmitigated market forces in areas where they do not belong and are inherently ineffective. Born in 1898, his own experience in an impoverished Sweden and depressed America lent validity to his conclusion: "A social order that ... cannot afford to give children enough food, sanitary and spacious accommodation, satisfactory health care and education, and at the same time lacks employment for a great part of its labour force - that social order is unreasonable, and immoral and is already condemned by its own admission."
Myrdal was acutely aware that "the advanced democratic [welfare] state has its perils (the dulling of civic alertness, arising from the very success of State intervention, and inflation), but there is no help for that, as he saw it, but more democracy, more education, more participation and more equality as measures to overcome them" (Francine Lalonde).

The Twentieth Century, a sequel to the author's Quebec and Its Historians: 1840 to 1920, is a survey of the main interpretive currents of a period of remarkable transformation in the study of French-Canadian history. Gagnon's principal themes are the emergence of professional or "scientific" history in postwar Quebec and the continuing struggles of nationalist and anti-nationalist scholars. At the same time, the author himself emerges as an impassioned partisan in the debates he chronicles and much of this work consists of a critique of the positions of Fernand Ouellet, a leading protagonist in recent historical controversies.

In earlier chapters, Michel Brunet, Jean Hamelin, Guy Frégault, Marcel Trudel and Louise Dechêne, among others, are placed in the context of their times and their reactions to previous scholarship is examined.

There are very few works on Canadian historiography and, the essays of Ramsay Cook aside, the most widely-read book on the subject, Carl Berger's The Writing of Canadian History, deals only with English-Canadian historians. This volume will, therefore, be of particular interest to English speaking historians, students, and general readers. The latter might also be interested in learning about the connections between historical debate and the political conflicts that rocked Quebec in recent decades.