Empire of Liberty

Gordon S Wood

Oxford University Press

£25

“The past is not dead,” observed American novelist William Faulkner.

“It isn’t even past.”

Perhaps this is why contemporary Canadian news stories resonate so strongly.

As most recent examples, consider the report that Aboriginal Affairs Minister Chris Bentley won’t rule out handing over to the Six Nations the disputed land that has been the site of a four-year aboriginal occupation in Caledonia, Ont, as a way to resolve a 200-year-old land claim.

The former Douglas Creek Estates held in trust by the province is still occupied by Six Nations protestors.

So far, the simmering land dispute, which has erupted in violent clashes between demonstrators and local residents in the town south of Hamilton, has cost taxpayers $64.3 million, not including the $16 million the province paid for the land seized and occupied by protestors from the nearby Six Nations reserve on Feb 28, 2006. The government has said protestors can remain there while all sides negotiate a resolution to the land claim.

Three other items resonate as well: the news in mid-February that the beloved candy company Laura Secord (named for the Canadian heroine of the war of 1812) has been returned to Canadian hands, and a recent interview with the Canadian-born governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, probing whether her Canadian origins might preclude her running for the U.S. presidency.

And, of course, the Canada-U.S. struggle for hockey gold at the 2010 Olympic games final in Vancouver, which was enthusiastically characterized as yet another “cross-border” dispute.

Yes, the rival interests of the U.S. and Canada have overlapped and inter-reacted ever since their beginnings as British colonies, a fact splendidly documented in Empire of Liberty by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Gordon S Woods.

Woods’ book is part of the Oxford History of the United States, a series which includes two Pulitzer Prize winners and two New York Times bestsellers, and is the latest volume. As such, it covers the historically influential and intense period of 1789-1815, bracketed at the early end by the beginning of the French Revolution and culminating with the fallout from the War of 1812.

This was a tumultuous period for both Canada and the United States and Woods’ enormous book is packed with fascinating facts Canadians may have been unaware of.

Did you know, for example, that at the dawn of the 19th century the U.S. population numbered approximately eight million compared to the half million living in Upper and Lower Canada? Crunch those numbers today and see how little those proportions have altered.

Were you aware that the aboriginals of the day were highly political and every bit as adept at planning out territorial strategies as the European immigrants moving onto their lands?

From the story of Tecumseh and Isaac Brock to Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton, Woods reveals a period marked by tumultous change — in politics, society, culture and the economy. It was also a period of great irony and surprise as the men who founded the new American republic watched their dreams morph into something quite different than they expected.

They hated political parties, yet parties emerged nonetheless. Although leaders wanted the end of slavery, it emerged stronger in 1815 than it was in 1789. While many wanted no entanglements with Europe, the entanglements proved unavoidable. Nevertheless, as European artistocratic values were suborned along with aboriginal culture, a prosperous and increasingly mighty middle class began to emerge which in turn created the economic engine that fuelled the world for the next two centuries.

It’s an astonishing story, one of the greatest in human history, to which Woods does admirable justice in this consistently interesting and hugely informative volume.

An excellent addition to any library. Paula Adamick

Driving like Crazy

Thirty Years of Vehicular Hellbending

PJ O’Rourke

Atlantic Books

£17.99

This is the time of year when all good motorheads gather at auto shows from LA and Detroit to Toronto and Stuttgart to ogle all that’s new. Despite a world wide financial meltdown and all the eco-fascism posing as environmental concern, the love affair with the shiny chariot goes on.

Sure to be at one of them is the iconic PJ O’Rourke, the prolific and funny author of Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, Peace Kills and On the Wealth of Nations.

O’Rourke has now penned a personal salute and mash note to his first love — the car, particularly the American car, which he describes as “cheap to make, easy to fix and easy to hot-rod.”

He comes by love of all things vehicular honestly enough. In fact, petrol is imprinted in his DNA since his grandfather had the Buick dealership in Toledo, Ohio, and the whole extended family worked there for years.

In 288 pages, structured as a series of essays, some classic and some previously unpublished, O’Rourke catalogues the history of his favorite models and his adventures in cars over the years, gushing particularly over a trip he took in 1977 from Florida to Los Angeles in a constantly-overheating 1954 Buick for a piece commissioned by Car and Driver.

From there, he veers into a thousand-mile expedition across Mexico; and then on to a trek through Kyrgyzstan in the back of a Soviet army surplus truck. The odyssey continues with an alcohol-fuelled weekend in North Carolina and then on to an eventful journey from Islamabad to Calcutta. And so it goes, from Buicks to Land Rovers to Harley-Davidsons, it’s hardly surprising then that he would also discover the thrill of NASCAR racing – just the thing to provoke fear and loathing among news anchors and elitists of the East coast.

Describing the sense of happiness and enthusiasm he found among the people at the races at Charlotte, NC, he writes: “What’s the difference between the South and the rest of America? There isn’t any. The South is the rest of America ….. Nobody’s eating roughage, running marathons, and taking yoga classes down there. People still drink, still smoke, still have guns, and still believe in a personal God who listens to them.”

And while this is essentially a compendium of funny personal stories, this is also an angry book.

“I take the demise of the American car personally,” O’Rourke admits. Ralph Nader and his unsafe-at-any-speed minions come in for special criticism, but it’s more than that, he writes. The truth is that we now live in the age of ‘Fun-Suckers’, that legion of neo-prohibitionists and nanny-staters who “achieve power without merit” and for whom the car has become an irresistible target. In fact, the ultimate goal of all nanny state funsuckers, according to O’Rourke, is the stifling of the innate human love of freedom and independence — which is what the car represents.

He also believes the current batch of funsuckers occupying the White House want to nationalize the auto industry, giving them further control over all Americans and their customers. The goal of this administration, he says, is a government mandated lightweight, green machine that runs entirely on “alternative” energy.

“When I was a kid, we called that a Schwinn,” O’Rourke quips. In Canada, it was called a CCM or a Raleigh.

The prose is lively, funny, engaging and depressingly credible – as the petrolheads over at Top Gear would agree — and will resonate with car hounds from California to Calcutta. Worth every penny for a great ride where seatbelts are optional. Jerry Todd-Jenkins

Women on Ice

Wayne Norton

Ronsdale Press

$26.95

It has been well over half a century since Clarence Campbell, then president

of the National Hockey League, remarked that hocky was simply “too rough for girls.”

He was responding to a question about the possible formation of a women’s hockey league in the 1950s.

Since then, of course, women’s leagues have been formed across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. and the recent gold medal won in Vancouver by the Canadian women’s olympic hockey team — which they celebrated fittingly with champagne and cigars — proves just how mistaken Campbell was.

What is less well known, however, is that women were playing competitive hockey fully half a century before Campbell’s comments. Plus, it’s hardly recognized at all that their game was particularly strong in Western Canada.

To set this highly neglected record straight, Wayne Norton has written a lively book on just this topic, and illustrated it wonderfully with loads of archival photos.

His story begins before the turn of the twentieth century and then proceeds into the years of the First World War when the game enjoyed an explosion in popularity.

Later on, in the 1920s, a large contribution to the women’s ice hockey game in the West was made by the squad known as the Vancouver Amazons.

“It is primarily their story which is told here,” writes Norton. “The Amazons were one of several teams that met at Banff every winter to contest for what was regarded (sometimes officially and sometimes unofficially) as the women’s ice hockey championship of Western Canada.”

Yet for many reasons, the Amazons who blazed the trail were not typical of either their era or of women’s teams of their day. For one thing, they had access to an artificial ice rink for practice. They were also associated with hockey’s famous Patrick brothers who helped advance their cause.

But acceptance didn’t come easy, as Norton notes: “Society expected many things of women in Edwardian times, but a serious inclination to play a man’s game was certainly not one of them. To play ice hockey, women had either to dismiss or ignore society’s discouragements, roadblocks and restrictions.”

Which they did, as their sport gained in popularity and support from independent-minded women emerged from all social classes: from a governor-general’s daughter to a coal-miner’s daughter.

What a story! To read this is to understand how well

deserved those Olympic cigars were. Heather Harrington