Blog incest: Moore on Dummitt on Moore on....

I was going to post a comment on the latest at Christopher Dummitt's Everyday History blog, where he riffs on a recent post of mine.  But the comment moderation thingee defeated me -- either iI have some specialized blindness that prevents me from deciphering the script of that spam-catcher test, or Google Accounts just hates everybody, or....  Anyway, Chris D, I'm posting my thought here, trusting that our mutual friends will go here to read your comment on mine as well as mine on yours.

This is what the comment would have said:

I appreciate the notice, Christopher, and I'm a big fan of your new blog.  Keep it coming.  But I liked the Extraordinary Canadians series very much.  Partly for the format of short, uniform, elegantly produced, small books. Not everyone who wants to read a Canadian life wants the size and scale of Foran on Mordecai (a very good book for sure!) or, say, all the various massive Trudeau biographies. And several of the short lives are very good, if you don't read them as failed big books. Poliquin on Levesque and Saul on Baldwin and LaFontaine (which I reviewed elsewhere) come to mind. There are many I have not read but which have interesting juxtapositions of author and subject, to say the least.  Boyden on Riel and Dumont, yeah, didn't work too well, I thought too.
Part of what intrigued me about the Evans review is right now in Canada we seem to be in a lull of that crazy vitriolic hostility that history profs used to unload on, well, Pierre Berton in particular, but really anyone writing history who wasn't tenured and official.  I think Evans's critique sounds serious and is not just that kind of bitchiness, but who knows.