Great to see an announcement that David Wilson's big biography of D'Arcy McGee is about to appear, with a launch for the first volume on April 21 at Ben McNally Books in Toronto.
Okay, David's an old friend of mine, and I'm looking forward to his getting the attention he deserves. And I've had my appetite whetted by hearing him talk of this book; there will be new things.
But I'm just as chuffed to see proof that a serious nineteenth-century Canadian political biography is possible, both in the academy and in Canadian publishing. When I wrote a book about Confederation ten years ago, I was very much aware of writing about a field no one wrote about. Richard Gwyn's John A. helped show those days are passing. I hope David's McGee book definitively re-establishes that such subjects can be done and are distinctly worth doing.
