I learn from the current Literary Review of Canada of a new biography of the early life of Joseph Smallwood. How many provincial premiers have both a celebrated novel and a deeply researched biography, both focussed on the years before they got seriously into politics?
The biography, newly published by McGill Queen's Press, is Joseph Roberts Smallwood: Masthead Newfoundlander, 1900-1949 by historians Melvin Baker and Peter Neary.
As usual from McGill-Queen's, there's much else in Canadian history in its Fall 2021 catalogue, from which notons:
Royally Wronged: The Royal Society of Canada and Indigenous Peoples edited by Constance Backhouse, Cynthia E. Milton, Margaret Kovach and Adele Perry, which explores decades of RSC scholarship that helped make Canada a worse place;
Women at the Helm: How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada by Diana Nemiroff, whose title announces its argument;
Flora! A Woman in a Man's World by Flora MacDonald and Geoffrey Stevens, the autobiography of the 1980s politician.
Disputing New France: Companies, Law, and Sovereignty in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 by Helen Dewar
and (from 2020 but new to me), Who Pays for Canada? Taxes and Fairness edited by E.A. Heaman and David Tough, foreword by Kevin Page
