Author Events
Jonathan Vance, author of A History of Canadian Culture will be at LaSalle Pavilion in LaSalle Park, Burlington on Tuesday, May 26th at 9:30 a.m. for their Book and Author Series breakfast event.
Book Reviews
A History of Canadian Culture
REVIEWED BY Laurel Smith
Quill & Quire
May 2009
As a rejoinder to those critics who find Canadian culture boring (or non-existent), Jonathan Vance’s ambitious, insightful new book provides proof that this country has a rich and often under-appreciated cultural heritage.
Defining “culture” as a “synonym for the arts,” Vance provides a chronological record of Canadian artistic activity, including material that is both descriptive and analytical. The issues he raises clearly illuminate the reasons behind the frequent “boom-and-bust” shifts and the often-precarious nature of Canadian artistic practice. For instance, Vance contends that the need for the elite to control the cultural agenda, as a way both to uplift the working populace and to express Canadian nationalism, butts up against the populist craving for art as pure entertainment. At the same time, the wary distrust between the amateur practitioner or folk-art craftsperson and the professional artist, as well as the classic battle between traditional and experimental artistic tastes, help define the cultural landscape. Read more ...
Our other national game
Geoff Pevere
The Toronto Star
April 5, 2009
In the late 1940s, groups lobbying Ottawa for a modest cultural presence in a network of recently built community centres learned that many of the facilities had mysteriously morphed into hockey rinks.
So much for art, and welcome to Canada.
Such stories abound in Jonathan Vance's A History of Canadian Culture. While it may be true that culture for many Canadians is what one does with skates on, it's also true that paintbrushes – or pens, chisels, pianos and movie cameras – have been as persistent in the Dominion as hockey sticks. Read more ...
You didn't know that?!?
REVIEWED BY PATRICK WATSON
Globe and Mail Update
March 27, 2009
The first television transmission in Canada took place in Ogilvy's department store in Montreal in 1931, 20 years before the CBC's first TV broadcast.
I didn't know that.
Gwethalyn Graham's novel Earth and High Heaven (1944), No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list for months, earned the Montreal author a fortune from its U.S. publication. More than a million copies were sold. The royalties poured in. But under Canadian tax law then, royalties were "unearned income," the tax people grabbed most of what Graham earned and she died in near poverty at the age of 52.
I didn't know that, either.
This book by historian Jonathan Vance, of the University of Western Ontario, is full of stories that will have you muttering "I didn't know that." With pleasure, too, because the guy really is a storyteller. Read more ...
