Will Ferguson. Bastards & Boneheads: Canada's Glorious Leaders Past and Present. Douglas & McIntrye, 1999.
An interesting review of topics/"great men" in Canadian history. The reaching for the laughs and the use of offensive labelling gets tiring very soon.
I learned one fact that applies to personal family history--that people who moved from Maine to Acadia to take up land vacated by the "expulsion" were called Planters.
I learned the most interesting details about the FLQ crisis.
It seems to me that the book focuses on what happened but is not very illuminating on why things happened.
He misses the mark completely on Louis Riel because he does not see that the Metis resistances were both totally about abuse of/denial of human rights by the Eastern politicians who were eager to have Canada become a nation with colonies.
The book suffers by being outdated, especially with reference to Indigenous issues which the TRC brought to our attention.
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