Stephen Leacock: The Sage of Orillia, and: k. d. lang: Carrying the Torch, and: Alice Munro: A Double Life, and: Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life (review)

66 biography Vol. 17, No. 1 comb was a key figure in the struggle to redefine the role of science in America; and he understood very well that neither the philosophy nor the morality of Peirce was suitable . He did not, to be sure, understand Peirce's philosophy. But then neither did most of Peirce's supporters. Even James, who brought him back to Harvard (with private funding) to lecture, discouraged publication of Peirce's 1903 lectures on grounds that they were obscure, if not unintelligible. Newcomb found himself in roles of power where he could bury Peirce, for him a charlatan and an effete snob who knew only "the privileged world of Harvard University and the upper crust of Cambridge and Boston society" (p. 152). Newcomb's resentment must have been deep. In America's version of the Methodenstreit , Newcomb had argued violently against Richard Ely's criticisms of individualist and deductivist political economy. Ely was also a colleague of Newcomb's, a fact which did not prevent him from charging, anonymously, that Ely's book, The Labor Movement, represented "the ravings of an anarchist and the dreams of a socialist." He concluded that "Dr. Ely seems ... to be seriously out of place in a university chair." Simon Newcomb beautifully represented what the American University wanted. Thorstein Veblen, Peirce's student at Hopkins, was surely correct about this: If Eliot of Harvard represented the old New England clerical upper crust, Gilman and Newcomb represented the quest for authority of the new bourgeois in the transforming institutions of higher education. There is a sense, then, that Peirce was caught by some very special forces at work. Finally, although it seems that Peirce was personally naive about most of this, it is hard to see how his philosophy, properly understood, could have worked in the interest of a technocratic science. Peirce's philosophy was profoundly metaphysical during a time when science was being defined as free of metaphysics. Worse, his synechism involved the mystical idea that the universe is a "Living Being." His claim that "if we cannot in some measure understand God's mind, all science . . . must be a delusion and a snare" (p. 346) was exactly what people did not want to hear. It is no accident that after his death, his views, like those of Dewey, were misappropriated by people whose interests were only technocratic. Readers of Brent's biography should note, in conclusion, that they will not get much clarification of Peirce's difficult ideas from his very fine book. Peter T. Manicas University of Hawaii at Manoa James Doyle, Stephen Leacock: The Sage of Orillia. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. 79 pp. $14.95. William Robertson, k. d. lang: Carrying the Torch. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. 112 pp. $14.95. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. 97 pp. $14.95. Peter Stevens, Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992. 74 pp. $14.95. These volumes inaugurate ECW Press's Canadian Biography Series (CBS), which is intended to include, the publishers write, "short, readable, illustrated biographies of prominent Canadians from all walks of life—writers, musicians, artists, politicians, and athletes—individuals from the past and present who have had a major impact on Canadian life." The press is well known for ambitious publishing projects within Canadian literature: ECW has produced multivolume reference works—The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, Canadian Writers and Their Works, the REVIEWS 67 Canadian Literature Index—as well as another series of short critical reader's guides to individual novels. Thus the Canadian Biography Series is a logical addition to the ECW's offerings. Some forty volumes are in preparation, and while "lots of research has gone into writing CBS volumes, these are definitely not heavy, footnote-laden, biographical tomes. They are short, direct, engaging, authoritative, and highly readable biographies of the people everybody wants to know more about. People like Donald Sutherland, Alice Munro, Wayne Gretzky, or Alex Colville" (ECW announcement). Judging by the first four entries in the series, the editors have produced just the sort of biographies they describe—and that, not really surprisingly, has both advantages and disadvantages...