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humanities 449 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Although lively, the book is a thick narrative, buttressed by the kind of long, meandering endnotes that few publishers will permit. There are 280 pages of text and 212 pages of notes; since the latter are in smaller type, the two parts are roughly equal in wordage. Another 33 pages are devoted to sources. Obviously this book is must reading for anyone interested in Ukrainian Canadians and it would be fascinating for some scholar to tell us how Ukrainian Americans and their organizations B which have walk-on parts here B coped with some of the same kinds of problems in relation to displaced persons. What may not be so obvious is how important this book is to the study of ethnic acculturation in twentieth-century North America. It seems to me, on the basis of Luciuk=s and other work, that the Ukrainian Canadian case B or certain aspects of it B is an extreme one. Different communities react to oppression in different ways. In some cases such as that of early twentieth-century Chinese Americans, oppression created a community cohesion that amounted, in matters of immigration, to a collective conspiracy. As Luciuk tells it, the memory of past oppression and fear of its recurrence created a culture of communal dissension among Ukrainian Canadians and their organizations. Luciuk, a scholar and a community activist, demonstrates a broad sympathy for a wide range of actors, telling us frankly of his admiration for both Panchuk and Frolick, and he even has a good word to say at the end about an extreme assimilationist leader who was Ottawa=s idea of a >good Ukrainian.= I regret that he did not make clear to his readers why so many immigrant Ukrainians and other Eastern and Southern Europeans were drawn into the communist orbit and, in many cases, remained there long after the Soviet dictatorship had been exposed for what it was. I have been much instructed by this work but do have, in addition to the above, two B and only two B minor quibbles. Luciuk writes of the >genocidal Great Famine of 1932B33= in the Soviet Ukraine. Surely >murderous= is the appropriate word. He also argues that the forced return to the Soviets of certain Soviet citizens who did not wish to return >was perhaps the single most disgraceful episode in the history of Anglo-American diplomacy in the twentieth century.= There are, of course, multiple candidates for this dubious honour. My own choices would be general refugee policy in the first half, Rwanda in the second. (ROGER DANIELS) George Emery. The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896B1914 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xxx, 260. $55.00 George Emery discusses prairie church history in the era of the Laurier settlement boom. His approach differs from that of John Webster Grant=s The Church in the Canadian Era (1967) and Neil Semple=s The Lord=s Dominion (1992). Grant=s overview does not feature the magnification of prairie 450 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 developments in the decade and a half that Emery deems crucial, while Semple=s assessment of Methodist history from the standpoint of the socioeconomic privilege and power of central Canada is considered inaccurate. The book focuses on the history of a particular Christian institution (the Methodist Church in Canada, arising from the union of several Methodist bodies in 1874 and 1884), rather than on non-institutional religious history. It prosecutes social history informed through rigorous deployment of quantitative evidence. It traces the shift from an earlier Methodist preoccupation in the west with Aboriginal peoples to the concern for Caucasians as the lure of >grain gold= (wheat) saw vast migrations into the prairie provinces from the Maritimes, central Canada, Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. While owning the Wesleyan root in Canadian Methodism, Emery maintains nonetheless that the Canadian expression, especially on the prairies, evolved as novel and unforeseeable developments required extraordinary flexibility and adaptability. The missioners faced formidable challenges. Prairie hardship, for instance, required men mobile and young enough to be bachelors when bachelors in...

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