Nature

500 tq LETTERS IN CANADA: I959 And that, in Canadian journalism, is an achievement. The reminiscences ofMrs. Bluebell Stewart Phillips, Something Always Turned Up (Ryerson, pp. x, I34, $3.50), match the fowiness of Gregory Clark but lack his professional skill. Mrs. Phillips sketches in the barest outline her career as a Saskatchewan school teacher who married an Anglican divinity student and saw him through the crises ofa mission field, an education at McGill, and the traumas of a first parish in the Laurentians. Her writing is unpretentious (indeed artless) and her comedy is unsophisticated, but her book does have a measure ofsincerity and warmth. (HUGO MCPHERSON) NATURE To fly-fishermen throughout the English-speaking world the name of Roderick Haig-Brown has become a byword signifying a connoisseur of that ancient sporting art. It means more, a promise ofexciting, colourful, and thought-provoking writing. His eighth book, Fisherman's Summer (Collins, pp. 253, illus., $4.50), adorned as it is with Lou Darling's vivid black-and-white drawings, strengthens the reputation already achieved. No ardent devotee of fly-fishing should miss it. At the same time, field naturalists will see in these pages the revealing of the kinship between those who go afield to cast an expectant fly into a hidden pool and those who go to find a bird in a secret bush or a flower in a shadowy bog. The same need of expert knowledge and skill and the same appreciation ofthe unexpected, ofthe unpredictability ofnature, and of the joy of finding at last, are there. The same problems ofadjusting to continuous change in natural conditions in this tempestuously industrializing world, the need for conservation, and the desire to save some of the charms of solitude and the wild are in this book as they are in all ofthis author's writings. Fishermen like this and naturalists have much in common. They should be able to work together to preserve something of that wild nature from which their enjoyment comes and in contact with which such real spiritual needs are met. Country Hours, by Clarke Locke, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald (Ryerson, pp. viii, lO5, $3.50), consists of the notes and impressions of a busy man, journalist and advertiser by profession, who has through the years taken time to look at nature, especially the wild creatures that one may fmd near any country home in southern Ontario. Brief, almost lapidary in form, these notes convey often highly personal inter- HUMANITIES Iq 50! pretations of animal action. Adorning the book and enhancing the writer's impressions are the black-and-white drawings of Thoreau MacDonald, an artist who is always adept at seizing and portraying the familiar and not so familiar aspects of the countryside and its human and animal dwellers. (R. M. SAUNDERS) MILITARY Two volumes have appeared in I959 to mark the year's significance as an anniversary. Colonel C. P. Stacey's Quebec, J 759 (Macmillan, pp. xiv, 2IO, maps, $5.00) is the only Canadian work ofseveral that commemorate the rwo-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (the others were all published in England). Leslie Roberts' history of the R.C.A.F., There Shall be Wings (Clarke, Irwin, pp. xiv, 290, illus., $5.00), is timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Bight in Canada on February 23, I909. Apart from their both being commemorative volumes, these works are as different in kind as the events they honour. Quebec, J 759 is a scholarly investigation of the evidence in an attempt to provide a definitive interpretation ofproblems and details that have vexed historical writing about the capture of Quebec for two centuries; but it is, at the same time, so well written that it will hold anyone's attention. There Shall be Wings, on the contrary, designed as a popular account ofthe R.C.A.F., and aiming at glamour rather than deep academic study, will fail to interest readers who have no previous connection with or concern in the events it records; but it is valuable because it contains a mass of factual detail that has not previously been collected between two covers. Leslie...