Local and Regional

528 LETTERS IN CANADA The Wild North Land, hardly less famous than its predecessor. Butler was a man of original personality and sometimes radical opinions, and McCourt presents a well-balanced portrait. Finding a Father by Graham McInnes ( Hamish Hamilton, 223, $5.50) is the third volume of a leisurely-written autobiography. The author was brought up in Australia, and his youth there provided the theme of the first two volumes: The Road to Gundagai and Humping my Bluey. In the present book he tells of coming to Canada after a lapse of seventeen years to see his father (divorced by his mother), and his discovery of the country. The two early volumes successfully COnveyed something of the temper and atmosphere of Australia. The present one is less successful in conveying the temper of Canada. Little happens in the book and little is revealed of the author himself, but the style is often a delight and some sketches of individuals are acute. Here is A. Y. Jackson: he "had a bent and broken nose, a loose friendly mouth filled with long narrow wonderfully strong teeth, a tonsure of gray hair over a pink healthy scalp, with an unruly tuft sticking up to make him look like an elderly Tintin, though his gait was more like that of a bear. He was a very steady, very prolific painter. ..." (ALEXANDER BRADY) LOCAL AND REGIONAL Centennial year brought forth a plethora of publications in local and regional studies. Reminiscences, autobiographies, official histories of towns and counties, private obeisances, the flow was overwhelming. The books reviewed in this section represent only a small selection from the literature. They may not be typical, but if they are, the Centennial Commission has much to answer for. The range, as usual, is from the very good to the very bad. But there seems to be rather more of the latter than of the former. The Carleton Library series of paperbacks, published by McClelland and Stewart, has received much well-deserved praise over the last few years for its policy of bringing out-of-print classics in Canadian studies to a wider publiC. In 1967 the Carleton Library reprinted two of the most important books in Canadian historiography, both of which originally appeared as part of the Carnegie Fund series on CanadianAmerican relations, a series thirty years old, but one which is still widely SOCIAL STUDIES 529 used by Canadian scholars. Fred Landon's Western Ontario and the American Frontier (no. 34, xxii, 304, $3.95) was not only an excellent example of regional history, but also One of the best frontierist interpretations of Canadian development. North Atlantic Triangle (no. 30, 1966, xxviii, 380, $2.75), by John Bartlet Brebner, remains the standard work on the interaction of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Increasingly, the Carleton Library has been commissioning new works, usually collections of essays on areas which have not received adequate attention in the past. Four such books appeared in 1967. W. T. Easterbrook and M. H . Watkins are the editors of Approaches to Canadian Economic History (no. 31, xviii, 300, $2.95). As well as reprinting a number of important articles, the volume includes an extensive essay on recent contributions to Canadian economic history. Many of the classic essays are here: A. R. M. Lower's splendid "The Trade in Square Timber," and D. G. Creighton's "Economic Background of the Rebellions of 1837." The more recent articles also maintain a high standard. However, they are interpretations of economic history by economists and demonstrate the almost complete absence of an historical approach to economic history in recent years. Gone is the daring, imaginative, historical inSight given the field by H. A. Innis and Lower and Creighton; gone also is the humanistic balance to the scientific approach of the economists. The raw material for analyzing modem Canadian social structure has been laid out in a Carleton Library volume compiled by sociologist John Porter, Canadian Social Structure: A Statistical Profile (no. 32, viii, 164, $2.95). In eighty-nine statistical tables, Porter shows the patterns which underlie his Vertical Mosaic. The statistics cover a wide range of social institutions and problems, comparing 1961 figures with...