Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Historical Geography of Finns in the Sudbury Area by Oiva Saarinen (review)

. 378 The Canadian Historical Review wrote. But he was the greatest surgeon of his day, not the greatest historian or writer. Bliss's more distanced and dispassionate view also has value. Osler's life can be better put into perspective, and with an honesty that has no reluctance to see the warts along with the greatness. Bliss has a respected background as a Canadian historian, coming to medical history relatively late in his career with award-winning books on Banting and the discovery of insulin. For this work he had access to all the documents used by Cushing, in addition to a further seventy-five years ofOslerian scholarship. The intelligent, witty, and critical Bliss confesses he went into this project expecting to find the feet of clay evident in the lives of all great men, but he found elements ·of greatness down to the tips of Osler's toes. As Bliss states, it is easier to deal with famous and idealized 'great men' like Banting, who, under the halo, turned out to be a poor researcher , wife beater, and alcoholic. Osler, in contrast, after intensive research, emerges as a paragon representing the best ofthe profession a learned, humanistic, hard-working, and productive man who had great influence on the profession, the public, and those who would foster medicine, medical education, and research at a time when great change was occurring. He looked like a saint to the physicians of the day and was characterized as such, and he seems to be saintly in both his life and his practice. Bliss is an ideal biographer for Osler: he does not suffer from the idolatry of many Oslerian scholars or from the cynicism of many social historians ofmedicine. He is able to combine scholarship with succinct but captivating writing that involves the reader in the man and his era. His impeccable research would have allowed him to outweigh Cushing's two-volume, 1400-page tome, but he has the ability to capture the essence ofthe events, the ideas, and the times and present them clearly in a book that is unusual in medical historical biography - a page-turner that will keep the reader reading late into the night, just as Osler liked to do. It is a remarkable life revealed in a remarkable book. JOCK MURRAY Dalhousie University Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Historical Geography ofFinns in the Sudbury Area. OIVA SAARINEN. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1999· Pp. xv, illus. $44.95 Between a Rock and a Hard Place is an unashamedly filio-pietistic celebration ofthe Finns' successful battle for economic (and political) assimilation and a celebration ofa Canadian 'concept ofmulticulturalism,' which Book Reviews 379 'provided the foundation for the maintenance of a more vigorous Finnish culture [than in the United States], that has lasted to the present day.' This 'aspect of the Canadian way of life - our ability to live with varying ethnic groups and cultures,' Saarinen states, 'serves to differentiate Canada from most other countries in the world.' The book is targeted partly at an academic audience (it contains the usual scholarly apparatus) and partly at a popular readership, especially in the Finnish community. Saarinen's determination to tell us just about everything there is to know about the Sudbury Finns is reflected in numerous excellent photographs, lists, and charts of institutional growth and development. The book is studded with twenty biographies of prominent Sudbury area Finns, all leaders of one or other ofthe subcommunities that made up the larger national community: for instance, 'Karl Lehto: Merchant-Wrestler,' 'John VernerAhlquist: Grand Old Man ofthe Finnish Communist Movement,' and 'The Honourable Judy Erola: Finnish Femme Extraordinaire' (who also provides the book's blurb). Saarinen does not bother to mention the name of the political party Ms Erola represented with such distinction in the early 1980s (the Liberal Party) - perhaps she is of such celebrity that she needs no political identification. But this is no casual omission. Saarinen does not, in fact, mention the Liberal or Conservative parties at all, and disposes of the rise and fall ofthe New Democratic Party in two sentences: 'By this time (1970s), it was identification with the working class rather than...