J.L. Granatstein is the former director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum and a distinguished research professor emeritus of history. He is an award-winning author of more than sixty books on Canadian political and military history, the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
J.L. Granatstein is a national treasure. For over sixty years, this soldier, professor, museum director, public intellectual, and professional provocateur has been exploring and revealing the hard truths behind Canada's national history. This collection of his essays stirs the historical imagination and is essential reading for all Canadians who want to understand war and politics in all their complexity. In his unflinching style and pursuit of the past as it was, and not how we wish it were, Granatstein has revealed not only how Canadians struggled in times of conflict and turmoil, but also how those decisions continue to resonate and shape contemporary Canada. - Tim Cook, author of Vimy: The Battle and the Legend and The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada's Second World War This collection traces the sustained work over the past fifty years of the foremost historian of Canadian politics in the era of the two world wars. It is a wonderful journey of discovery into the new sources and analytical frameworks with which he reshaped our understanding of this crucial era. Lucid prose - Granatstein's trademark - brings to life the remarkable people and the burning issues that profoundly influenced the country and brought it onto the world stage at a time of international upheaval and violence. - Roger Sarty, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University