The Unknown Country
$3.50
By COWARD MCCANN
THE title of this informal, chatty, colorful, descriptive book about Canada and its people is not ineptly chosen. Paradoxical as it may seem, we are too familiar with Canada to know it intimately or to understand it thoroughly. Superficially Canada lacks the challenge of being “different.” Consequently, although many Americans have traveled and hunted and hiked and fished in Canada’s hospitable wilds, few could achieve a respectable passing mark in an examination on Canadian history and institutions and racial and economic problems. Mr. Hutchinson comes from the expansive West of Canada, from British Columbia, and his writing has some of the qualities that Americans in the East are sometimes inclined to associate with California. It is fresh and zestful and enthusiastic, with a tendency now and then to slip over into excessive exuberance. Mr. Hutchinson is in love with Canada, with its many natural beauties, with its diversity, and with the human beings who make up the Canadian people. He succeeds in making the various provinces come alive as he depicts the shrewd, hurdfisted, hard-working French peasant from the island of Orleans, the farmer of the prairies, battered by the depression, the boom spirit of Vancouver, and the vanishing English gentility of Victoria. Now and then he falls into overwriting, as when he has tears “surging down the cheeks” of a French-Canadian orator. But he knows his Canada, its history and its politics and its idiosyncrasies, well. Anyone who is planning to visit Canada’s seacoasts and mountains and lakes and forests will find Mr. Hutchinson an agreeable and informative companion. W. H. C.