Roy MacLaren

Many books have been written about Mackenzie King, Canada's longest-serving and probably strangest Prime Minister. In this book, the author has chosen to dive deeper into King's foreign policy (or lack thereof) as Hitler and Mussolini were gaining in power. Maybe that is why I found that the book lacked context, making it too easy for me to judge Mr. King's ideas by today's standards. Antisemitism was common at the time, as was an enormous fear of communism, and several other world leaders believed in appeasement, having just lived through the horrors of world war. So our PM was maybe not as much of an outlier as he is portrayed in this book.

And, in the end, did his views about the dictators really change much on the world stage? Canada entered the Second World War right away. And foreign policy is only one part of Mr. King's overall legacy. At times, I felt the book was unbalanced, almost as if the author bears a personal grudge against Mr. King.

On the plus side, I learned at lot about our history, I'd never heard of Chanak. I hadn't understood the role of Italy's invasion of Abyssinia in the demise of the League of Nations. I began to think that the delusions suffered by Mr. King were more dangerous than the almost funny way they are so often portrayed in other writing.

I found the writing style dense and hard to follow at times. I often felt like I was looking for a needle in a haystack....but was pleasantly surprised, in the end, by just how many needles of knowledge I'd found.

So, a mixed reaction all in all.… (meer)