On the Night Table of Ken McGoogan

Photo credit: Sheena Fraser McGoogan

When I write history, I try to wear my research lightly. And for my last five books, I have been blessed with an outstanding editor, Phyllis Bruce at HarperCollins Canada, who catches me up whenever I let my reading show. “Lighten up,” she writes in the margins. “Too academic!”

In my new book How the Scots Invented Canada, the bibliography runs to sixty titles. Highlights include three collections of essays, a meditation, and a couple of surprises. In The Scottish Tradition in Canada, edited by W. Stanford Reid (M&S, 1976), I found thirteen scholars coming at Canadian life from fourteen angles. Reid himself addresses “The Scottish Background,” “The Scottish Protestant Tradition,” and “The Scot and Canadian Identity.” Grist for the mill.

I also learned from two more recent books published by McGill-Queen’s University Press: Canadas of the Mind: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms in the Twentieth Century, edited by Norman Hillmer and Adam Chapnick (2007), and A Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada, edited by Peter E. Rider and Heather McNabb (2006).

Then there was Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition, a meditation by Elizabeth Waterston (University of Toronto Press, 2001). It’s insightful and instructive, yet also subjective and personal, and conveys a heartfelt appreciation of the Scottish-Canadian literary tradition.

If all this sounds predictable enough, given my title, two less likely works also influenced the new book: The Future of the Self: Inventing the Postmodern Person, by Walter Truett Anderson (Tarcher/Putnam, 1997), and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, by Robert Kegan (Harvard University Press, 1994). But don’t take my word for it, I implore you. See for yourself.
 

Best-selling author Ken McGoogan’s books include Fatal Passage and Race to the Polar Sea. His latest, How the Scots Invented Canada, is new this fall.