Great Canadians: Twelve Profiles of Extraordinary People

Marie T. Gillis is a member of the Angus L. Macdonald Library staff at
St. Francis Xavier University.

Great Canadians is a collection of brief biographies of 12 people
arbitrarily chosen by the author as representative of the best this
country has to offer. Its cover features a picture of the iconic Terry
Fox, a person everyone can agree was a great Canadian. That photo may be
the best part of the book.

In her introduction, Angela Murphy outlines her criteria for choosing
the 12 personages profiled. In her view, to be a great Canadian one must
have a recognizable name and have made a positive contribution to
Canadian culture or life. These wide parameters allow her to choose the
usual subjects, but still leave unanswered some pesky questions. Why,
one may ask, Margaret Atwood rather than Margaret Laurence, Carol
Shields, Timothy Findlay, Robertson Davies, or any one of myriad others?
Furthermore, why only one fiction author when there are four
politicians? Murphy congratulates herself for including a writer, a
philosopher (Marshall McLuhan) and an athlete (Wayne Gretzky) in her
list and, perhaps to deflect the inevitable criticism, decries the
paucity of women candidates. Murphy may be satisfied, but her list
breaks no new ground.

Perhaps this is nitpicking. What is important here is the style and
substance of the profiles. The style is competent; the substance
nonexistent. Murphy has chosen to write the most superficial of
sketches; one chronological skimming of a life after another. If you
knew nothing of these people before reading this book, you will not know
much more after. But the people she chronicles are all so well known
that there is almost no excuse for such limited histories. Her research,
as proven by her list of sources, is insufficient to produce a credible
undergraduate essay on any of these topics. There are many good
biographies of the people profiled here; this book’s are not among
them.