Up the Glens: Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, 1783-1994. Rev. ed.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

The bulk of this book is a reprint of an earlier work by Lieutenant
Colonel William Boss that was originally released in 1951. This updated
version includes new photographs, an impressive 40 appendixes, and a new
chapter—covering the years 1952 to 1994—by Brigadier General
Patterson.

Both Boss and Patterson are to be commended for painstaking research
and attention to minutiae. In a genre that is closer to family folklore
than military history, the potential to omit (and mortally offend) an
old comrade is enormous. Boss, unfortunately, was not a great writer.
His prose is repetitive and sometimes confusing. His anecdotes about two
“strange” recruits—a Jewish soldier and a “coloured
boy”—reveal more about Canadian attitudes toward minorities in the
1950s than they do about the SD&G regiment during World War II.

The format of the book is a curious compromise. Physically, it has the
dimensions of a picture book, yet the content is virtually all printed
text that is set in hard-to-read double columns. Photographs would have
been better exploited if enlarged to picture-book size. But they were
not, and the result is disappointing.

None of these shortcomings, however, are likely to deter the target
audience, which is all members and ex-members of the Stormont, Dundas
and Glengarry Highlanders. If you ever wore a kilt of the Macdonell of
Glengarry tartan or stepped to the quick march “Bonnie Dundee,” this
book is a must-have.