Out of the Shadows: Canada in the Second World War. Rev. ed.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

This fine, readable history of Canada and World War II, when events
“were forcing Canada to step out of the shadows,” appears in a
revised edition 18 years after its first publication. It retains its 150
photos and handful of maps, but the text is slightly longer and the
helpfully annotated bibliography recommends many titles published since
the first book.

Newly available archival sources and recent discoveries have led the
authors (both military historians with the Directorate of History at
National Defence Headquarters) to alter some sections and change their
judgments in some matters. Whereas in the first edition they rated three
Canadian generals as first-class, here they conclude that Major-General
B.M. Hoffmeister was “probably the only Canadian who could have
reached his rank in the German army”; re-evaluation has led them to
“modify ... considerably” their favorable appraisal of Simonds and
Vokes. Coverage of the home front still leaves the Japanese in 1949,
when they gained the franchise; there is no mention of settlements that
came in the 1980s.

The book is not intended for scholars. Rather, its objective is “to
provide a popular overview of events [for] the general reader”; in
this it succeeds admirably.