Canada: Pictures of a Great Land

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

Canada’s particular beauty is such as to invite treatment on the grandest of scales. Its infinite variety, enormous geographical scale, and the vigorous, unpeopled wilderness that are such features of the great land are ill-suited to miniaturization. Here gorgeous, outsize colour plates, full- or even double-page spreads, go far to suggest this overwhelming abundance. They are the collected work of many well-known Canadian photographers, and each one of them is a work of art.

As is seldom the case with a book of splendid pictures, the text too is noteworthy. The prose of Pierre Berton, Jean-Louis Gagnon, and A.E. Johann, as well as the poetry of Duke Redbird and Alootook Ipelli, provide widely varied perspectives on the unique character of the country still so little known. (The plates are accompanied by descriptive text in English, French, and German.)