No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War

Description

256 pages
Contains Photos, Maps, Bibliography, Index
$39.99
ISBN 0-07-552713-8
DDC 940.54'0971

Year

1996

Contributor

Reviewed by J.L. Granatstein

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Review

The furor over the television series The Valour and the Horror continues
to resonate in Canada. The CBC-TV series, in the eyes of veterans,
seemed to downgrade their collective efforts during World War II and to
apply contemporary relativism and a neopacifist slant to issues that
seemed much clearer half a century ago. One result of the continuing
discussion was another TV series, No Price Too High, deliberately
contrived to present a different take on what Canadians accomplished,
why they acted as they did, and how they felt about it. The series,
pointedly not shown on the CBC, was nonetheless a great success, even
securing an audience on the United States’ PBS network.

This volume, produced by Terry Copp (the main historical adviser for
the series) and filmmaker Richard Nielson is similarly first-rate. The
book covers the prewar and wartime years, looks at the home front and
the war zones, and provides a host of illustrations, many of which are
new. Other books (including volumes by this reviewer) have covered the
same ground, but No Price Too High is without question one of the very
best. Copp is a distinguished military historian, an author who has
delved deeply into the Northwest Europe campaign and into the difficult
question of battlefield stress; he has an eye for a good quote and, most
important, the wide understanding to set it in context. This more than
anything else distinguishes his book and the TV series he worked on from
The Valour and the Horror.

Citation

Copp, Terry, and Richard Nielsen., “No Price Too High: Canadians and the Second World War,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 13, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/5475.