The Just a Minute Omnibus

H. Graham Rawlinson is a corporate lawyer with the international law
firm Torys in Toronto. He is co-author of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most
Influential Canadians of the 20th Century.

The success of Marsha Boulton’s Just a Minute series, which originated
from the television history mini-series Just a Minute and its companion
newspaper column, made this compilation book both inevitable and
welcome. Here, 150 short sketches of Canada’s past are brought
together in a volume perfect for browsing. Though strictly speaking,
Boulton’s approach is not biographical, the best parts of this book
come when the author tells short but compelling stories of particular
people—heroes and scientists, athletes and explorers, famous and
unknown, but each a Canadian—who for reasons as unique as the
individuals themselves make Canadian history a fascinating study. The
Omnibus does not pretend to be comprehensive or exhaustive, even though
it covers hundreds of years of history—after all, each chapter about
each moment in our past takes up no more than a few pages in her book.
But the stories, about such legends as Tom Longboat and such obscure
oddballs as Dr. James Barry, make the minutes spent reading this book
worthwhile ones indeed.