CanQuiz

Stephen Field is an information services librarian in the Queen
Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Books of facts and trivia continue to be popular. Researcher Alastair
Sweeny’s contribution to the genre is an accessible
question-and-answer book that focuses on “quirky details” about
Canada. The book, which contains more than 800 questions and 150
black-and-white photographs, is organized into four major categories:
history, sports, geography, and celebrities. These categories are
divided into five to seven subcategories. The history category, for
example, comprises the subcategories “Canada Discovered,” “Canada
Faces Disaster,” “Canada at War,” “Canada Invents,” and
“Canada Firsts and Bests.”

Readers of CanQuiz will learn, among other things, the name of the
Canadian who invented the first light bulb, the location of the largest
library in Canada, the site of the world’s largest man-made explosion
prior to 1945, and the name of Canada’s largest island. There are,
however, factual inaccuracies. While he was a great Canadian football
hero, Russ Jackson was not actually, as Sweeny states, the last Canadian
quarterback to play in the Canadian Football League; other Canadian
quarterbacks, including Gerry Dattilio of the Montreal Alouettes, have
spent varying amounts of time playing in the CFL since Jackson’s
retirement in 1969. And Newfoundland does not operate on double daylight
savings time; over the summer of 1988, the Newfoundland government
experimented with double daylight savings time, but abandoned it the
following year.

Although errors in a fact book inevitably diminish that book’s
appeal, CanQuiz will nevertheless be of interest to children and adults
who would like to discover some “quirky” facts about Canada.