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Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Volume 1. 1919-1968 (review)

but somehow more intimate information about the historian. The two first met in 1961; over the next forty years their paths crossed occasionally, but hardly frequently. They were intellectually well-suited for each other in that both were extraordinarily bright and literate, and both had come to strikingly similar conclusions about major ‘-isms’ in Canada: nationalism, bilingualism, separatism, and federalism. Theirs was thus an intellectual friendship, rather than a deeply emotional one, making it all the better a vehicle for understanding the role of the historian in society. In recalling four decades of contact with Trudeau’s writing – as reader, speech writer and translator – and with the man himself at conferences, parties, over points of law and politics, in battle against Meech Lake, and ultimately over his casket as it lay in state, Cook the historian is never far from view. We watch his career unfold, from the University of Toronto to York, with digressions to Harvard and Yale; we hear of his associations with the elite of Canadian intellectual and artistic society; we follow his critiques of fellow-memoirist Gordon Robertson and his repudiation of Kenneth McRoberts’s alternative vision of Quebec’s place in Canada. But most importantly, we watch him struggle with what it means to be an historian standing next to power: ‘[S]ince I continued to share and support his essential ideas,’ Cook wondered, ‘had I now become merely an apologist for him?’ Ultimately, the historian decides in the negative, but he does not reach the answer without some engaging intellectual wrestling of his own. This is a smart book about the way we remember the past, the allure of power and celebrity, the potential depths of intellectual companionship, and ultimately about one man’s view of that most enigmatic of Canadian politicians. In breaking the teeth of time, Cook is doing what historians have always done with their subjects but have so rarely attempted with their friends. The results are most worthwhile. (P.E. BRYDEN)