Welcome to Litsy!

I could not put this book down! She chose 50 objects to try and capture what it means to be Canadian for Canada 150! The illustrations are amazing

In 1992, a two-year moratorium was announced on cod fishing in Canada. It instantly put 30,000 people out of work, the largest layoff in Canadian history. The moratorium has not yet been lifted.

Catherine's great-great-granddaughter still looks at this sampler every day, and thinks about the hard life that awaited its creator. Like her mother, she has lived for most of her life in Huron County. Her name is Alice Munro...

The town of St Paul Alberta celebrated Canada's centennial by building a UFO landing pad, which is exactly the sort of "oddly shaped poured-concrete architecture" that Urquhart calls memorable of 1967, along with "train whistles shrieking the first 4 notes of 'O Canada,' hippies dressed in the Canadian flag" and "geometric maple leaves."

"a whole generation of young men, mostly from the Maritime Provinces, where after the collapse of the fisheries unemployment rates were high, have been displaced in order to work as labourers for Suncor or Syncrude." They "drive gigantic trucks the size of a 3-storey house" on "massive tires that cost over $50,000 each."

By the 19th century, the Arctic had become an imperial obsession as explorers who set out in ships with names such as the Terror, the Fury, or the Griper (the modern-day equivalent would be the Schizoid, the Psychotic, or the Neurotic) were either frozen in or frozen out, in what appeared to be a difficult and time-consuming variety of male suicide.

Danceland dance hall at Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan, has a maple "floating floor" fitted "overtop of twenty tons of tightly packed horsetail hair" and apparently causes "couples to levitate in each other's arms."

[Image detail from a painting by Prairie artist David Thauberger.]

Shortly before being hung for treason in 1885, Louis Riel said: "I am more convinced every day without a single exception I did right. And I have always believed that, as I have acted honestly, the time will come when the people of Canada will see and acknowledge it."
In 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that Métis and non-status Indians are "Indians" under the Constitution, bringing to attention exactly what Riel claimed: that rights were not upheld.

Watteau's 1783 brush drawing 'The Death of Montcalm' uses the uniforms of the day. But when it came to setting, the French artist seemingly could not bring himself to leave out the standard Middle Eastern tent and palm tree, and these anomalies make the composition more than a little geographically confusing.
[My sister is in the photo, having just picked berries on the Plains of Abraham.]

An interesting and very unique book about Canada in honour of its sesquicentennial. Each chapter focuses on an object that the author has selected as being important to the story of the country. The writing and the accompanying illustrations are beautiful. I loved that she stayed away from the obvious (beavers, maple leaves, etc.) and dug a little deeper.

Read this end of dec2016

Lest we forget 🇨🇦