Customer Reviews

Colour of Canada

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Originally published in 1967 to celebrate the Centennial Year and Expo, this 1983 3rd edition is the latest.

This book divides up pictures of Canada into five regional chapters:

The Maritimes;
Into Quebec;
Ontario;
The Prairies;
British Columbia.

At first sight the book is a picture book with text pages limited to 10%. However the text pages and the captions to the pictures are so well written that they make the book a lasting treasure. Geographic and historic facts are beautifully mixed with descriptive images and phrases of poetic grace in brief but powerful captions to photographs that are so vast they often require more than one page.

Here is a caption for a picture of the Canadian Rockies:

The prairie begins its transformation into foothill and then to mountain once you have passed the 110th meridian of longitude. Farther south, in Colorado, the moment arrives some eight meridians of longitude farther east, the Canadian prairie being wider than the American because the Rockies swerve easterly south of the border. After the swells of the foothills come the waves of the rockies, grey, minaretted, the earth in tempest all the way to the Pacific. Yet, in the troughs of these waves are the absolute stillness of the valleys and the perfect reflection of the mighty rocks in placid, glacier-fed lakes.

What is lacking from the book are the people of Canada. Most of the pictures are landscapes with a few architectural photos added. Where there are people in the pictures they arepart of the background. The only portrait is one of the author at the end of the book.