Review
"Very moving and at its best when the unguarded personalities of the two men shine out from its pages, this is a muscular, confident, and companionable memoir." Michael Valpy, The Globe and Mail "This memoir of intellectual, political, and personal friendship is a pleasure to read. A fascinating second glance at some of the key events of the Trudeau era by someone who was his intimate, without ever becoming a mere courtier." Philip Resnick, University of British Columbia "By the distinguished English-Canadian historian Ramsay Cook, chronicles a friendship of shared ideas that spanned the later decades of his life - the period that Canadians still call the "Trudeau years"...Ramsay Cook is not simply one of Canada's most distinguished historians. He also belongs to that category with which British political culture remains uncomfortable, the public intellectual...Cook-on-Canada is itself a worthwhile study, and the more so as it tells us not only how the author became part of the Trudeau camp, but how he helped to ensure that the tents were erected at all...Cook's memoir is important because it illustrates just how small is a hyphen that links Canada's two foundling peoples, even after decades of positive effort...the number of Canadians who fully comprehend the two cultures could probably be counted in hundreds, and maybe even handfuls...Hence the importance of Ramsay Cook...Their [Cook and Trudeau's] intellectual friendship grew out of cerebral telepathy, a shared view of their country as both bicultural and united, which saw no contradiction between duality and strength...The Cook-Trudeau entente was long lasting and based on shared ideas."Ged Martin, National University of Ireland, Galway, The Round Table, December 2009
Product Description
Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Ramsay Cook were friends for nearly four decades. A passion for the intellectual life drew them together but their friendship focused more on politics once Trudeau became prime minister. In "The Teeth of Time" Cook reflects on his relationship with Trudeau and the tensions created when one friend achieves political power and the other struggles to find the balance among his roles as detached scholar and teacher, involved citizen, and personal friend. Trudeau, the most intellectual of Canadian prime ministers, turned to Cook, an illustrious historian and a speech-writer during the 1968 election campaign, for his trusted views.Cook's revealing memoir also traces how public affairs and the central political themes of Trudeau's reign - nationalism, federalism, and constitutional reform - continued to drive their relationship after Trudeau's resignation in 1984. "The Teeth of Time": is taken from "The New Faces" by W.B. Yeats, a poem that is a declaration of abiding friendship: Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time ...Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they. In a friendship that bridged the world of politics and the intellectual world of academia, what Cook and Trudeau wrought will outlast the teeth of time.
