Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec Paperback – April 24, 2001

I got this book before my first trip to Quebec, what a great read. My boyfriend is from Montreal and he joked that I probably learned more and now know more about Quebec than he does b/c I kept saying "did you know this or do you know that?"... I loved the sarcasm of the author, it was written in a way that doesn't make you feel like you're reading a boring history book... this book falls somewhere between a history book and a tour guide book.
I learned so many amazing things from this book -- even learned things that his family didn't even know about and they live there. I really felt like the things I read helped me appreciate the things I saw once I was there --it made things that much more special for me b/c I had a better understanding of the people and how things are the way they are. Thank you Taras Grescoe!!!!

I purchased this because I met and worked with a number of friends from Quebec. This provided interesting information and my friends got a kick out of the fact I was reading a history book about their culture. There are some funny parts, and some of it doesn't make as much sense if you aren't able to reference people from Quebec to have context.

Taras gave us a very detailed description of Quebec by writing his book as a novel. You can tell it from the titles of the book and its chapters such as "Le Ranch du Spaguetti" What does Le Ranch du Spaguetti tell you about the chapter topic? He didn't go straight with titles like "Language in Quebec". No, no, he was more creative. He started all his chapters describing a scenario out of nothing and from there he went to the general topic of the chapter, giving space for related topics, topics that may not always be obviously related at first sight. He well warned readers when beginning the book -page 9- to get used to it, this warning came after talking about margarine to guns!!

Anyone seriously interested in Quebec should read Sacré Blues despite that many readers will have trouble with it. It takes patience some times because of his same creativity and novelist style. Just take it easy. Some times I would just skim over lengthy scenarios descriptions, especially when beginning the chapters. You might skim it all if you're a student all hurried up making a paper on Quebec, but it can a great training for GRE tests. Once Taras gets to the point he catches your attention into reading more and more.

He covered many interesting issues besides the obvious ones (cuisine, language and culture, the separatists, etc) like the relationship between the local indian natives and Quebequers -the natives didn't found Quebec-, the local media, business environment and job market. I have read other 5 or 6 books on nations and they didn't cover as many topics as he did. Many descriptions supported by statistics, yet keeping the novelist style. Perhaps he should've searched more about the job market. He claimed somewhere that the youth don't have many career choices but the government web sites do recommend certain careers, some of them technical like technical in chemistry or forestry. But anyone who reads this book will surely get much more info about Quebec. Anyway, he well described the current situation, huge unemployment. I think another reviewer said that this book has some creepy parts, but he didn't tell them. Now here you have it, unemployment. Students will not understand how unemployment is creepy, but the rest of us should understand that is as threatening as terrorism, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. It's not as scandalous as the problems I listed, but its consequences and suffering are the same.

Very curiously he didn't talk too much about the schools, but I kind of liked it. In this world obsessed with college education, it's good to find someone who's not so obsessed with universities. Universities are a topic that attracts much attention from the media, either in movies, TV programs, newspapers articles, etc. I have met folks around the world who also talk about colleges. There are people whose actual religion is the elite colleges from USA, England, France, etc. Some are even fanatics, zealots. I find this ridiculous passion even here in my 3rd world country whose "elite" produce nothing of knowledge, only a few 3rd class businessmen, bureaucrats, etc. However, college education is not leading most youth to good jobs because of the current world saturation of college graduates. So, Taras didn't follow mainstream trends but he did report the current problem of too many teenagers with very low education, incapable to write basic things like "I was" in French. All other languages than English are very complex to write, and I know such ignorance can happen, I see it here in my Spanish/speaking nation.

This book is liberal, but not exactly of the American type. Let's see how. Just to start, he didn't condemn the church too much as someone said. I really liked it when in page 9 it's described and slightly praised some local behaviors like just wandering the streets or making eye contact and smiling to strangers, behaviors that justify a call to police in USA and West Canada (probably all English Canada) under grounds of harassment. I remember the first time I knew about such simple and huge differences, one time an American teacher told me that here in Mexico you can walk making eye contact with strangers. I didn't see any big deal in this behavior and regarded his commentary as weird. Later I lived in USA and realized many women were offended by such behavior. It seems to me that the same women who follow insane diets and hate their bodies, are the same who see a rapist behind every man, which is the real offense. Liberty can be as ambiguous as love. He wrote many interesting commentaries about these issues on cultural differences between Quebequers and "anglos", for lack of a better name for the English-speaking, white, non-Hispanic population in US and sister nations. The Quebequers are very similar to Hispanics.

Taras could be blamed for being biased in favor of Quebec, just like his Canadian West Coats friends told him once; this might be true at some extend. Many French are brain-washers experts and their Canadian sons should be as well. Anyway, he did show the current situation of the local natives, who are not treated as they should by Quebequers, and several more problems from Quebec.

One problem that he may not have addressed properly is the crime one. He, supported by statistics and I guess his own experience, claimed that Quebec has probably the lowest crime rates in our continent. Nonetheless, it's not convincing since he also described the state of the family, broken. Some liberal readers might be offended by my following commentaries, but the experience in most of the rest of the world shows that wherever the family institution is broken the crime rate goes up. Most of criminals are youth anywhere; it makes sense since they badly need a good home environment where to grow up, otherwise they go nuts. Unemployment also pushes crime up. Now, get these two problems together in Quebec, how's come their crime rates are so low? For example he claims there were only 149 murders over there (with about 7 millions inhabitants) in 2000, a quarter of them within same criminals or gangs. In the same year, Baltimore (with less than a million inhabitants) got 262 murders.

Now, I'll seem to be off the topic, but I won't. I don't think the cold weather explains low crime rates; the cold-weather Russia has a huge rate. The Scandinavian nations, with high family broken rates like to claim to be almost crime/free. It just looks like Quebec too. However, I invite all of you readers to visit the web site [...] to get a different view from what the Scandinavian governments -and their populations- want the world to believe. There is crime in Scandinavia, just like there is in Quebec and could be higher than what the statistics claim. Therefore this could be the main problem with Tara's book, it takes statistics as truths. Even if I am wrong and the crime statistics (all stats in fact) are true, a researcher must always mistrust the statistics. For a good example of how some statistics are biased read "The ten things you can't say in America" where the author shows how the stats of deaths from smoking and guns are obtained, he does a great job in showing bias. Taking statistics as truths is a common mistake.

All in all I recommend Tara's book to all readers around. Besides, if the crime is actually low in these regions I also hope some human sciences researcher studies these situations and contributes to understand what makes a person become criminal. Just like this books goes from one topic into another, this same book could promote research in very different areas of knowledge.

I have considered moving to Quebec and this book has made me both want to move there immediately and also be cautious about it - that's how evenhanded his writing is. I feel like I have learned a lot about the people of Quebec, more than one can learn from a travel guide or a history book. His writing style practically takes you there. If you are interested in learning about the real Quebec and can't go there yet, this is the next best thing. I highly recommend this book.

This guy is a genius. The writing is superb, the examples are trenchant and sometimes hilariously apt, and his conclusions are based on lots of transparent evidence. In trying to portray the province accurately, he ends up about as far as possible from some of the regrettable traditional stereotypes about French-Canada and the Quebecois. Definitely the best thing I've ever come across to help the outsider understand the region and the people.