CANADA: TOMORROW'S GIANT

This is a book of travels (conjugal, taking twins, with the wife at the wheel) from Newfoundland and Halifax to the ""terrifying vacuum"" where Winnipeg rears -- travels in pursuit of that most elusive, baffling, ubiquitous, and irrepressible national force:- personality; that ""pragmatic"", proud, enduring, rough-hewn, and ever-self-discovering Something which is the modern Canadian. Talks, random, formless, with fishermen, farmers, Indians, an apple-orchard owner and a clergyman; all in local idiom, all throwing off glints and scintillations of Canadian bias, defiance, puritanism, and the convulsive transition of the Canadian to a land of cement and a forest of industry crowding out the trees and sky. Psychological theory goes by the board, but Hutchison revels in the psychological influences and affinities of the Canadian cultural heritage, the smells and climates and natural life of Canada, the domestic and social life of the individual. If there are flashes of revelation and a continual nearness to the nuances of the national personality, the most impressive and powerful quality the book possesses is its style -- a use of language which invigorates and opens up unsuspected dimensions in whatever it touches.