Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger (review)

Reviewed by: Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger Donald Wright Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger. Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 319, $60.00 Despite our shared research interests, Carl Berger and I have met only once. We talked about Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald, the University of Toronto, and the operas of Richard Wagner, among other things. Afterwards, I thought to myself that the man I had just met was not unlike the books that I had devoured as a graduate student. The Sense of Power, The Writing of Canadian History, and Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada are insightful, economical, and soft-spoken. Indeed, they are models of scholarship and 'he is a superb historian' (3). Ramsay Cook's opening essay identifies the main themes of Berger's scholarship, and it introduces the man behind that scholarship. In a sense, Cook applies Berger to Berger. That is, he applies Berger's biographical approach to historians and historiography to Berger himself. Berger's greatness, Cook believes, lies in his detachment and in his appreciation for irony. He distrusted teleological history that sought to validate the present by recourse to the past. That past, he emphasized over and over again, had to be approached on its terms, not our terms, and sometimes it unfolds in unintended, even contradictory ways. Berger also understood that less is more and that longwinded explanations only alienate the reader. Where most historians need a chapter, Berger needed a paragraph; where most historians need a book, he needed an essay; and where most historians need a thick monograph, he needed a slim volume. In my darker moments, I sometimes think that his one chapter on Donald Creighton will say [End Page 318] more than my entire biography! (Parenthetically, and eerily, Creighton predicted as much. In a letter to John Gray, he commented on Berger's 'cool and detached' manner, adding, 'I cannot help but feel that he has got closer to the sources of my historical inspiration than any other Canadian critic is likely to do.') The source of Berger's detachment, Cook speculates, can be located in his childhood and adolescence: growing up in the northern Manitoba community of Le Pas, he learned to look at Canada and Canadian nationalism with a bemused, ironic, and cool detachment. From the outside, the inside always looks different and, sometimes, even a little absurd. The essays that follow pursue very different topics but they are bound by a common conviction: ideas matter. Broadly defined to include history and psychology, art and literature, religion and science, myths and symbols, and gender and race, ideas constitute an important aspect of our lived experience. They shape how we perceive the world and how, in turn, we negotiate our place in it. To this end, Michael Gauvreau insists that we move beyond the study of individual intellectuals to the study of culture, and he encourages us to engage with social, political, and religious history; Marlene Shore considers the life and career of James Mark Baldwin, the first modern psychologist appointed to a Canadian university; Ian Ross Robertson revisits Sir Andrew Macphail through the lens of Montreal's Pen and Pencil Club; Danielle Hamelin evaluates the significance of Toronto's Arts and Letters Club; Barry Ferguson studies the meanings of Canadian citizenship before the 1947 Citizenship Act; David Monod looks at race as performance in the Harlem Renaissance as part of his larger interest in the history of vaudeville; Doug Owram surveys notions of progress, science, and religion in Victorian Canada and the monkey wrench Charles Darwin threw into the mix; Gerald Friesen, in collaboration with Masako Kawata, rereads the Japanese internment and the subsequent movement for redress on national, regional, and individual planes at the same time as he confirms the importance of sharing authority in oral history and the necessity of de-privileging the omnipotent historian; and Alan Bowker presents a sobering picture of the new era as distinct from the modern era, where more and more people compete for fewer and fewer resources, where the Internet facilitates connectedness, creativity, and spontaneity but also...

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