Wednesday's Pick!

One of the few non-fiction nominees for the Evergreen Award celebrating excellence in Canadian literature is The Unfinished Canadian: the People We Are by Andrew Cohen. Cohen is the bestselling author of While Canada slept: how we lost our place in the world, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and a Globe & Mail ‘notable book’. Both of these books critique the Canadian mentality, and what he sees as a lack of Canadian national identity. Throughout the book, he goes about comparing Canadians to people from other nations, implying that perhaps we simply don’t have the history, haven’t existed as a country long enough, to have the deeply ingrained traditions and cultural self-awareness of other nationalities. After an introduction in which he mentions many of the cultural stereotypes that people tend to believe, he divides the Canadian identity into categories. Cohen compares us to other nationalities to show us how others in the world view Canadians, but more importantly, how we view ourselves. Thought-provoking and full of debate, this is a book to be discussed with the politically-savvy as easily as with 'the average Joe.'