R. B. Fleming

For anyone interested in the history of the Scottish people, in Scotland and North America, this book is essential reading. In Canada and the United States today there are tens of thousands of descendants of Highland Scots who left Lochaber around 1800 to settle in Glengarry County. This book deals with the conditions in Scotland before migration, settlement experiences in Glengarry, and the spread of these Scots-Canadians from Glengarry to the American and Canadian wests. There are fur trade and Metis connecitons, and even ties with the Caribbean. As well as colourful articles, this book contains a wealth of genealogical information, family trees, maps, photographs and other illustrations. For anyone interested in the history of the Scottish people, in Scotland and North America, this book is essential reading. In Canada and the United States today there are tens of thousands of descendants of Highland Scots who left Lochaber around 1800 to settle in Glengarry County. This book deals with the conditions in Scotland before migration, settlement experiences in Glengarry, and the spread of these Scots-Canadians from Glengarry to the American and Canadian wests. There are fur trade and Metis connecitons, and even ties with the Caribbean. As well as colourful articles, this book contains a wealth of genealogical information, family trees, maps, photographs and other illustrations.

Born in 1934, Peter Gzowski covered most of the last half of the century as a journalist and interviewer. This biography, the most comprehensive and definitive yet published, is also a portrait of Canada during those decades, beginning with Gzowski’s days at the University of Toronto’s The Varsity in the mid 1950s, through his years as the youngest-ever managing editor of Maclean’s in the 1960s and his tremendous success on CBC’s Morningside in the 1980s and 1990s, and ending with his stint as a Globe and Mail columnist at the dawn of the 21st century and his death in January 2002. Gzowski saw eight Canadian Prime Ministers in office, most of whom he interviewed, and witnessed everything from the Quiet Revolution in Qubec to the growth of economic nationalism in Canada’s West. From the rise of state medicine to the decline of the patriarchy, Peter was there to comment, to resist, and to participate. Here was a man who was proud to call himself Canadian and who made millions of other Canadians realize that Canada was, in what he claimed was a Canadian expression, not a bad place to live.

During the first two decades of this century, Sir William Mackenzie was one of Canada's best known entrepreneurs. He spearheaded some of the largest and most technologically advanced projects undertaken in Canada during his lifetime – building enterprises that became the foundations for such major institutions as Canadian National Railways, Brascan, and the Toronto Transit Commission. He built a business empire that stretched from Montreal to British Columbia and to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. It included gas, electric, telephone and transit utilities, railroads, hotels, and steamships as well as substantial coal mining, whaling, and timber interests. For a time Mackenzie also owned Canada's largest newspaper, La Presse. He accumulated an enormous personal fortune, but when he died in 1923, his estate was virtually bankrupt as a result of the dramatic collapse of his Canadian Northern Railway during the First World War.In an era when the entrepreneur has come to be seen as a media hero and when struggles about the role of state enterprise in the transportation and energy sectors consume public policy debate, it is ironic that Mackenzie is largely forgotten by all but a few historians and railway aficionados. He left no papers to guide biographers. After a decade of gathering and piecing together fragments from an immense array of sources, Rae Fleming has written the first biography of the man that the German press extolled as the "Railway King of Canada."Mackenzie was wily, crafty, manipulative, and intimidating. Starting as a general contractor in Eldon Township in rural Ontario, he built a small fortune contracting for the CPR in the Selkirks in the 1880s and then moved on to bigger things. Along the way, he funded the first full-length documentary movie, was toasted by the House of Lords, received a knighthood from George V, and developed close friendships with the major politicians of his day, including Borden and Meighen.In a business biography intended as much for general readers as for a scholarly audience, Fleming offers a revisionist perspective on Mackenzie. He dispels the simplistic approach of those historians and journalists who have depicted Mackenzie and his partner Sir Donald Mann as melodramatic crooks who could have stepped out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn.