Celtic Lightning: How The Scots And The Irish Created A Canadian - Softcover

McGoogan, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443425516 ISBN 13: 9781443425513

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016

Synopsis

An exploration of Canadian roots and identity from bestselling author Ken McGoogan

With Celtic Lightning, Ken McGoogan asks the question: Who do we think we are? He argues that Canadians have never investigated the demographic reality that informs this book―the fact that more than nine million Canadians claim Scottish or Irish heritage. Did the ancestors of more than one quarter of our population arrive without cultural baggage? No history, no values, no vision? Impossible.

McGoogan writes that to understand who we are and where we are going, Canadians must look to cultural genealogy. He builds on the work of Richard Dawkins, who contends that ideas and values (“memes”) can be transmitted from one generation to another. Scottish and Irish immigrants arrived in Canada with values they had learned from their forebears. And they did so early enough, and in sufficient numbers, to shape an emerging Canadian nation.

McGoogan highlights five of the values they imported as foundational: independence, democracy, pluralism, audacity and perseverance. He shows that these values are thriving in contemporary Canada and traces their evolution through the lives of thirty prominent individuals―heroes, rebels, poets, inventors, pirate queens―who played formative roles in the histories of Scotland and Ireland.

In the nineteenth century, two charged traditions came together in Canada. That reconnection, Scottish and Irish, sparked Celtic lightning ... and gave rise to a Canadian nation.

About this title

About the Author:

KEN MCGOOGAN has published more than a dozen books, among them Fatal Passage, How the Scots Invented Canada, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, Celtic Lightning and Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. He has won the Pierre Berton Award for History, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan has worked as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He sails with Adventure Canada, teaches creative non-fiction in the MFA program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and lives in Toronto with his artist-photographer wife, Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1443425516
• ISBN 13: 9781443425513
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400