Trudeau and Our Times Vol. 1 : The Magnificent Obsession

The classic two-volume study of Trudeau and his impact upon Canadian society and politics

Volume 1: The Magnificent Obsession
Winner of the Governor General’s Award

This volume examines the formative influences on Pierre Trudeau’s childhood, his knight-errant youth and early manhood, his charismatic ascent to the Liberal Party leadership, and his dramatic first decade as prime minister. It concludes with his bittersweet triumphs in fighting off the separatists in the 1980 referendum campaign and his battle with provincial premiers to patriate the Canadian constitution.

Volume 2: The Heroic Delusion
Winner of the John W. Dafoe Prize for Distinctive Writing

This volume describes in fascinating detail the abiding liberal Pierre Trudeau’s quixotic confrontations with his neo-conservative opponents, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. A masterful analysis of the country’s political economy in the decades following World War II, it suggests that Trudeau’s delusion was that Canada could pursue a policy independent of her neighbours to the south.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Stephen Clarkson is a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto. A frequent commentator on Canadian affairs in both French and English media, he is the author of several books on national and international politics including the prize-winning Canada and the Reagan Challenge.

Christina McCall is a writer of literary non-fiction who has worked as a socio-political analyst for Maclean’s, Saturday Night, and the Globe and Mail. Grits, her portrait of the Liberal Party, was acclaimed as “one of the most important Canadian books of the 1980’s” and her work has won major awards.


From the Trade Paperback edition.