Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam

Started: March 26th
Finished: April 2nd
Pages: 235

Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series is a series of brief biographies, generally written by someone who is also well-known, who can perhaps bring an interesting personal perspective to the biography.  In this case the author is Vincent Lam, an award-winning author who happens to be an emergency room physician.

Unfortunately, the book feels formulaic.  For example, it's strictly linear.  But the backstory of Douglas's life before his political career lacks interest  told out of context.  If Lam had started with, say, the story of the 1944 Saskatchewan election and then gone back to explain how Douglas got to the point where he was being greeted everywhere by cheering crowds while in the background a national committee of corporate presidents coordinated opposition to his campaign and every mainstream paper in Saskatchewan printed stories headlined things like "Socialism Leads to Dictatorship" and "All Opposition Banned if CCF Wins Power"-- well, I'd have gobbled it up instead of thinking "la la la....immigrant Scottish boy, small town preacher, la la la" as I did for the first 100 pages.

Don't get me wrong: I picked up the book because I wanted to learn more about Tommy Douglas.  And I ate up the story of his political career:  17 consecutive surplus budgets implementing a progressive social agenda, culminating in the introduction of Medicare, all in one of the poorest provinces in Confederation....bam!  Take *that* you sad sorry excuse for a federal conservative government. Stop bleating about "fiscal responsibility" while cutting programs and running up big deficits.  

Ah hem. I digress.  I guess my point was that Douglas's story could have been better told.  I'll give Lam the benefit of the doubt and believe that he was constrained by the format of the series.