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Excerpted from The Tyee's review of Roderick and Sharon Stewart's Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune
Thanks to his months in 1930s wartime China, Norman Bethune is probably the most famous Canadian in the world. He was also a jerk: a drunk, a womanizer, a bigot, an egotist, with a vicious temper and sloppy surgical skills.
Yet he deserves our attention and respect. Bethune was appallingly self-destructive, but at last found the will to reconstruct himself — to become the phoenix rising from his own ashes.
Roderick Stewart's new book rises from the ashes of his earlier biographies of Bethune. Historians know that the past is always changing: new archives are opened, octogenarians finally give interviews, new science requires new interpretations of people and events. Even so, this latest book, co-written with his wife Sharon Stewart, is likely to remain the definitive study for some time.
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The Stewarts have done an extraordinary job in their new biography. They travelled to many of the places where Bethune lived and worked, talked to old Party members who remembered him, and assimilated much new material into their narrative. The book is beautifully written, with a clear narrative. Providing excellent background information on the times, they keep Bethune in the foreground and make him a much more complex, exasperating, and admirable man than the pottery statue of Chinese propaganda.
To order Phoenix online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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