Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
Excerpted from The Globe and Mail’s review of Mary Frances Coady’s Georges and Pauline Vanier: Portrait of a Couple.
There have been 11 Canadian-born governors-general since 1952. Of these, Georges Vanier holds a very special place, partly because he was the first francophone to hold this high office, but also because of his spectacular courage and dignity, as well as the overt and deeply spiritual dimension he brought to everything he did.
At least he holds a special place for those who remember him. Too often, Canadians, mostly through forgetfulness but sometimes from ingratitude, sell our unique history and good fortune short. No one ever exemplified better the very finest that the word “Canadian” stands for than this extraordinary soldier who saw service in two world wars, and who died in office during 1967, our centennial year, a shining example of duty, service and loyalty.
Mary Frances Coady has rightly joined him in her careful, comprehensive new biography with his extraordinary wife, Pauline, without whom he could never have been the inspirational figure he became. It was Pauline, according to Coady, who restored the young soldier’s self-confidence – both his sense of himself as a “full man” after he lost his leg, and also his shattered heart after the deaths of so many boon companions.
(…)
So this is a timely and often tender book about an extraordinary couple Canadians have every right to feel enormous pride in. The Roman Catholic Church is in the process of turning them both into saints, which is fine and good, but plain Canadians can simply rest secure in the knowledge that the best among us rose to the highest office in the land.
To order Georges and Pauline Vanier online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.