Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad by John Stewart
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702019835742 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Robert Bothwell |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
John Stewart
Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 296 pp. $39.95 (hardcover)
ISBN: 9780773551404
Reviewed by: Robert Bothwell (bothwell@chass.utoronto.ca), University of Toronto
Diplomatic memoirs of time served in Ottawa are sparse. For the ninety years that
Canada has hosted foreign missions, there may be as many as fifteen or twenty—if
we understand, as we must, that Canada usually accounts for a chapter or less in
memoirs that must span whole careers, usually as a prologue, or perhaps an
entr’acte. The United States, as befits Canada’s sole land neighbour—and for
many years its largest trading partner, military ally, and cultural mecca—accounts
for a large part of the literature. Two recent US ambassadors, James Blanchard
and Paul Celucci, published books that deal exclusively with their service in
Canada, and others, such as David T. Jones, a former embassy counsellor, are
well represented in the literature of Canadian–American relations.
Americans who publish books on Canada find themselves in the odd position
that their principal market is not at home, but in Canada. This was especially the
case with Blanchard and Celucci, who sold to the Canadian market through
Canadian publishers. The Canadian public, or the part of it that buys and reads
books, has an inexhaustible interest or anxiety about what the Great Neighbour
thinks of them. (The truth being, not much.) And in all probability, when
Blanchard and Celucci are remembered in the future, it will be as ambassadors
to Canada rather than as governors of their home states, respectively Michigan and
Massachusetts, where at best their names will adorn some misbegotten public facil-
ity, so that people may wonder who they were.
John Stewart’s is a different kind of memoir. He is a Canadian who worked for
the US embassy in Ottawa as an economic adviser from 1990 to 2010. Stewart
observes that he was trained in history, and notes that the internet and digitization
have altered our ability to compile research and understand contemporary history.
This accounts for one of the strengths of the book: that it compiles contemporary
documentation from largely US sources bearing on relations with Canada. It is also
a weakness, as the many long indentations interrupt the flow of the argumentation.
And in the documentary sphere, Stewart has to compete with Wikileaks, which has
published a fair amount of US diplomatic reportage on Canada. In fact, it is easier
to find and trace Wikileaks’ material than the documents cited in Stewart.
International Journal
2019, Vol. 74(1) 172–186
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020702019835742
journals.sagepub.com/home/ijx
To continue reading
Request your trial