- Paperback: 360 pages
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (April 10 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0771045735
- ISBN-13: 978-0771045738
- Product Dimensions: 22.2 x 14 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 476 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,064,321 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Myrna Kostash, award-winning author of No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls, scans the headlines and interviews an impressive range of Canadians aged 25 to 35 for her look at a generation and a nation in the budding. In The Next Canada, Kostash talks to an IT consultant about the trend towards self-employment in an increasingly unpredictable, post-downsizing-era job market; to the director of a Toronto food bank about poverty; and to a Reform MP about spending public funds to ensure the viability of a universal health-care system. She chats with Calgary-based e-ziners about new publishing technologies, and with an Edmonton actor about a peculiarly Canadian brand of comedy: "I think Canadian comedy comes out the only way we know how to channel rage: angry but polite." A Halifax curator speaks frankly about the limits to acceptance, even within a race, established by birthplace. Student activists disclose events leading up to the RCMP's controversial pepper-spraying of human rights demonstrators at the 1997 APEC meeting at UBC. And Native instructors talk about their attempts to teach both aboriginals and non-aboriginals a different relationship to the land they call home. Kostash confronts the desires and fears, the convictions and mores of "Generation Nexus" with those of the "the architects of cultural nationalism and anti-American imperialism." This book, then, will interest not only the generation represented in its pages and the baby boomers who will see how their legacy, for better or worse, has been transformed, but also the Gen-Xers in between through whom many of these hot debates have been filtered.
Kostash intelligently navigates the turgid waters of identity politics, and she polemicizes with grace. What emerges is an optimistic picture of Canadian youth. In them the collective values of communitarianism have survived intact, and their view of their country as distinct has not been undermined by the forces of globalization. "How is it possible," Kotash asks, "that my interviewees, who live in so many radically new circumstances that could not have been foreseen when the various elements of Canada's social safety net were being woven together, who seem to have assumed the burdens of the 'new' consciousness of contingency and multiplicity, and the normalization of the transnational globe, who have no illusions about the long-term survivability of a specific Canadian identity, who have been handed the apparatus of theory that warns them social cohesion is a romance of the Old Narrative--how is it possible that, when I asked them not just whether they were Canadians but how they knew they were, they almost to a person answered some version of 'I know I am a Canadian because I believe in social compassion.'" --Diana Kuprel --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“Interspersed with more serious issues – the overexposure of Canadians to American media, for example, or the ravages of homelessness – are lighter subjects, and this mix is what makes the book entertaining as well as thought-provoking.”
–Montreal Gazette
“Richly documented…An important work.”
–Globe and Mail
“What Kostash has done is illuminate the psychic and philosophical turf of our generation is working and restore faith that, yes, our generation cares about what it means to be Canadian, cares to work for social and political change.”
–Georgia Straight
“Great insight from an eclectic group of young people, whose interests and passions will undoubtedly shape this Canada into the next.”
–Southam News
–Montreal Gazette
“Richly documented…An important work.”
–Globe and Mail
“What Kostash has done is illuminate the psychic and philosophical turf of our generation is working and restore faith that, yes, our generation cares about what it means to be Canadian, cares to work for social and political change.”
–Georgia Straight
“Great insight from an eclectic group of young people, whose interests and passions will undoubtedly shape this Canada into the next.”
–Southam News
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