Think Big: My Adventures in Life and Democracy [Hardcover]

Though widely perceived as an evangelical bumpkin from the sticks, Preston Manning has a clear grasp of Canadian government (his father Ernest was Alberta's premier for 25 years) and one challenges him on Parliamentary protocol at one's peril. In Think Big, Manning has an accessible and detailed snapshot of a fascinating passage in Canadian history--the founding of a new political party and the snafus inherent to that process. It's also a family biography, Reform (and later, Alliance) Party manifesto, history lesson, and Liberal slugfest, which, depending on your perspective, is a distraction or a colourful detour. Either way, Manning tells these rich stories well, and with ample left hooks. Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day get theirs, but not right away (the book is laid out chronologically), and not with the quaking vitriol Manning reserves for Jean Chrétien and his "unethical" Liberals. Refreshingly, self-reflection is not alien to Manning. "Just as I visited the deserted Commons Chamber late at night and found myself wondering what that Parliament might be like if a democrat occupied the prime minister's chair," he writes of the aftermath of 2000's federal election, "so on this night I found myself envisioning the Alliance campaign that might have been." Indeed, Day's spectacular bungling of his party's leadership--and dangerous courtship, by the author's estimation, of the Christian right--was also Manning's Waterloo and very nearly the undoing of the Alliance. Manning chronicles the Day fiasco with negligible sentimentality and commendable honesty. Ditto Harper, who Manning portrays as a petulant hothead "who had difficulty accepting that there might be a few other people (not many, perhaps, but a few) who were as smart as he [on] policy and strategy." By his own admission, Manning's folksy affectations and discomfort with the image game probably cost him as much voter credibility as his lack of French or peculiar fondness for former Ontario premier and renowned hatchet-man Mike Harris. That may explain why much of Think Big reads like a meditated counter to the unflattering portrait of the Alliance party perpetuated by a skeptical press. Still, Manning emerges as balanced, lucid, and passionately devoted to toppling the endlessly reining Liberals. That he very nearly succeeded, despite the odds, makes Think Big that rarest of things--a Canadian political must-read. --Kim Hughes

“Policy wonks will remember Manning’s memoirs for his parting insights on some of the issues that will dominate the Canadian agenda for the coming decade – medicare, the environment, or the future of western Canadian aspirations. Political junkies will parse Manning’s memoirs for his words on Day and for his impressions of Harper, as guarded as they may be. But Chretien should worry that it is the chapter Manning devotes to Liberal ethics over the course of his tenure that historians come to make their own.”
–Red Deer Advocate


“Political power escaped Preston Manning; political influence never did from the day he and others formed the Reform Party of Canada”
–Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail:


“Manning…is one of a kind….Many Canadians have never taken him seriously. Others were with him from the start of the Reform experiment. And a few of us grew to realize, only in the last few years of his career, the magnitude of his talent and his commitment to all of this country. Think Big will appeal at least to the latter two groups, and may even give the first occasion to reconsider.”

“…disarmingly frank.…And in one devastating chapter, he sums up the ethical failures of the Liberal government more powerfully than any single précis I’ve yet read.”
–National Post


“Faith, ethics, morality –these are his themes, and he returns to them time and again as he relives past glories, settles scores and muses about the future.”

“The overarching theme of the book, as the title suggests, is thinking big. For Manning, the Alliance represented one aspect of this idea. His dream was to move beyond the Reform party’s regional base and build a political tent large enough to accommodate social and fiscal conservatives, small-d democrats and reform-oriented federalists from across the country. He never achieved that goal. He did, however, send a signal to traditional party brokers in Ontario and Quebec that the West was capable of producing a formidable party, one that may yet achieve those objectives. The effort to create the Canadian Alliance was an important step along that road.”
– Vancouver Sun


“Manning is speaking blunt truths. His party should listen.”
–Regina Leader-Post


“The literary voice is familiar, authentic, un-massaged; you sense there is an inner struggle to write from the heart without completely sacrificing a certain emotional distance he’s come to call friend. It’s the very mirror of his life in politics.”

“The loss of his political voice, taken for granted for so long, spoken on behalf of so many, was clearly the biggest defeat of all. He no longer feels so constrained.”
–Edmonton Journal


“His early years are recounted mainly to indicate he always thought big, which is not untrue, and nicely focuses the whole book. Description of the ideas and emotions that spawned the Reform Party is quick and effective.…His accounts of political campaigns are well-paced.…His dogged though fruitless efforts to learn French are wittily rendered.”
–Calgary Herald