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With Celtic Lightning, best-selling author Ken McGoogan plunges into the
perpetual debate about Canadian roots and identity: who do we think we are? He
argues that Canadians have never investigated the demographic reality that
informs this book -- the fact that more than nine million Canadians claim
Scottish or Irish heritage. Did the ancestors of more than one quarter of our
population arrive without cultural baggage? No history, no values, no vision?
Impossible.
McGoogan
writes that, to understand who we are and where we are going, Canadians must
look to cultural genealogy. He builds on the work of Richard Dawkins, who
contends that ideas and values (“memes”) can be transmitted from one generation
to another. Scottish and Irish immigrants arrived in Canada with values they
had learned from their forebears. And they did so early enough, and in
sufficient numbers, to shape an emerging Canadian nation. . . .
About the author:
Ken McGoogan has published a dozen books, among them How the Scots Invented
Canada, Fatal Passage, and Lady Franklin’s Revenge. His
honours include the Pierre Berton Award, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography,
the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, and the Canadian Authors’ Association
History Award. Ken has crisscrossed Ireland and Scotland numerous times, and also
circumnavigated both countries.
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada / Patrick Crean
Editions
Media & events:
Colleen.Simpson@HarperCollins.com
Publication rights: Beverley Slopen Literary
Agency / Beverley@slopenagency.com
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