50 Years, 50 Books: The Good Fight
Posted: Wednesday, March 16, 2022
As a way to celebrate our anniversary, Acquisitions Editor Randy Schmidt reached out to fifty UBC Press authors and asked them to talk about their favourite UBC Press book. This is what we heard.
Written by Adam Chapnick
Brendan Kelly’s The Good Fight: Marcel Cadieux and Canadian Diplomacy is a captivating and award-winning biography of Canada’s most important francophone diplomat of the twentieth century. Kelly makes extraordinary use of Cadieux’s diary and other primary-source evidence to tell the story of a mandarin who played a critical role in the development and evolution of Canadian foreign policy from the Second World War through the 1970s. Just as important, The Good Fight epitomizes UBC Press’s distinct contribution to the Canadian scholarly canon. Kelly was a first-time author, taking on a much-maligned theme (diplomacy and statecraft) in a much-maligned genre (academic biography). We should all be thankful for UBC Press’s commitment to new scholarly voices, and for its openness to Canadian diplomatic history in all of its forms.
Adam Chapnick teaches defence studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. His most recent book with UBC Press is Canada on the United Nations Security Council: A Small Power on a Large Stage.