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All four books in this series are wonderful mini-excursions to a commonly visited place and should keep a young one busy for a while. Highly recommended.
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On that chilly morning the inexperienced Canadian Corps (including one British brigade) were expected to accomplish what the British and French had failed to do in two years: namely, to dislodge the Germans from their impenetrable stronghold of Vimy Ridge on the Douai Plains of France. And they were expected to achieve that victory with fifty thousand fewer men then the French had LOST in their own frustrated assaults.
They did it.
And this book is their story.
Pierre Berton's approach is unique, and makes for a breathtaking read. In the Author's Note he says "My purpose... has been to tell not just what happened but also WHAT IT WAS LIKE. I have tried to look at the Vimy experience from the point of view of the man in the mud as well as from that of the senior planners."
He has achieved his goal... one gets the sense that the author ran through the trenches and across "No Man's Land" himself with a videocamera on that thunderous morning. Not only do we see the root and stem of every tactical achievement and blunder, we hear, see and smell, and FEEL what took place as well, in as much as it is possible. The research is extensive and meticulous, as can be seen in the Acknowledgements and Source List at the end of the book.
It just so happens that I live within sight of the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, here in the capital city of Canada. High up in that Tower the single word "Vimy" is carved. For me, reading this book shifts a tremendous load of significance onto that single word.
Vimy stands for more than a battle won, it stands for Canadian ingenuity, innovation, courage, Canadian dash and daring, Canadian enterprise. Life! Freedom!
It has become commonplace to say that Canada came of age at Vimy Ridge.
This is an immeasurably important, beautifully written book. Read Vimy, "lest we forget."
99% of my class enjoyed reading this book. It was very hard to put the book down as got further into the book. It was well writen and the information is great for people entering high school.
I would recomend this book to anyone who would like to know more about WWI and the strugles the people had..due to the fact that it focus in on the CANADIAN heritage. It is well writen because Pierre Burton did a lot of research..
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Joseph H. Pierre, Jr.
Thanks to Corsi's painstaking research we know that English evolutionary thought was time-lagged about a half century behind the French. The unifromitarianism vs catastrophism interpretation of earth history, which I had thought was due primarily to Lyell, was intensively debated by French geologists by 1800. The geologist Philippe Bertrand, proposed, in 1797, the marine origin of life and gradual evolution of all organic forms. Terrestrial plants and animals are descended from original marine species. Julien-Joseph Virey proposed (1816) that the term 'evolution' be used to denote the transmutation of species. 'It is thus plausible that, thanks to such evolution, nature has risen from the most tenuous mold to the majestic cedar, to the gigantic pine, just as it has advanced from microscopic animals up to man, king and dominator of all beings.' In his Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1800) he stated the principle of sexual selection, which assured the optimum adaptive state through elimination of the weaker: "Nature resembles the law of Sparta, which let weak and sickly babies die, but took extreme care of strong, muscular individuals. Thus it is that women submit more easily to the most ardent males, seek the strongest ones, prefer the most untamable." We seem to hear Darwin speaking when Virey writes: "Nature initially produced only one very simple plant and one very simple animal, which it then varied to infinity, with gradual increases in complexity, to produce the most consummate species." The geologist Louis-Constant Prévost proposed that the evolutionary descent of each organism might one day be traced from the fossil record, from "the creation of the simplest beings to that of man himself."
Corsi summarizes his findings: "In the late-eighteenth-century Parisian scientific community, there was extensive discussion on the origin of life, on the possibility of explaining vital-function characteristics in physical terms, and on interpreting the success of life forms on earth in evolutionary terms. Far from being an isolated thinker, Lamarck took part in a far-reaching, momentous debate that aroused the curiosity and concern of many of his contemporaries."
This book is a must-read for all those teaching history of science.
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