“When Canada Dreamed” is a Peterborough book, though its wide-ranging content might lead you to think otherwise.

It was written here on the banks of the Otonabee River by Sean Kane, a longtime East City resident and now retired member of Trent University’s Humanities faculty. He writes from his home, though he is rampant with memories of a life lived in the fields of Canadian literary and cultural aspiration.

There is no disguising for readers that he is an academic; however, the fact that he has aspired over his career to be both a well-informed cultural observer and a writer in his own right, suggests that he has much to say to a non-academic reader. What he offers in “When Canada Dreamed” is both a personal memoir and a set of personal experiences related to the flowering of Canadian culture and literature from the 1960s to the present day. The book offers much more than that, but it focuses on the great changes that Canada has undergone since the end of the Second World War.

This creative effort has special interest to me because Sean and I have lived parallel though quite different lives since 1943 when we entered the world in different parts of Toronto. We were both educated in the city and became graduate students in English Literature at the University of Toronto about the same time. Then, coincidently, we found ourselves in September 1972 employed as young professors in the English department at Trent University. We have been colleagues ever since though our special interests have often taken us in different directions. While I have been more conventional in my academic pursuits, Sean has sought to develop a distinctive profile as a creative writer and cultural observer. This memoir substantiates his intellectual evolution and the interesting set of experiences and writing projects that he delights in recalling.

He subtitles this fascinating, sometimes quirky book “Growing up in the absurd world of Canadian writing and........

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