Smug Minority
This is a book about freedom – and the lack of it – in Canada: freedom from useless and often degrading toil, freedom from want and freedom from ignorance. It is Pierre Berton’s thesis, documented by public statements made over the past generation, that a smug minority of business and political leaders has conspired to inhibit that freedom. The establishment, says Berton, has brainwashed the public into believing a series of myths which have no validity in a post-Puritan age. These myths include such old saws as “A woman’s place is in the home” . . . “Anybody can work his way through college” . . . “Satan finds more mischief still for idle hands to do” . . . “Too much security kills initiative” . . . “It’s your own fault you’re so poor.
The author…
$2.99
December 18, 2012
Pierre Berton was one of Canada’s most popular and prolific authors. From narrative histories and popular culture, to picture and coffee table books to anthologies, to stories for children to readable, historical works for youth, many of his fifty books are now Canadian classics.
Born in 1920 and raised in the Yukon, Pierre Berton worked in Klondike mining camps during his university years. He spent four years in the army, rising from private to captain/instructor at the Royal Military College in Kingston. He spent his early newspaper career in Vancouver, where at 21 he was the youngest city editor on any Canadian daily. He wrote columns for and was editor of…