Reviews
Noble Illusions: Young Canada Goes to War
The sharp-eyed Ottawa writer Stephen Dale has produced a short book about how boys were invited to war a hundred years ago… Noble Illusions locates the romantic notions of yesterday’s death frenzy in the context of today’s efforts to airbrush the killing fields of 1914-1918. He shows how the Official story is trying to replace the “bleaker view of the war” brought home by its veterans, now long departed, with a more inspirational tale based on a “blind, unthinking patriotism that would make any future call to war easier to swallow.”
— Jamie Swift in Peace Magazine
An important account of why young Canadians ‘voluntarily’ enlisted for the senseless slaughter that was World War I. Noble Illusions is an antidote to the political forces trying to re-create that political culture today.
— Yves Engler, author The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy
Dale argues that Young Canada’s lessening of the realities and reasons for WWI, where in its pages war is something equivalent to keeping bees or perfecting one’s slap shot, helped to result in thousands upon thousands of young Canadians aching to sign up to go do battle with the ‘Kraut’, truly believing that they’d be home by Christmas.
— Miles Howe, Halifax Media Co-Op
Dale asks, given all that happened in the dark twentieth century, whether young Canadians today would be as quick to rally to the colours and fight in a new war. Though he does not necessarily answer this question directly, he does suggest that the promotion of Canada as a warrior nation has this as one goal.
— Jon Weier, for Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation
McLuhan’s Children: The Greenpeace Message and the Media
McLuhan’s Children is the first Canadian book to take a serious look at the Greenpeace beast and try to analyze whether it is still a force for change… I hate to say it, but executives at Shell should be reading this book, which tells exactly how “Greenpeacing” is done. As for current and former Greenpeacers—and others who want to try to herd the media a little—it’s required reading, surely. – The Globe and Mail
McLuhan’s Children is an important book for anyone who wishes to understand the media technologies that not only provide a growing measure of “what” we know, but increasingly shape “how” we know things.
Accessible, lucid and coherent in its narrative, this book is about far more than the rise of Greenpeace, it is about the form of the culture we are coming to inhabit as the next century approaches. -- Vancouver Sun
Engaged scrutiny at its best, fair-minded and independent of party lines. – Todd Gitlin, NYU, author of The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars.
Ottawa writer Stephen Dale has written a book… [that] is full of interesting insights… This is a thoughtful and provocative book, worth anyone’s time. – Canadian Forum
This fascinating and well-researched book follows the mix of anarchy and planning behind the key Greenpeace campaigns. It also looks at the challenge of taking a green message onto the international stage… Greenpeace’s successes and failures and the constant ebb and flow of its international public image make this an important book for all people trying to publicize their message and change the world, not just green it. – The New Internationalist
Lost in the Suburbs: A Political Travelogue
[an] observant, witty and astute tour… [Dale] has shed considerable light on some of the more knotty paradoxes spilling across the northern border of the United States… One of the many virtues of Lost in the Suburbs is that it gets readers thinking. – National Post
Ottawa journalist Stephen Dale spent several months travelling through California’s Orange County documenting the cartoonish and increasingly out-of-touch Republican political machinery that backed Ronald Reagan and property-tax revolts. Dale parses the ‘SoCal’ political landscape, revealing Republican functionaries languishing in memories of the Reagan era and local politicians who see public transit as a Communist plot. – The Globe and Mail
In Lost in the Suburbs, Stephen Dale troubles to take a closer-than-usual look at the way we live now. He roams through a swath of exurban southern Ontario, north of greater Toronto… interviewing reporters and politicians, home-owners and mall rat teens… The book is partly a meditation on the old Canadian virtues of collective social responsibility and social concern, and whether these can withstand the blind rage of the suburbs and the savvy cynicism of neo-conservative politicians happily playing hardball with very real resentments. – Montreal Gazette
Stephen Dale’s research revealed much about how politics has been shaped by the car and its central role in our lifestyle. – Ottawa Citizen
Dale’s book provides plenty of insights while remaining accessible… [and] offers a splendid analysis of the factors that have shaped the suburban political landscape. – The Canadian Forum
[an] excellent book. – David Lewis Stein, Toronto Star
Candy from Strangers: Kids and Consumer Culture. New Star Books, 2005.
“… provides a provocative take on a hot political issue… [and] challenges us to consider the effects of not just technology… but also economic ‘advances’ on that most tenuous of human states: childhood.” — Rabble.ca