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list price: $32.95
edition:Hardcover
also available: Paperback
category: Biography & Autobiography
published: Nov 2013
ISBN:9781553656104
publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Conversations with a Dead Man

The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott

by Mark Abley

tagged: cultural heritage
About the Author
Mark Abley is an award-winning poet, journalist, and author. His books include The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English and Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year, and a Discover Magazine Top 20 Science Book of the Year. Abley lives in Montreal. Learn more at MarkAbley.com.
Editorial Reviews

"As Canadian biography deepens as a form, it will need books as intrepid, incisive, and compassionate, as this one, and before long Conversations with a Dead Man may be seen as pioneering."

— Charles Foran, author of Mordecai

Mark Abley has undertaken a daunting task: reconciling the Duncan Campbell Scott whose pen inscribed the cultures of Canada’s First Nations in justly celebrated verse, and the same Duncan Campbell Scott who, as the overseer of residential schools and head of Indian Affairs, attempted to erase those same cultures from the pages of history. Abley, a fine poet himself, turns Scott, the bogeyman, into a man of flesh-and-blood, by—in a fine twist—making him into a revenant to be grappled with in regular visitations. The conceit works admirably. Reading Conversations with a Dead Man, I felt as if I had been waylaid, not by a dour Ottawa bureaucrat, by an Ancient Mariner with the most urgent of tales to tell.”

— Taras Grescoe, author of Bottomfeeder and Straphanger

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