Robert Bothwell, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, and J.L. Granatstein, the former director of the Canadian War Museum, are both respected authors of Canadian history books. In Our Century, they combine their efforts to give a brisk overview of Canada’s achievements in the 20th century.

The title is a reference to Sir Wilfred Laurier’s 1904 statement that the new century would belong to Canada. While most historians have accused Laurier of being overly optimistic, the authors argue that Canada became the best place on earth to live in the 20th century. Despite this overtly nationalistic framework, Our Century delivers a fairly straightforward one-volume history of the last 100 years.

After an introductory chapter setting the national scene as it was in 1900, each subsequent decade is given its own chapter. This is an artificial subdivision, but one that largely works since many significant events, such as the First World War and the Great Depression, fall within the boundaries of a decade.The early chapters suffer from too light a treatment of what was essentially a different world, and the later decades are too recent for brief historical assessment. The most satisfying chapters cover the 1940s to the 1970s, when the fabric of Canada was being rewoven into the nation we know today.

Our Century is readable, well illustrated, and contains many interesting page-sized sidebars on such peripheral events as the Halifax explosion and the Asbestos Strike of 1949. There are occasional errors (Ronnie Hawkins never played with the Doors), but these are more than offset by numerous fascinating facts and bits of trivia (such as the story of an automatic weather station set up on the Labrador coast by a Nazi U-boat that was not discovered until the 1980s). As such, Our Century provides a good introduction to recent Canadian history for those who may not be well versed on the subject.