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Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.

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Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press 2008)

THE EMINENT CANADIAN historian Jack Granatstein has been recruited to pen a cover blurb for this book and has written: "Based on massive research, this is the best and most complete account of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War we are ever likely to get."

Research alone, of course, cannot guarantee that a book will be the definitive work on a subject. And the notion that any history is the most complete account "ever" short-changes future historians. Indeed, there are certain inexplicable gaps in Renegades that historians might wish to explore to write a more complete history. For example, to paraphrase Frank Scott's famous question to E.J. Pratt about his poem on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, "Where are the women?"

Raising these caveats is not to say that Petrou's Renegades isn't good. It IS good--ironically--because it's the very type of history that Professor Granatstein disparages--social history. With the able assistance of archivist and historian Myron Momryk--whose immense labor Petrou gratefully acknowledges--Petrou has put together a comprehensive factual database chronicling the personal details of the almost 1700 Canadians who went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight fascism.

In addition to recognizing Momryk, Petrou might have inscribed a thankful word for the long-dead faceless functionaries of the Communist International (Comintern). It was they, after all, who assembled and preserved the exceedingly important record of international leftist history that is found in the political assessments of the tens of thousands of...

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