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Le Saint-Laurent et les Grands Lacs au temps de la vapeur 1850-1950.

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Le Saint-Laurent et les Grands Lacs au temps de la vapeur 1850-1950 by Pierre Camu, Les Cahiers du Quebec, CQ 137, Collection Geographie, Editions Hurtubise HMH Itee, Montreal, 2005, 616 pp., paper $69.96 (ISBN: 2-89428-679-1)

In the 1950s, geography students from across Canada travelled to Ottawa to take up coveted summer jobs at the (sadly) short-lived Geographical Branch. Those stationed in Ottawa got used to seeing a slim young Branch geographer, impeccably dressed, unobtrusively going about his work. With his focussed, contemplative demeanor, he stood out, and I sometimes wondered just what his job was. I did find out he was interested in transportation geography. This was the young Pierre Camu, and the history of Canadian water transportation, particularly in eastern Canada, was then and has remained his life-long interest. Later in his career Camu assumed various important administrative positions. He became President of the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority, Chairman of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, and in the private sector he was a senior executive with Lavalin Inc., one of Canada's largest engineering firms.

Camu works in a vital field--communications--that has not only engaged some of Canada's best minds, but is a grand theme in Canadian scholarship. One thinks of Harold Innis and of Marshall McLuhan, and in popular history Pierre Berton. Now in retirement Camu carries on that tradition, assiduously working on a trilogy on the evolution of water transportation in the Great...

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