With Axe and Flask: The History of Persephone Township from Pre-Cambrian Times to the Present Day

by Dan Needles

Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for 2003


The creator of the hugely popular Wingfield Farm plays lays bare a beguiling corner of rural Canada

Just a few hours north of the city, you’ll find the familiar features of Persephone the hardscrabble farms, the timeless small towns, the laconic local citizens. The fabled turf that is home to Wingfield Farm (immortalized by Dan Needles in five one-man stage productions), Persephone is hard to find on any map but very near the Canadian soul.

In Persephone anything can happen and often does. Towering local figures dating back to the township’s murky colonial beginnings land-grabbing speculators, shady railway promoters, heedless despoilers of natural wonders, and spectacularly slippery politicians cross paths with the likes of Sir John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, not to mention the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie and the future King Edward VII. With Axe and Flask tells it all, sparing no Canadian sacred cow in uncovering the township’s checkered past, from the displacement of its original native inhabitants to the recent invasion of the weekenders.

You are about to enter a world at once strange and recognizable, where past and present, fact and fiction combine in a potent mix of comedy, pathos and national identity.

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2002

Reviews

[Arow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this book for the Winter Challenge 2009. It fit into a few catogories. It started out quite funny and contiuned through out but it was amazing to see how quickly his writing tired me. The book is written like a funny history book; he put in all these long footnotes that just got to be too much for in the end.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book could be dry at times -- part of it, I know, was a deliberate choice and part of the humour -- but there were one or two times when it dragged unnecessarily. Having said that, I can see why it won the Stephe Leacock Medal. The humour shone through the majority of the book and there were parts that I laughed out loud at.

[Ruthpearson]

I like history, so I enjoyed this in the main. Needles is funny in places so it is interesting reading.

I have read over 27 books since reading With Axe and Flask.

[Robert Washburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

He wishes he was Stephen Leacock. Nope.