What do you think?
Rate this book
Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Portraits
Part 1 Peace and War
I Peace now!
II War is good business, invest your son
III Hell no, we won't go
Part 2 Student Power
I Knowledge for whom?
II. Be realistic, demand the impossible
Part 3 Counterculture
1. Back to the garden
2. Hope I die before I grow old
Part 4 The Third World Within
I We hold the rock
II The rising of the women
Part 5 Two Nations, One Enemy
I Create two, three, many Vietnams
II Le Québec aux Qubécois!
III Free Quebec, free Canada
Part 6 This Is Not a Revolution, Sir, This Is a Mutation
I Movement nation
II Portraits revisited
III It's my fight, it's my life
Notes
Bibliography
Foreword
Introduction
Portraits
Part 1 Peace and War
I Peace now!
II War is good business, invest your son
III Hell no, we won't go
Part 2 Student Power
I Knowledge for whom?
II. Be realistic, demand the impossible
Part 3 Counterculture
1. Back to the garden
2. Hope I die before I grow old
Part 4 The Third World Within
I We hold the rock
II The rising of the women
Part 5 Two Nations, One Enemy
I Create two, three, many Vietnams
II Le Québec aux Qubécois!
III Free Quebec, free Canada
Part 6 This Is Not a Revolution, Sir, This Is a Mutation
I Movement nation
II Portraits revisited
III It's my fight, it's my life
Notes
Bibliography
- GenresCanada
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
13 people want to read
About the author
Myrna Kostash
18 books11 followersBorn and raised in Edmonton, AB, award-winning non-fiction writer Myrna Kostash is the author of nine books, including All of Baba’s Children and The Doomed Bridegroom. In addition to contributing articles to various magazines, such as Geist, Canadian Geographic, and Legacy, Kostash has written radio documentaries and theatre playscripts. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in numerous Canadian and international anthologies, such as The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays, Edmonton on Location, Literatura na swiecie (Warsaw), and Mostovi (Belgrade).
A founder of the Creative Non-Fiction Collective, Kostash has taught creative writing workshops across Canada and in the US. She has served on several award juries, including those of the Governor General’s Awards, the CBC Literary Non-fiction competition, and the Writers’ Development Trust’s Pearson Award for Literary Non-fiction. In 2008 the Writers Guild of Alberta presented her with the Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2009 she was inducted into the City of Edmonton’s Arts and Culture Hall of Fame. Her upcoming book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey into Byzantium, will be released in 2010.
A founder of the Creative Non-Fiction Collective, Kostash has taught creative writing workshops across Canada and in the US. She has served on several award juries, including those of the Governor General’s Awards, the CBC Literary Non-fiction competition, and the Writers’ Development Trust’s Pearson Award for Literary Non-fiction. In 2008 the Writers Guild of Alberta presented her with the Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2009 she was inducted into the City of Edmonton’s Arts and Culture Hall of Fame. Her upcoming book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey into Byzantium, will be released in 2010.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 28, 2022
Kostash writes as a committed observor/participant of the "movement" in Sixties Canada. She says up front that part of her agenda is to take the Canadian decade out of the shadow of its southern neighbor. I wish she'd have followed through on both the potential of her perspective and on the thematic agenda but the book falls a bit flat. There are some interpolated passages from participants in various events, but they aren't integrated into the narrative. More problematically, up until the chapter on Quebec near the end, the story is shaped almost entirely in terms of Canadian reactions to American events. I came away not feeling like I really understood what distinguished the Canadian experience.
February 2, 2022
Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada
by Myrna Kostash
Reviewed by Dee Knight
Myrna Kostash took me back to the Canada that welcomed me and tens of thousands of war resisters from the USA to Canada during the Vietnam era. Her book makes it obvious why the welcome was warm and comfortable: despite the cultural differences, we were part of a continental youth movement. The student-based peace movement she describes was the early cornerstone and founding force of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and Union of American Exiles, originally named the Union of New Canadians. It was the social environment of the new youth culture that many U.S. war resisters gravitated into easily – feeling almost like “home,” but with special cultural differences that allowed us to learn, while breathing much easier than before we arrived.
The photo collection in the book’s center is a “memory lane” of my years in Toronto in the late sixties and seventies. Many of them, from the Baldwin Gallery, based in what we thought of as an “American ghetto”, document lives we lived together: street festivals, rock festivals, park weddings, protest marches, and even gatherings of U.S. war resisters.
While Kostash documents memories of struggles and “epiphanies” of our generation that have common roots in both the U.S. and Canada, she also portrays the new and special realities of that period, like emerging nationalism on the left in both English- and French-speaking Canada. She revived my memory of the Front de Liberatión de Québec (FLQ), whose emergence in 1970, together with the official War Measures Act which answered it, was a “wake-up call” for many American resisters in our new country. (The tendency of some Canadian officials, especially at the local level in various parts of Canada, to include newly arrived Americans in their dragnet of suspicious types, was much less lasting in Canada than it would have been south of the border.)
The women’s and counter-culture movements Kostash describes were shared phenomena on both sides of the border. But the existence of an officially recognized left was one special element that set the Canadian experience apart. New arrivals from south of the border could find a “new political home” for our sprouting progressivism. And for those of us lucky enough to get union jobs, the socialist affiliations of the unions were quite welcome. I personally gravitated easily to the New Democratic Party’s leftish “Waffle” movement, and later got the beginnings of a radical education, and involvement with the radical labour movement, with friends further left.
Near the end of the book Kostash raised familiar questions about “what is to be done” with our early efforts at social change. “It was we, the kids and the students,” she wrote, “who showed up for the dress rehearsal, who were present at the crisis of modern capitalism, and routed its assumptions: how and for what we would be educated, for whom and why we would work, and how we would be sexual and with whom we would build a family…” She says the period of the sixties and seventies was “the ‘peak’ experience of our generation.” But she adds that “after the demonstrations” we needed to learn to “render radicalism ordinary, liberate it from the false achievement of eruptions into the extraordinary, ground it rather in the patient labour of working with the undramatic and unheroic realities of ordinary life…”
She describes the “ongoing struggles” in the eighties: “student mobilization in Iran, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique, Soweto, Brazil…” as well as students protesting fee hikes and joining with unions against wage controls and nuclear power, nuclear weapons, uranium mining, and so on.
At the very end of the book Kostash quotes Che Guevara: “Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” She adds “And so we had been ridiculous with love, with joy, with the first free labour of our young lives. We should be so ridiculous again.” To which I say “Amen, and thank you!”
by Myrna Kostash
Reviewed by Dee Knight
Myrna Kostash took me back to the Canada that welcomed me and tens of thousands of war resisters from the USA to Canada during the Vietnam era. Her book makes it obvious why the welcome was warm and comfortable: despite the cultural differences, we were part of a continental youth movement. The student-based peace movement she describes was the early cornerstone and founding force of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and Union of American Exiles, originally named the Union of New Canadians. It was the social environment of the new youth culture that many U.S. war resisters gravitated into easily – feeling almost like “home,” but with special cultural differences that allowed us to learn, while breathing much easier than before we arrived.
The photo collection in the book’s center is a “memory lane” of my years in Toronto in the late sixties and seventies. Many of them, from the Baldwin Gallery, based in what we thought of as an “American ghetto”, document lives we lived together: street festivals, rock festivals, park weddings, protest marches, and even gatherings of U.S. war resisters.
While Kostash documents memories of struggles and “epiphanies” of our generation that have common roots in both the U.S. and Canada, she also portrays the new and special realities of that period, like emerging nationalism on the left in both English- and French-speaking Canada. She revived my memory of the Front de Liberatión de Québec (FLQ), whose emergence in 1970, together with the official War Measures Act which answered it, was a “wake-up call” for many American resisters in our new country. (The tendency of some Canadian officials, especially at the local level in various parts of Canada, to include newly arrived Americans in their dragnet of suspicious types, was much less lasting in Canada than it would have been south of the border.)
The women’s and counter-culture movements Kostash describes were shared phenomena on both sides of the border. But the existence of an officially recognized left was one special element that set the Canadian experience apart. New arrivals from south of the border could find a “new political home” for our sprouting progressivism. And for those of us lucky enough to get union jobs, the socialist affiliations of the unions were quite welcome. I personally gravitated easily to the New Democratic Party’s leftish “Waffle” movement, and later got the beginnings of a radical education, and involvement with the radical labour movement, with friends further left.
Near the end of the book Kostash raised familiar questions about “what is to be done” with our early efforts at social change. “It was we, the kids and the students,” she wrote, “who showed up for the dress rehearsal, who were present at the crisis of modern capitalism, and routed its assumptions: how and for what we would be educated, for whom and why we would work, and how we would be sexual and with whom we would build a family…” She says the period of the sixties and seventies was “the ‘peak’ experience of our generation.” But she adds that “after the demonstrations” we needed to learn to “render radicalism ordinary, liberate it from the false achievement of eruptions into the extraordinary, ground it rather in the patient labour of working with the undramatic and unheroic realities of ordinary life…”
She describes the “ongoing struggles” in the eighties: “student mobilization in Iran, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique, Soweto, Brazil…” as well as students protesting fee hikes and joining with unions against wage controls and nuclear power, nuclear weapons, uranium mining, and so on.
At the very end of the book Kostash quotes Che Guevara: “Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” She adds “And so we had been ridiculous with love, with joy, with the first free labour of our young lives. We should be so ridiculous again.” To which I say “Amen, and thank you!”
December 10, 2024
A beautifully evocative account of 'the Sixties,' specifically the New Left and the counterculture, in English-speaking Canada. Whatever one might think of Kostash's judgements (she holds firmly to the left-nationalist view of Canada, for one thing) this book is an irreplaceable document of what it felt like and what it meant to experience the aspirations and struggles of Canada's still-neglected 'youth vanguard.'
Read
April 1, 2009Reviewed here.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews