New book review: Reynolds on Spooner’s Canada, the Congo Crisis, and UN Peacekeeping, 1960-64.

Today we are publishing ActiveHistory.ca’s tenth book review. This month Ken Reynolds, an historian with the Department of National Defence, reviews Kevin Spooner’s recent book about Canadian peacekeeping in the Congo:

Notes prepared for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s attendance at a Commonwealth conference in March 1961 summed up Canada’s position on Africa, noting that Canada had “no territories in Africa and no territorial ambitions.  It has no financial or commercial interests in the Congo sufficient to influence its judgment.  Canada – as anyone may verify by examining our record on this issue in the United Nations – has been and remains, relatively speaking, impartial” (p.148).  So, how did Canada end up with blue berets in the Congo?

Read the Full Review

[We ask people outside of the academic history community to review books for this website. We hope this will provide a new perspective on history books not regularly found in academic journals. If you would like to review a book for ActiveHistory.ca, and you are not currently a graduate student or professor in a history department, please contact info@activehistory.ca.]

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Blog posts published before October  28, 2018 are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.

Please note: ActiveHistory.ca encourages comment and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments submitted under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.