Books for Development: Canada in the Late Twentieth-Century World

Books for Development combines several ideas that rub against the grain of major narratives positioning literacy as always good, reading ditto, settler culture as tolerant, and Canada as a neutral, honest broker and peacekeeper on the world stage. The detailed work that Mason does here – connecting and critiquing ideologies around literacy, reading, and publishing in a way that is relevant to scholars of literature and politics – is both unusual and welcome.

—Margery Fee, University of British Columbia, author of Literary Land Claims