John Robert Colombo
42 Dell Park Avenue / Toronto M6B 2T6 / Canada
Phone 1 (416) 782 6853
E-mail jrc@colombo.ca
Webpage www.colombo.ca
19 May 2021
Dear Anna Yin and Terry Barker:
Many thanks are due to the two of you for drawing my attention to Tracking the True North, the reading of which gave me great pleasure, that of reminding me of what I already knew and of introducing me to what was new to me.
SureWay Press has produced an agreeably informative text and a volume that has the distinguishing characteristics of being two essays and indeed two texts in one – a detailed and exact narrative about conceptions about the “lost past” and a wealth of commentaries on ever-present (albeit hard-to-find) source materials.
I am sorry you did not notice in passing Colombo’s All Time Great Canadian Quotations (1994), which has hundreds of chronologically arranged quotations, the first of which begins in 1,000 B.C. (from the Vedas) and the last to A.D. 1995 with Judith Merril embracing the vision of the Voyager Interstellar Record then approaching outer space. There is also is the “Polar World / Tropical Valley” section of the final thirty pages of Mysterious Canada (1988) which covers some of your material from highly imaginative and conceptual perspectives including the Theosophical one.
The author has done an amazing amount of reading and has bravely embraced the imaginative and intuitive dimensions of human desire, illusion, knowledge, history, hope, and achievement. It puts “Canadian” history in the widest of possible perspectives. I hope Tracking the True North sets the compasses of young readers spinning and awakens their sense that history is a story that may indeed be true.
Congratulations,
JRC
