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EACH MAN'S SON.

MacLennan, Hugh.

Toronto, Macmillan, 1951 (reprinted 1988). 256pp, paper. $4.95, ISBN 0-7715-9276-0. (The Macmillan Paperback series #33). CIP

Grades 10 and up
Reviewed by Joan McGrath

Volume 16 Number 5
1988 September


Of the Highlanders of Cape Breton Island author MacLennan writes. "Each man's son was driven by a daemon of his own hope and imagination—by his energy or by his fear—to unknown destinations." Each Man's Son is the story of one such driven man, Dr. Dan Ainslie, whose life is spent serving the needs of the hard-bitten roughneck miners of his native Island.

Ainslie is childless and his much loved wife can now never bear him the son he longs for. He begins to covet the son of a neglectful absentee of a neglectful absentee father and a local village girt. Their child seems to him to be a lad of exceptional promise, and he feels that it will be a crime if the boy's gifts are brought to nothing by the life of grinding poverty and ignorance that is all the boy's mother can provide. The Doctor begins to intrude upon the lives of mother and child, and the results are such as no one could have foreseen.

This is the most warm and moving of MacLennan's powerful novels, and its reappearance in a handsome new paperback edition is welcome indeed.


Joan McGrath, Toronto Board of Education, Toronto. Ont.
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