Although the United States itself did not enter the war until April 1917, Canada enlisted the moment Great Britain engaged in the conflict in August of 1914. The Canadian contribution was great, as over 600,000 men and women came to serve in the war effort--400,000 of them overseas. Over 150,000 were wounded while near 67,000 gave their lives. A pivotal turning point in the history of the modern world, its mindless slaughter shattered a generation and destroyed its seemingly secure values assumptions. The literature it generated, and continues to generate so many years later, is enormous and addresses all of its aspects. While many great scholars have brilliantly analyzed the "literature" of the war, little has been done on the writings of ordinary participants, the men and women who served in the war and wrote about it but are not included among the well-known poets, novelists and memoirists. Indeed, we don't even know how many titles these people published. Nor do we know how many more titles were added later by relatives who thought their memoirs or collected letters merited publication.

Brian Douglas Tennyson's The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs is the first attempt to identify all of the published accounts by Canadian veterans of their Great War experiences. It not only provides the first comprehensive list of Canadian published memoirs, it dramatically disproves the long-established view that few Canadian veterans published accounts of their experience in the First World War. It lists more than 960 titles published during and after the war by the veterans themselves, plus several hundred more that were written by the veterans but were published later by relatives. The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs includes not only memoirs, magazine articles, collections of letters and interviews published in books or articles, but novels and collections of poetry as well, on the ground that they also constitute a creative form of memoir of their authors' wartime experiences. Tennyson has also included regimental histories published in the postwar years if they were written by men who had served in the battalion about which they were writing and/or made extensive use of personal recollections. The key criteria in his research were that items had to have been published to be included in this bibliography, had to reflect first-hand experience, and had to have been written by Canadians. Thoroughly inclusive, it includes entries not only by soldiers but by doctors, nurses and chaplains and also Americans and others who served in the Canadian forces as well as Canadians who served in non-Canadian (e.g.

American, British and French) forces. The book also includes complete bibliographical information as well as biographies of all of the writers, however obscure. It is an ideal resources for genealogists, professional and amateur historians, and teachers not only in Canada, but in the United States and United Kingdom.