Giller winner Dr Vincent Lam's next book's subject: Tommy Douglas

Dr Vincent Lam (right), the Giller Prize-winning author of the 2006 short story collection Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and a Toronto emergency physician, has been selected to write a new biography of Tommy Douglas, the "father of Canadian medicare" and the Greatest Canadian ever.

Pretty good gig, eh?

The book will be published by Penguin Canada as a part of a new series of 18 books called Extraordinary Canadians. The series, which also includes a biography of Dr Norman Bethune by former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and books on people from Louis Riel to Marshall McLuhan, is to be edited by Ms Clarkson's husband, the writer John Ralston Saul.

Dr Lam's inclusion in the series came as a surprise to some critics.

"Yes, there are the expected biographies of politicians such as Tommy Douglas (but by the unexpected Vincent Lam, winner of the 2006 Giller Prize for English-language fiction)," wrote The Globe and Mail's James Adams.

Besides Ms Clarkson and Mr Ralston Saul, the series features a number of other very well established writers like M G Vassanji, Margaret MacMillan and Douglas Coupland. The only nonfiction Dr Lam has to his name are some newspaper articles and a co-writer credit on a book called The Flu Pandemic and You, and his fiction publishing is limited to his short story collection as well as a forthcoming novel called Cholon, Near Forgotten.

Toronto Star publishing reporter Vit Wagner called the Lam-Douglas choice "an intriguing matchup." Mr Wagner wrote, "The pairings sometimes seem odd, if never completely counterintuitive. Vincent Lam on Tommy Douglas? Well, Lam, besides being the Giller Prize-winning author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, is a doctor; Douglas was the father of medicare."

If Dr Lam seemed an odd choice to some, he seemed well matched to the task to others. "Why not?" asked Toronto Star critic Dan Smith. "It’s the rich authorial voice and hopefully unexpected perspectives that will make these brief histories succeed; we won’t be looking for new facts or discoveries."

The Canadian blog Taylor & Company, however, didn't approve of the choice of Dr Lam... or of almost any of the other authors... or most of the subjects. Under the headline "CanCulture elite still propping up old, tired icons" Chris Taylor criticized the number of Toronto and Ottawa writers, of whom Dr Lam is one, chosen to write biographies (13 of the 17 announced so far) and suggested his own list of biographical subjects -- zero of which overlapped with the Penguin list.

Lumping in Dr Lam -- whose Chinese parents immigrated to Canada from Vietnam -- with the "CanCulture elite" is questionable, but the real test will come when the Douglas biography is released, at an undetermined date in the next three years. Despite his Giller win, some critics have called him a "media darling" and taken potshots at Bloodletting.


Photo: Marc Coatesworth, National Review of Medicine

Check out our website: www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com