Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects
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by John Goddard
Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2014
224 pp., illus., $19.99 paperback
Do you feel cheated when heritage sites fail to provide detailed histories of the buildings you visit or the people who lived there? If Toronto is your destination, a book like John Goddard’s Inside the Museums offers some help. Goddard gives thorough accounts of selected Toronto’s heritage sites by exploring the histories of the people associated with them and the minute details of artifacts found in the buildings. He even offers public transit directions and includes nearby attractions.
Goddard doesn’t just draw the reader in; he walks us through each of the ten sites, building-by-building and room-by-room. When he writes of the Mackenzie House he allows readers to envision the most intimate details of the Mackenzie family’s lives. For instance, he notes that on the second-floor rear bedroom “Isabel Baxter Mackenzie gave birth to thirteen children,” and that “William Lyon Mackenzie died in the upstairs front bedroom of this greybrick townhouse, steps away from modern Yonge-Dundas Square and the Toronto Eaton Centre.”
In this book, Goddard, a former Toronto Star reporter, provides detailed stories that make for enjoyable reading.
— Jessica Knapp (Read bio)
Jessica Knapp is Community Engagement Coordinator for Canada's History Society.