Strange Days: Amazing Stories From Canada’s Wildest Decade
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by Ted Ferguson
NeWest Press, Edmonton, 2011
280 pp., $21.95 paperback
Strange Days: Amazing Stories from Canada’s Wildest Decade is an assemblage of true stories about Canada in the 1920s. Many have been fascinated with the era know as the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, or the Fabulous Decade. Ted Ferguson introduces the self-indulgent period from 1920 to 1929 that ended with the stock market crash and compares it with the years leading to the “Great Recession” of 2009.
The prosperous years of the 1920s are full of stories — some humourous, some disturbing, and some downright bizarre.
Strange Days touches on prohibition, train robberies, gruesome murders, and great athletic feats. We learn of an extravagant and generous Montreal millionaire who lost it all, and about the escapades of a Cincinnati teenager who duped the Toronto Star and made front-page news by posing as a “wilderness boy.” As Canadian author Charles Lewis noted, the era was “touched by madness.”
It would have been great to see some photos enliven the pages of Strange Days, but all in all Ferguson’s collection of tales offers an entertaining romp through some of Canada’s lesser-known history. Thank goodness he dug through the archives to bring us these gems, thereby shaking the myth that Canadians are staid, polite, and boring.
— Beverley Tallon (Read bio)
Beverley Tallon is a freelance writer and the former Assistant Editor for Canada's History.