Shock Troops win(s)

First Christie Blatchford and now Tim Cook. Good times for Canadian military literature:

Tim Cook lands $25,000 non-fiction award

A trip with his parents to Western Europe when he was 17 laid the groundwork for Tim Cook's triumph Mondayas the 2009 winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for excellence in literary non-fiction.

The 37-year-old Ottawa-based historian took the $25,000 prize, the eighth in Taylor history, at a luncheon ceremony in a downtown Toronto hotel ballroom, winning over two other finalists with a 728-page historical epic, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918, published by Viking Canada.

Cook, currently First World War historian at the Canadian War Museum [see second part here for more on the museum] , said in an interview after his win that while in Europe with his parents, "[his] drug of choice was Star Wars action figures" and his favourite author Stephen King.

But "when I arrived on the Western Front, I realized something profound had happened here, something important," he recalled.

(Top) Tim Cook
(Bottom) Shock Troops traces the heroics of Canadian soldiers on the front lines of battle

"It was those cemeteries — walking those cemeteries, walking by myself a lot of the time, looking at those gravestones, looking at the 18-year-old kids, or the 25-year-olds or the 55-year-olds, trying to understand what happened there." Later, in university, he was moved by the poetry — "those word pictures" — of such First World War writers as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

This year's trio of Taylor judges lauded Shock Troops, the last of a two-volume series on which Cook spent 10 years, for its "tremendous detail and almost unstoppable narrative momentum," one that "reveals the difficult relationships that formed among politicians, commanders and ordinary soldiers" during the final two years of the Great War.

Cook said that while he wants his book to earn the approbation of academics, he is also interested in "reaching beyond ... to get the word out on non-fiction" to a larger audience, as the late author Pierre Berton once did.

"We need to understand our part [in the First World War] in all its complexity and nuances ... [with] all the bruises left in." More than two million Canadians enlisted in the First World War effort and 60,000 of these were killed — relative to Canada's population today, it is the equivalent of 250,000 dead.

Like the Cook title, the other finalists embraced what juror (and Globe and Mail columnist) Jeffrey Simpson called "sweeping historical narratives" that "depended on archival research."..

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• Read an essay by Tim Cook about his winning book, as well as an excerpt