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A Voluntary Crucifixion
Guernica Editions, Spring 2019
418 pages
Trade Paperback
ISBN13: 9781771832724
ISBN10: 177183272X
English
$25.00 Canada, $25.00 US
Read more from the Essential Prose Series
A Voluntary Crucifixion traces the story of 20th century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J MacKinnon's life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society “from the bottom up”. A Voluntary Crucifixion recounts the tale of MacKinnon's adventures and misadventures from post-Tiananmen Hong Kong to various ports of call in the Indian Ocean, offering MacKinnon's views on everything from censorship to indigenous issues, all of which reflect his life ethos that the key to life is to refuse to adapt, and to fight tooth-and-nail for every square inch of your freedom before others wrench it from you.
I have left too many casualties along the trail of this shattered dream to be blind to the impossibility of escape. I have betrayed my own flesh and blood until it became a habit. I buried secrets so deep within the catacombs of my heart, vowing that nothing but death and the Creator would exhume them.
… [E]ven ingested in small mouthfuls, this is a dangerous intellectual sojourn, a potent constitutional for a sedentary, middle-aged man like myself. In a word, the sheer theatricality of David’s life -- his travels, his risk-taking, his volatile alliances -- is guaranteed to make one’s own seem comparatively timid. One wonders (or I did) whether one has shirked the challenges, personal and civic, of a responsible adulthood. Even without this secondary impact, however, the book is extraordinary. When it is not a call to action, it teems with so many clear-eyed, rude and perspicacious observations that Swift’s admonition applies to it perfectly -- we will know a genius among us by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
Patrick Shannon
A Voluntary Crucifixion is worth finding, buying, reading and savoring. MacKinnon is an underappreciated gem who, in a perfect world, would be a household name, and for more than one reason. Make him one in yours.
Joe Hartlaub, Senior Reviewer, New York’s Book Reporter
Reviews
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Nonfiction Review by Neil Boyd
The Malahat Review - January 23, 2019
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A Voluntary Crucifixion
Book Reporter - April 11, 2019
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#635 Go east, young man
The Ormsby Review - October 16, 2019
Books by David MacKinnon
