VOLUME I of The Historical Atlas of Canada was a big, expensive, scholarly work. Its pages often yielded meaning only after hard work with magnifying glass and scratch pad. Yet for thousands of readers, it was the Canadian book of the year in 1987 In strange and beautiful ways, it reconstructed the distant past (12,000 BC to AD 1800) in patterns that few readers had ever imagined. Whether the subject was Native cosmology, Acadian settlement, or fur-trade economics, the Atlas presented ways of seeing the past that seemed absolutely new. But in the information century, we take for granted floods of data on practically everything. Volume III, which modestly announces it will "address" the 20th century, covers the years 1891 to 196L and the editors must have faced an overwhelming mass of data. Can Volume III match the freshness of Volume I? How, for instance, to map the Canadian army`s part in the Second World War on just one map? The solution here is simple and brilliant - a map of war graves. The swollen circle that bulges out around Ortona told me all I needed to know about the Italian campaign. Nearby stands a little chart of war dead per 100,000 soldiers. To my astonishment, the Canadians stand fifth in the world, well behind the Russian, German, Japanese, and British forces, but ahead of such big winners and losers as the United States, France, and Italy. There`s also a plate on the home front; the map of Toronto day nurseries for the kids of women in war work conveys more than all those Rosie-the-Riveter stories. Need a short lesson on how the 20th century has changed how we live and die? Contemplate Plate 29, where infant mortality rates in the Canadian cities of 1891 exceed 200 per 1,000 births, and Plate 32, which shows how pasteurization, chlorination, and public health defeated typhoid and its deadly cohorts in the decade after 1910. What did the Depression do, anyway? Look at Plate 40, a page full of U-shaped graphs. Everything plunges into a pit in 1929-30, then slowly climbs up the other side. For a more human scale, Plate 41 traces the bleak odyssey of Nelson Thibault. In five years Tbibault hit 35 places between Halifax and Vancouver and never found steady work. The editors forthrightly declare that social, economic, and cultural conditions are their bread and butter, and they have shaped the Atlas on that basis. By the same logic, they are not very interested in politics. The Atlas pays little attention to any election but that of 1935, and none to the birthplaces of prime ministers or the distribution of party funding and patronage boodle. Belief about the feasibility of explaining the world while leaving out formal politics is the fault line that divides the old history from the new. So it is word, considering how well the resolutely "new" Adas holds up on this test. Can this mostly apolitical book tell us worth, while things about the issues of the day? Look at the sudden emergence of the Prairie wheatlands after 1900 and, in Plate 43, their near-unmaking by the dustbowl and Depression. Look at freight-rate gerrymandering, corporate concentration, or how Central Canada got all the war work. It`s fair to say the Atlas knows something about regional discontent. Searching for Canadian culture, the Atlas charts amateur sport in the 1890s, churchgoing in the 1920s, and the programs on CBC radio in 1956. Does the Atlas think Quebec is a distinct society? In the introduction, Paul-Andre Linteau declares the commitment of the Atlas "to fair treatment of Quebec`s distinct characteristics," but he has to agree that "various plates show that Quebec shared many common features with ... the rest of the country." Indeed, all kinds of charts popularity of television, education spending, workforce composition, fertility rates show Quebec growing ever more like the rest of us. By 1961, what makes Quebec distinct seems to be language, ethnicity - and a strong sense of distinctiveness, no doubt. If we know how to read it, there`s a theory of the origins of the Quiet Revolution here. 1 worked on one small part of one plate of Volume 1, and maybe a tinge of proprietorial feeling toward that volume made me suspect that Volume Ill would never be able to match its predecessor. Well, it does. Fresh perspective, ingenious cartography, and masses of research have done it again. Volume 11, on the 19th century, is promised for 1992, and I`m already eager to see it.