SOURCE: A review of The Impossible Railway, in The New York Times Book Review, November 12, 1972, p. 48.

In the following review, Richler calls The Impossible Railway a "considerable triumph," praising Berton for his ability to make a complex story "readable."

Canada, threatened within by French Canadian separatists and without by rampaging American investment, is presently in a truculent and soul-searching mood. Its writers, their nationalist zeal often outstripping their talent, are bent on mythmaking. Turned inward, they are prospecting the past for those heroic tales that helped forge the nation or at least define how it differs from the other, sometimes insufferably overshadowing, America.

In this, as in any stake-claiming race, many of the searchers, ill-equipped, are inevitably panning fool's gold. Others are salting shallow pit-heads, inflating the stock for nationalistic consumption. But a few are surfacing with valuable, even essential, mythological ore.

Among them, the indefatigable Pierre Berton...