Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War

By (author): Gil McElroy

When his father died, award-winning poet and curator Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father’s military career. Beginning in the Second World War and continuing right through to the end of the Cold War, the senior McElroy staffed Canada’s network of electronic defence, including the Distant Early Warning Line – a network of radar stations stretching along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Baffin Island.

Established in the early 1950s, the DEW Line provided advance warning of an aircraft or missile attack. There, servicemen lived in isolated radar stations, watching surveillance screens for the telltale blips that threatened nuclear annihilation.

McElroy reflects on the sacrifices these men made, living away from their families for great lengths of time – for the “greater good” of protecting North American airspace and
Western values.

At the same time, Cold Comfort follows McElroy’s experience of growing up as an itinerant military brat, who moved from one posting to another, and the military family’s attempts to hold together in the face of the father’s absence. Cold Comfort also explores the utter enigma that was the author’s father. Examining the contents of the box of photographs, image by image, McElroy attempts to come to terms with the mysterious photographer, a man better understood by his military compatriots than by his own family.

AUTHOR

Gil McElroy

A military brat, Gil McElroy was born in Metz, France, and grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His critical writing on art has been published in magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia, and he has worked as an independent curator since the 1980s, organizing exhibitions for galleries in Ontario and the Maritimes. From 1997 to 2000, he was Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, PEI. He won the Christina Sabat Award for Art Criticism in 2001 for his curatorial essay on the visual poetry of bpNichol, “Ground States: The Visual Contexts of bpNichol.” He is also an artist, exhibiting gallery and site-specific installations based on his interests in cosmology. He has published poetry widely in Canadian and American periodicals and anthologies, and a book-length collection of his recent poetry, Dream Pool Essays, was released by Talonbooks in the fall of 2001. He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario.


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When his father died, award-winning poet and curator Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father’s military career. Beginning in the Second World War and continuing right through to the end of the Cold War, the senior McElroy staffed Canada’s network of electronic defence, including the Distant Early Warning Line – a network of radar stations stretching along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Baffin Island.

Established in the early 1950s, the DEW Line provided advance warning of an aircraft or missile attack. There, servicemen lived in isolated radar stations, watching surveillance screens for the telltale blips that threatened nuclear annihilation.

McElroy reflects on the sacrifices these men made, living away from their families for great lengths of time – for the “greater good” of protecting North American airspace and
Western values.

At the same time, Cold Comfort follows McElroy’s experience of growing up as an itinerant military brat, who moved from one posting to another, and the military family’s attempts to hold together in the face of the father’s absence. Cold Comfort also explores the utter enigma that was the author’s father. Examining the contents of the box of photographs, image by image, McElroy attempts to come to terms with the mysterious photographer, a man better understood by his military compatriots than by his own family.

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Details

Dimensions:

272 Pages
8.5in * 216mm * 5.5in * 140mm * 0.5625in14mm
379gr
13.375oz

Published:

May 15, 2012

City of Publication:

Vancouver

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Talonbooks

ISBN:

9780889226845

9780889227118 – EPUB

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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