About the Author

MAX and MONIQUE NEMNI are retired university professors who spent most of their working lives in Quebec. They were friends of Trudeau, who encouraged them to become the editors of Cité libre and agreed to let them write his intellectual biography. The authors have both been much published in academic publications in both English and French. They won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Young Trudeau, and were finalists for the same prize for Trudeau Transformed, the follow-up to Young Trudeau. They now live in Toronto.

Reviews

“No single book had the psychological impact of Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau. It changed the perceptions and challenged the political reflexes of Canadians. Conceived as an act of homage, it turned into a journey of shocking discovery. As the Nemnis examined Pierre Trudeau’s private papers, they found a very different young man than they had expected or previous accounts had revealed. The unshakeable federalist who became Canada’s 15th Prime Minister had once plotted to take Quebec out of Canada. The eloquent democrat who penned Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms had once shrugged off Nazi atrocities and admired fascism. It is a tribute to the Nemnis’ skill and scholarship that Mr. Trudeau emerges undiminished from their portrait. They show how he was shaped by pre-war Quebec with its all-powerful church, its authoritarianism, and its separatist yearnings and how he eventually broke free.” —Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing jury citation

“One of the truly great contributions to Canadian political history.” —National Post