reviews — comptes rendu (137–159) | Revue d’Etudes Canadiennes en Europe Centrale | volume 09 (2014) | 151 Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and other Stately pleasures Patricia Cormack / James F. Cosgrave Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 272 pp., ISBN-13: 9781442613911 Jason Blake University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Especially for those of us who do not live in Canada, Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures is an ideal book. Patricia Cormack and James F. Cosgrave write clearly, energetically and intelligently of the lowbrow popular culture that usually fies below the Central European radar. In Brno or Budapest or Bucharest, academics know Tomas Haliburton and Tomson Highway, but not necessarily Tim Hortons. Moodie and Munro are household names in the halls of academe, but Mercer? Who’s that joker? Desiring Canada flls many of these cultural gaps as its authors intro- duce and cleverly “examine everyday pleasures, Canadian identity, and the state” (17). Like many texts, Desiring Canada begins with an epigraph by Pierre Trudeau – name- ly, his 1967 line “Tere’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” Unlike many books, Desiring Canada does something interesting with the quip. As long as there’s a television in the nation’s bedrooms, the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation does have its place there and plays its part in regulating our wants and concepts of Canada. “Canadian identity,” we learn, “is one of desire, and desire is by defnition always incomplete” (212). In other words, the publicly-funded CBC helps to fesh out concepts of Canada, entailing that “the state has only appeared to disappear from the interest in citizens’ pleasure” (212). Te fve body chapters are neatly woven together and focus on: 1) two recent CBC contests (“Seven Wonders of Canada” and “49 Songs from North of the 49 th Parallel,” which set out to choose a playlist for newly-elected President Barack Obama); 2) the Tim Hortons cofee phenomenon; 3) ice hockey and televised spectacles of violence; 4) “Peace, Order and Good Gambling”; and 5) CBC comedy. Desiring Canada is a model for academic writing. Te arguments and writing are clear, endnotes are delightfully sparse and sometimes funny, the index is well-organized, and Cormack and Cosgrave provide concise information and background on, for example, the oft-ridiculed MAPL rules for what makes music Canadian. Tis saves us from having to slog through such