Health Care in Canada: A Citizen's Guide to Policy and Politics

Is the sole purpose of a reference collection to provide quick, factual information in the form of encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, handbooks, atlases, thesauruses, plot summaries, gazetteers, statistical sources, style manuals, and the like? Or, might there be a place for more extensive research sources that provide complex and nuanced accounts of difficult issues?

This review of Katherine Fierlbeck's Health Care in Canada begins with these questions because Fierlbeck's work fits firmly into the latter category of sources; it goes beyond simple factual description of institutions and processes in order to provide in-depth examination of myriad political and theoretical issues involved...