During the parliamentary years, from his first election in 1979 to his appointment to London in 1996, MacLaren draws on his diary to offer impressions - at times devastating, at others sympathetic - of those he encountered in his several ministerial capacities and global travels. Earlier, life in Saigon and Hanoi following the French Indo-China war, the oppressions of the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia, the erection of the Berlin Wall, multilateral diplomacy at the United Nations in Geneva and New York during the Cold War are recounted with both insight and humility. Of his business career, MacLaren offers, for example, an insider's perspective on the collapse of Massey-Ferguson and the successes of his business magazine company. A political memoir set in an autobiography, The Fundamental Things Apply ranges widely over Canadian economic and international affairs, including NAFTA and deficit elimination, during the latter decades of the twentieth century, offering a timely and personal account of how the public policies - both domestic and international - pursued then were formative in creating the country we live in today.

1930S America was in the depths of the great worldwide depression. A rich young man, educated in the radical mix of the University of Chicago, joins with a group of young communists who want to abet the struggle for union rights in the emerging labor union movement. They are in the thick of the physcial and economic struggle when Rick shoots several strikebreakers who are beating some unarmed strikers. His group aids him in his escape to South America and then to Berlin. There he becomes involved in the political intrigues that led to World War II. He accompanies a strange little man to Zurich where he meets "The Fat Man," a worldly wise amoral adventurer who has developed a scheme for running guns for Emperor Haile Selaisse of Ethiopia in his struggle againts Mussolini's fascist dreams of a new Rome. On arrival Rick sees quickly the futility of the scheme which rapidly unravels. The group escape from Ethiopia, scatters, and he goes to Spain. There he joins the International Brigades who are fighting General Franco's fascists. Soviet intrigues, espionage, and betrayals cause him to flee to Paris. There he meets a mysterious young woman and falls in love. His happiness is interrupted by the approaching Nazi Wehrmacht.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A collection of homilies by a deacon for deacons--and anyone else who preaches. These homilies, which reflect the author's firm commitment to social justice, are followed by discussion questions.