In 1964-65, an international team of thirty-eight scientists and assistants, led by Montreal physician Stanley Skoryna, sailed to the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to conduct an unprecedented survey of its biosphere. Born of Cold War concerns about pollution, overpopulation, and conflict, and initially conceived as the first of two trips, the project was designed to document the island's status before a proposed airport would link the one thousand people living in humanity's remotest community to the rest of the world - its germs, genes, culture, and economy. Based on archival papers, diaries, photographs, and interviews with nearly twenty members of the original team, Stanley's Dream sets the expedition in its global context within the early days of ecological research and the understudied International Biological Program. Jacalyn Duffin traces the origins, the voyage, the often-complicated life within the constructed camp, the scientific preoccupations, the role of women, the resultant reports, films, and publications, and the previously unrecognized accomplishments of the project, including a goodwill tour of South America, the delivery of vaccines, and the discovery of a wonder drug. For Rapa Nui, the expedition coincided with its rebellion against the colonizing Chilean military, resulting in its first democratic election. For Canada, it reflected national optimism as the country prepared for its centennial and adopted its own flag. Ending with Duffin's own journey to the island to uncover the legacy of the study and the impact of the airport, and to elicit local memories, Stanley's Dream is an entertaining and poignant account of a long-forgotten but important Canadian-led international expedition. “To the primary objective of Stanley’s Dream, [intended] as “a stand-in for Skoryna’s never-written final report”… the book succeeds exquisitely. It is wonderfully researched, overflowing with resonant details, and beautifully illustrated. While these qualities combine to form a definitive and richly humanizing reference for scholars in diverse fields with interests bearing on the expedition, its aftermath, and related questions – the perfect tribute, surely, for an unlikely and many-sided undertaking of pivotal consequence to the lives of its participants and beyond.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History "Duffin describes Stanley's Dream as the biography of an expedition and its offspring, but it is more than that. Her research has brought recognition to metei and closure to the people of Rapa Nui and her book serves as a foundation for future scholarship. As a historian of science and now a medical student, I could not put it down!" Canadian Historical Review "An intriguing detailed compendium, retrospective analysis, and overall fascinating story of one of Canada's major standalone contributions to international science." The Ormsby Review "In her ambitious non-fiction exploration of the 1964–65 Canadian-led expedition to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, Jacalyn Duffin makes it clear there will be no detail left unexplored, no missing bibliographic data, and certainly nothing resembling a composite. The result is a capacious book in which an old story is ushered back into the light ... Duffin achieves a fascinating bait and switch in the latter third of Stanley's Dream. A hero emerges." Literary Review of Canada "Lively and very personal, Stanley's Dream is not just a thorough investigation into the making of colonial science but a highly original one. At times, it almost reads like a thriller as Duffin skilfully unfolds the mysteries behind the mission to Easter Island. This book is both excellent and essential." Laurence Monnais, Université de Montreal The story of a passionate attempt to capture the entire biosphere of an isolated community facing ecological transformation. The Carleton Library Series is an enduring and significant initiative to publish and reissue documents and texts important to the history of the place we now call Canada. Begun in the 1950s at Carleton University, the series was intended to be a non-fiction counterpart to the New Canadian Library. In the new millennium the motivations for, and thus the mandate of, the series have shifted. While the CLS remains committed to humanities and social science research on the long histories of the territory called Canada, it now takes as its primary purpose the reimaging of how Canada understands itself. The series does not seek to define what Canada should be but rather invites scholars working on questions about the country's history, present, and future to reassess persistent mythologies and to imagine just shared futures. The CLS publishes books that engage in the transformative diversification of knowledge; that examine local and regional knowledges and experiences; that explore the relation of Canada to the world within and across borders; and that draw on a range of disciplines, theoretical traditions, methodologies, and episte