“Radford has crafted a beautiful and touching look at the early history of the city, the province and the region, illuminating the origins of political battles that still rage to this day while bringing a human touch to the story through his grandparents.” 
— Justin Bell, Edmonton Journal (full review)

“Tom Radford is a trailblazer in Western Canada.”
— Order of Canada citation

“Tom Radford has a story to tell and he rolls it out panoramically across the breadth of landscape and history that is that other Alberta – parkland and boreal and riverine – its communities, politics and visions that have uniquely shaped it. Radford is a passionate surveyor of it all. Peggy & Balmer is seamlessly structured to weave in and out of Radford’s narrative of a remarkable if rocky marriage and its setting of Social Gospel and prairie populism, oil and gas booms and busts and oozing bitumen, striking Galician workers and strike-breakers, wars and offstage revolutions; weaving in and out of Tom’s 1950s childhood in Edmonton when he absorbed his grandparents’ legacy along the great trench of the North Saskatchewan River and in the books, maps and scrapbooks of their library; and finally in and out of his own work and values sprung from a profound sense of rootedness in place.”
— Myrna Kostash, Kobzar award-winning author of Ghosts in a Photograph