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During the 1965-66 television season, when our CBC-TV series This Hour Has Seven Days was at its peak, I went over to the Park Plaza Hotel on Bloor Street, in Toronto, to try to persuade the prime minister to come to the studio for one of our famous Hot Seat encounters, where we had established a tradition of really tough, two-interviewer, hard-edged challenges to establishment figures (and discovered to our surprise that a few of them seemed to relish the experience and indicated their willingness to do more).

• Lester B. Pearson, by Andrew Cohen, Penguin Canada, 206 pages, $26

But Lester Pearson turned me down. When press secretary Jim Coutts brought me into the hotel suite, he just said, "In the next room; he's expecting you." What I wasn't expecting was to find the country's political leader stretched out on his back on a sofa with his shoes off and a folded newspaper on his stomach. He stayed right there, stuck out a hand, chatted affably for a few minutes, acknowledged that our Hot Seat interviews were certainly getting talked about in the capital, and then said with an amiable little grin, "However, I don't think it's just the thing for me, Patrick. But thanks for coming in."

And that was it. And I'm still sorry. And reading Andrew Cohen's new biography makes me all the sorrier, so rich a portrait is it of a man whom I had always admired, but about whom, I have just discovered, I didn't know the half. Or even the 10 per cent.

Cohen's life of Pearson is one of the new entries in Penguin Books' Extraordinary Canadians, a series of biographies under the general editorship of John Ralston Saul, who claims in his introduction that these are all people who have changed us. And if the other subjects come within a country mile of the Mike (as he was known) Pearson, whose life Cohen compellingly recounts, I expect the claim will stand up, and that a not-insignificant part of the change will come with the reading.

“ He had at least one significant extramarital amatory adventure ”

For here is a Mike Pearson whom, I suspect, few knew much about. Not only was he the prime minister who gave us the Canadian flag and the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare and a bilingual public service (those I knew about, of course ... well, uh ...), he was also a versatile athlete, a military pilot and ambassador to Washington. He was twice nominated to be secretary-general of the United Nations, where he had already been president of the of General Assembly, was one of the inventors of NATO and for two years chairman of its council, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for having devised the international peacekeeping force that resolved the explosive Suez crisis, which, until then, had baffled and defeated the leaders of the world's major powers.

As prime minister, when he was invited to Washington by then-president Lyndon Johnson, he publicly criticized the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was given unremitting hell for that by Johnson when they later convened at the president's recreational home at Camp David.

Well, I sort of knew some of this stuff, but having it swim before you all at once in a fluid stream of concise and sparely written biography makes it feel as fresh as though you were meeting the man for the first time.

Among the other things about Lester Pearson that I did not know: This versatile man had worked as a sausage-stuffer for Armour and Company in Hamilton, Ont., had carried bedpans in a front-line military hospital in the Balkans, articled in law but gave it up, was excellent at rugger and lacrosse, and pretty good at hockey, baseball and basketball, in which latter sports he was also admired as a coach

He had at least one significant extramarital amatory adventure. He was awarded the OBE. He chaired the United Nations' four-country working group that "drafted the terms that produced the State of Israel." He did freelance broadcasts for the BBC during the First World War. He became a friend of the poet Robert Graves. He even worked for the CBC.

And if all of this sounds a bit jumbled here in a short review, it does not seem so in Cohen's recounting of it, in just under 200 pages. Cohen, follows his award-winning editorial style - he was a Globe and Mail stalwart for many years, and is also, most recently, author of The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are - of lucid and straightforward journalistic narrative, largely chronological (though with a few enticing leaps forward here and remembered past events there) in a way that keeps you reading, confident that there will be another good story on the next page.

This project is planned to comprise 18 books, and if this one is exemplary of the rest, it is to be hoped that there will eventually be more than that. Cleanly and simply manufactured, each with an original painted portrait on the dust jacket (this one by Joseph Salina), the series looks like a commercially well-planned venture that will also have a long life in classrooms and libraries across the country. Among the projected subjects: Lord Beaverbrook, Marshall McLuhan, Nellie McClung, Glenn Gould and Emily Carr. A documentary film is also being made along with each book.

My one complaint is that a book like this, which is bound to become a reference work, needs an index; its five-page time-line helps, but not having a detailed index is an annoyance.

Patrick Watson's most recent books are Wittgenstein and the Goshawk: A Fable for Adults and This Hour Has Seven Decades.