Reviews

Peter C. Newman's Politics as Soap Opera

Published in The Tyee on January 5, 2012: Peter C. Newman's Politics as Soap Opera. Excerpt, and then Newman's response:

Something is wrong with a country's political discourse when that discourse is dominated by a man who can't write. 

That man, of course, is Peter C. Newman, who has been bloviating about Canadian business and politics for over half a century. I recall Renegade in Power, published in 1963, as an entertaining takedown of John Diefenbaker. But I was young and impressionable then. 

That was not long after Theodore White published The Making of the President 1960, which created a new genre of political coverage. It would soon be followed by Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. All featured authorial ego and self-consciously clever writing. 

The rest of us have moved on from New Journalism, probably because the only ones good at it were Wolfe and Mailer. But Newman has stuck to it, and prospered mightily. He has, after all published a string of books since 1959. They have done very well. He also edited Maclean's from 1971 to 1982, imposing his own metaphor-rich style on it. 

For years I have avoided Newman's books on style grounds alone, though the reviews and interviews were harder to ignore. With his latest book, the media buzz was intense: Newman was proclaiming the death of the Liberal Party, so it must be true. 

Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, this obituary too is exaggerated. But exaggeration -- hyperbolic over-exaggeration, generously garnished with clichés -- is at the core of Newman's style.

And here is Newman's response, pulished in The Tyee today.

The Redemption of Norman Bethune

From The Tyee, September 27, 2011, a review of Phoenix: The Life of Norman Bethune, an excellent biography. Excerpt:

Thanks to his months in 1930s wartime China, Norman Bethune is probably the most famous Canadian in the world. He was also a jerk: a drunk, a womanizer, a bigot, an egotist, with a vicious temper and sloppy surgical skills. 

Yet he deserves our attention and respect. Bethune was appallingly self-destructive, but at last found the will to reconstruct himself -- to become the phoenix rising from his own ashes. 

Roderick Stewart's new book rises from the ashes of his earlier biographies of Bethune. Historians know that the past is always changing: new archives are opened, octogenarians finally give interviews, new science requires new interpretations of people and events. Even so, this latest book, co-written with his wife Sharon Stewart, is likely to remain the definitive study for some time.

The Fog of War

Published today in The Tyee – 'The Fog of War'. Excerpt:

Think about Canada in the Second World War, and you likely think about overseas battles and campaigns: Hong Kong, Dieppe and the liberation of the Netherlands. Think about Canada at home during that war, and you likely won't think about much: Conscription, the deportation of Japanese Canadians from B.C., convoys from Halifax. 

That's because the propagandists in both wars emphasized heroic combat (with the messy bits airbrushed out), and the censors made sure that Canadians at home heard as little as possible that might be of value to the enemy. But they also made sure we wouldn't hear anything that would discourage young men and women from enlisting. 

As a result, news of many important events was suppressed. After the war, those events seemed too stale to make public, or to remember. So one of the surprises of this excellent book is that, between 1939 and 1945, Canada was fighting a deadly and complex struggle here at home. 

Another surprise is that censorship in the Second World War was also a complex struggle: The censors (themselves professional journalists) had to deal with a military that wanted to censor everything, politicians trying to stay in office and news media that wanted to cooperate but often considered censorship absurd and pointless.