Pardon me for blowing my own horn, but I was asked to write a column in the Saturday Business section of the Toronto Star, the largest circulation newspaper in Canada. The criteria set out was to describe people I had interviewed during my journalism career and talk about lessons I learned from those sessions. So far I’ve done five columns: Martha Billes of Canadian Tire, Conrad Black who needs no introduction, former Royal Bank president Earle McLaughlin, real estate developer Don Matthews, and grocer Galen Weston. Weston was the most recent, appearing last Saturday. The column runs biweekly so look...
Why do we read? To escape. To learn. To swim in someone’s wonderful words. To pass the time on the bus. To lull a child to sleep. But what books do we choose? Here are brief descriptions of my top ten selections for your own reading pleasure. “Surfacing” by Margaret Atwood is her best novel. For me, all others since 1973 are unreadable. A nameless narrator as alienated loser is an unusual device, to say the least, but I appreciate her anti-American stance. Only the ending confuses by offering so many possibilities. Does she stop being a victim? Pregnant, does...
A line popped out at me in an opinion piece I was reading yesterday: there are 4,350 journalists working in Ontario. In a province of 14 million, that number is so minuscule I can’t even determine what it is as a percentage of the total population. There must be more people cleaning windows right now than there are researching and writing newspaper articles. My writing career began in 1960 with the simple act of putting up my hand. As a member of the Athletic Council at John F. Ross Collegiate in Guelph, Ont., I was attending a regular meeting led...
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