Spectator

Posts with category ‘Books’


Peter Munk interview at Indigo goes awry due to rowdy audience member

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Balzac’s neatly turned observation that “behind every great fortune there is a crime” has developed into a veritable shibboleth of the activist left. One thing is sure: if you make or inherit a great fortune, it’s a lock you’ll be accused of a great crime. Gates is a monopolist, Murdoch a closet fascist, Thomson a virtual polygamist, and don’t even get me started on all those Russians. Tuesday night in Toronto I saw this phenomenon in action. Peter Munk, whose Barrick Gold Corporation has developed into one of the great Canadian money-spinners of recent times, was interviewed on the stage at Indigo Books. His interlocutor was his daughter, Vanity Fair contributor Nina Munk. The subject of the chat was supposed to be a new book by Munk the Younger and Rachel Gotlieb that is titled The Art of Clairtone and celebrates the design innovations of Peter Munk’s long-defunct stereo company. The evening went more or less as planned, with Nina asking Peter straightforward journalistic questions concerning the content of her book. And then, in a moment, things went haywire.

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“Legal problems” may delay Conrad Black’s memoir of his legal problems

There are rumours floating around concerning delays in the publishing date for Conrad Black’s much-ballyhooed trial memoir The Fight of My Life. Until as recently as last week, his Lordship’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart president Douglas Pepper, was saying the doorstopper would be out this October. However, a source close to Black reports that “legal problems” could push it out a year to fall 2009. Black’s busy litigation schedule may have something to do with it.

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White men cheer for Mark Steyn at Bay and Bloor

You can’t swing a cat in this town without hitting Heather Reisman interviewing some author. Such events usually go down at Indigo Books (where lately it seems she’s the CEO, picks the books, arranges the floor displays, sweeps the floor, changes the light bulbs and sews the employee smocks), and last night, at the Bay and Bloor location, the author in question was the ubiquitous Mark Steyn. He was there to plug his much discussed book America Alone, and held forth in front of a jam-packed audience of mostly white men on his general discomfort with and disdain for the Muslim world and multiculturalism. He espoused what he called a “natalist” policy for Canada—i.e. Canadians should produce more babies, thereby vitiating the need for immigration—and something about “telescoping” our educable years, presumably so as to free up time for more babymaking.

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Peter C. Newman weighs in on “Robber Baron” and Conrad’s prison publishing

Peter Newman, my colleague and Black scribe extraordinaire, dropped me a line this morning. Always a joy, especially since parts of the message are well worth sharing:

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NYC newspaper war now playing out in the Post, Observer and Vanity Fair

Over at the Department of Double Standards we find Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff writing one of those self-fulfilling-prophecy pieces about how dim-witted the Sulzbergers are. The item is in the May issue and muses on how the family will inevitably sell The New York Times to Warren Buffett or the Washington Post Company or Michael Bloomberg or the highest bidder. And that whoever gets it will deserve it more than the Sulzbergers because whoever it is isn’t—how to put it?—as stupid as the Sulzbergers.

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Defining Darfur: Is it genocide?

Writing in yesterday’s Globe, the always engaging Jennifer Wells discussed the other politically charged movement of the moment that may disrupt Beijing ’08: Darfur. Wells interviewed Ellen Freudenheim, a consultant for a non-profit called Dream for Darfur that is dedicated to holding corporations sponsoring the Olympics accountable in light of China’s decidedly sinister involvement in Sudan.

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Character assassin–cum–biographer Tom Bower weighs in on Black

Among the more grinding ironies that his Lordship had to endure on that inauspicious yesterday was the appearance at 2:19 p.m. EST of a piece on the Web site of his former flagship, The Daily Telegraph. In it, and without the riposte, Black’s most ferocious tormentor, the character assassin–cum–biographer Tom Bower, puts the boot in without fear of contradiction:

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