We Like Opinions, We Really Do

By David Hayes, The Globe and Mail Book Review; November 14, 2009 You Can’t Say That in Canada By Margaret Wente HarperCollins, 211 pages Canada and Other Matters of Opinion By Rex Murphy Doubleday Canada, 329 pages I like opinion columnists. I really do. I admire writers like Margaret Wente and Rex Murphy – whose columns appear […]

Never a Wayward Word

To read A.J. Liebling today, 35 years on, is to weep for the absence of such a wickedly skilled scourge. We so need him By David Hayes, The Toronto Star; April 26, 2009 The Sweet Science and Other Writings by A. J. Liebling (edited by Pete Hamill) The Library of America, 2009 1,057 pages, Of the […]

Gay Talese Undone

By David Hayes, The Globe and Mail Book Review, May 6, 2006 A Writer’s Life By Gay Talese (Knopf, 2006, 430 pages) Gay Talese is arguably the greatest non-fiction writer alive, and on the evidence found in his new memoir, A Writer’s Life, also one of the most tortured. Once a newspaper reporter, he chafed […]

Different Strokes for Different Folks

By David Hayes, The Globe and Mail Book Review, January 7, 2006 The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting By Darren Wershler-Henry (McClelland & Stewart, 331 pages) In my living room, under a kidney-shaped, glass-topped coffee table, sits a Remington No. 2 portable typewriter, given as a Christmas gift to my mother in 1928. […]

Bush Bashers New and Recycled

By David Hayes, The Globe and Mail Book Review; October 30, 2004 Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants:The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror by James Wolcott (Miramax, 2004, 313 pages) Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk by Maureen Dowd (Putnam 2004, 523 pages) The U.S. economy has been lacklustre for the […]