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 […]

Notes on a Scandal

Jan Wong’s explosive “pure laine” charge in her Dawson College pieces ignited a firestorm. But the Globe and Mail’s crime was to run for cover and let its star reporter take the fall. Here’s how it happened By David Hayes, Toronto Life, May 2007 ON AN OTHERWISE uneventful Wednesday last September, Kimveer Gill, dressed in […]

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 […]