Monday, August 23, 2010

New Books: Fleming on Peter Gzowski

Rae Fleming's biography of journalist and radio hero Peter Gzowski looks like being one of the first out of the big fall books.

First review I've seen is Robert Fulford's in the National Post. Fulford is acerbic about his longtime friend Gzowski but unreserved in his praise for Fleming's book.
I can’t say more for Fleming than that he’s made me think freshly about a subject I believed I knew well. He’s given us an absorbing, provocative book about a man who was even more complicated than most of us imagined.
Fulford is almost the only Canadian book reviewer of any significance still writing in mainstream media (if the Post counts!), but he does play to his audience (see the ranting comments for the sense of who that audience is). He writes that Gzowski
subscribed to the bizarre CBC doctrine that a representative panel of Canadian opinion consisted of a Red Tory, a left-wing Liberal and a member of the NDP.
Actually, whatever Gzowski's politics, the bizarre doctrine he actually subscribed to was the faith that when you found three people who made great radio, you let 'em run. About the same time that the Camp-Kierans-Lewis panel was thriving, Morningside also featured a business panel. None of the three was a critic or analysis of business. all were practitioners and cheerleaders for the business ideology, but they too made lively, sharp, and skillful radio every week. Gzowski and his team recognized radio talent when they saw it and gave them free rein.

Publisher info here. R.B Fleming website here.
 
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