Book description
Born in 1934, Peter Gzowski covered most of the last half of the
century as a journalist and interviewer. This biography, the most
comprehensive and definitive yet published, is also a portrait of
Canada during those decades, beginning with Gzowski's days at the
University of Toronto's The Varsity in the mid 1950s, through
his years as the youngest-ever managing editor of Maclean's
in the 1960s and his tremendous success on CBC's Morningside
in the 1980s and 1990s, and ending with his stint as a Globe and
Mail columnist at the dawn of the 21st century and his death in
January 2002.
Gzowski saw eight Canadian Prime Ministers in office, most of whom
he interviewed, and witnessed everything from the Quiet Revolution in
Qubec to the growth of economic nationalism in Canada's West. From the
rise of state medicine to the decline of the patriarchy, Peter was
there to comment, to resist, and to participate. Here was a man who
was proud to call himself Canadian and who made millions of other
Canadians realize that Canada was, in what he claimed was a Canadian
expression, not a bad place to live.
Complicated is too anodyne a word to describe the Peter Gzowski who
emerges from Fleming's pages. But on radio he was magic. The medium
freed him from all the dark corners of his private self -- and made him
free as the birds he imagined the Galt skaters of his boyhood to have
been -- and through it he connected with the emotions and imaginations
of Canadians to an extend few others have.
Rae Fleming's previous
biographical investigations include a biography of Sir William
Mackenzie, an edited collection of essays on biography, and a recent
commissioned biography, not yet published. He has also written several
articles, most of them biographical in one way or another, for The
Beaver magazine. Rae lives in Argyle, Ontario.
