Moguls of Winnipeg

The first of these two books, Peter C. Newman’s Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada’s Media Mogul, is very confusing, to say the least, which may explain why one of Izzy Asper’s three children (David) would have nothing to do with it. It illustrates the pitfalls involved in writing biographies of people you know, even for such an eminent portraitist as Newman. Sooner or later the first person of the acquaintance starts to intrude on the authorial third person of the biographer. Autobiography becomes all tangled up with biography, fiction with history.

This is tricky ground even for a reviewer of a book such as Izzy, which is also a kind of obituary for the man who was the last of the barons of Canadian print journalism, men who loved newspapers, who used and misused them, and who were both worshipped and despised by the journalists they employed. Yes, even a careful reviewer may inadvertently start to insert himself...