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 ofMaclean's in the 1960s and his tremendous success on CBC's Morningside in the 1980s and 1990s, and ending with his stint as aGlobe 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.
Industry Reviews
"Fleming's biography of Gzowski is nuanced and remarkably well-assembled. It gathers the disparate strands of the broadcaster's chequered life into a coherent and fascinating view of a clever, complex personality who, despite emotional problems, kept a country intrigued for almost twenty years." -- London Free Press (Canada) Sept 2010 "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 Chr(45) 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." -- Maclean's magazine August 2010 "Having greatly enjoyed my friendship with him for four decades, I still sometimes brood over his contradictions. He was like an absorbing character in fiction whom the author never quite explains. Fleming is a long-time admirer of Gzowski the broadcaster but doesn't let that suppress what he's learned about Gzowski the man. 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." -- National Post (Canada) August 2010
