![]() No worries in our household about bickering domestic staff who think nothing of hopping a plane to Florida at your expense to check out your home in Palm Beach. It’s wonderful not to have to worry about a constant cycle of hosting and attending classy dinner parties with people you may or may not like including bitchy heiresses. As I lay reading on my ten-year-old sofa covered with a sale-priced fleece throw from Hudson’s Bay to protect the polyester upholstery from whatever the dog tracks in, I started to appreciate the simplicity of my own working-class life. ![]() Remember the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for”. As I got into the book, it becomes evident that it is not always easy to be rich. ![]() I’ll warn you now, this is a rather lengthy review because there’s so much to talk about I cannot begin to cover it all. Anyway, Back to Barbara’s Bookįriends and Enemies is educational, self-deprecating, frequently humorous, tragic, and eye-opening. I kept that letter for several years-my fragile connection to a famous person. A couple of weeks later I received a personal letter signed in fountain pen thanking me for them. I knew his strong conservative leanings were the antithesis of what Bob Rae was promoting so I figured he’d like them. I packed a couple up and personally delivered them to Conrad Black’s Hollinger office on Toronto Street with a note that his children could perhaps wear them. ![]() The remaining tee-shirts had to be distributed or disposed of so I started giving them away. Of course, I lost money on the tee-shirt venture because I ordered too many but it was an interesting experience. I had tee-shirts printed with Taxed to the Max and Rae’ving Mad” which I sold for ten dollars each at a cardtable I’d set up on the lawn during the demonstration. In fact, through about seventy-two degrees of separation, I can claim a cobweb-thin connection to Conrad Black.īack in the early nineties when Premier Bob Rae was destroying the Ontario economy with his NDP economic policies and prolonging the recession by several years, I attended a protest at Queen’s Park. I’ve been a keen observer of both Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel and until a few years ago when their politics took an even more dramatic turn to the right, I was an admirer. I remember reading in The Globe and Mail many decades ago about Black’s wedding to his first wife who had been his secretary that’s how long I’ve been around. This means I’ve watched, read about and observed her life and career and that of her husband Conrad Black pretty much from the start. Now eighty years old, Barbara Amiel is seven years older than I am. And who can truly relate to a woman who includes Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter in her list of ‘friends’? ![]() Her extreme right-wing politics and lack of sympathy for feminism compromised my objectivity on what she would have to say. When first I heard about the book, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to read it. Weighing in at a hefty 603 pages in the hardcover and 978 pages on my iPad mini, it requires a lot of time, and many glasses of wine or, in my case, cups of strong tea to get through. You will need to allow plenty of time to read and absorb the contents of Barbara Amiel’s new memoir Friends and Enemies which was released earlier this month. ![]()
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