Hurly-Burly: A Time at the Globe

Janet Money is Sports Editor of the Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review.

Hurly-Burly is former editor-in-chief Doyle’s account of his time at
Canada’s national newspaper. But it begins with an unfortunately
lengthy and dull history of the paper. Once Doyle enters the scene, in
1951, the book picks up, but it remains faintly disappointing.

There is a dull “objectivity” to Doyle’s accounts of events in
the history of Canada and the newspaper, perhaps not surprising in a
journalist’s book, but unfortunate in a memoir. There is no sense of
an editorial philosophy that was uniquely Doyle’s other than a concern
for what he calls “gaps in the social grid,” and he expresses little
emotion other than bland admiration for most of his colleagues.
Doyle’s description of the funeral of early publisher George McCullagh
leaves us bewildered by the massive outpouring of grief, having been
shown no reason why the man would be so loved; likewise there seems no
context for much of what we read about personalities at the Globe from
the 1950s into the 1980s. Though vaguely chronological, the book’s
organization is haphazard; in the space of a few pages Doyle moves from
meeting the British High Commissioner to request an interview with
Margaret Thatcher (denied) to five paragraphs on film reviewer Jay Scott
to an early look at Brian Mulroney.

Dauntingly long, with an inadequate name index and too few photographs,
this book, ironically, could have benefited greatly from much more
stringent editing.