My Kind of People

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This is an engaging series of vignettes about the local characters of eastern Ontario, from the Kingston area sprawling from the Ottawa Valley to Toronto. Murphy has seen it all and very cleverly recounts the various events he has been associated with, such as the Almonte train crash of 1941. There is an assortment of people here: colourful bootleggers, newspapermen, hockey players, and so forth, mainly from the era of the Great Depression. But there are very few women.

My Kind of People is enjoyable, if slight, and adds somewhat to the local history of Ontario through the memoirs technique.