The Headliners: Behind the Scenes Memoirs

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

A Canadian journalist with half a century of experience in observing and recording the doings of the great, the near-great, and the merely sensational reviews a long list of the fascinating characters whose goings-on are a reporter’s meat and drink. Here are politicians galore, both the ins and the outs (the section on John Turner, written during his brief term of office as Prime Minister, seems oddly dated); sports figures; writers; entertainers; a few bandits and spies; and passing mentions of royalty, quintuplets, and other assorted fauna. The style is, as might be expected, journalistic and businesslike, with no flourishes or wasted words. Brief vignettes, all of them, yet each adds its own tiny accent of colour to the recorded life of a Headliner. Includes several pages of photographs.