Golden Phoenix: The Biography of Peter Munk

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

A good biographer strains for a “warts-and-all” perspective on his
or her subject; the bad biographer either succumbs to the subject’s
charm, aura of power, or other attributes or veers in the opposite
direction, toward unbalanced hostility. Richard Rohmer has lost this
battle ignominiously. In his attempt to portray the mercurial Canadian
business promoter Peter Munk as a “golden phoenix,” Rohmer has
instead exposed himself as a golden sycophant.

Munk deserves better. A Hungarian-born Jew whose family fled the menace
of Hitler’s final solution, Munk has seen spectacular failure and
spectacular success as a businessman in his adopted homeland. A bungled
attempt to assemble Clairtone hi-fi stereos and TVs in Nova Scotia and
export them to affluent North American living rooms provided the initial
blemish on his reputation. Quixotic schemes to build posh holiday
colonies in Fiji and in the shadow of Egypt’s pyramids followed. Only
as “Canada’s gold-finger” (as the prestigious Economist dubbed
him) has Munk been able to remake his image. His Barrick Gold
Corporation is one of the largest and most profitable gold producers in
the world. Yet even here he has flirted with disaster, coming within
days of paying top dollar to gain control of Bre–X Gold just before
the magnitude of its venality became known.

Instead of incisive analysis of this boom-and-bust tycoon, Rohmer has
given us consummate apple-polishing. The book appears to be based on
hours of tape recording his subject and then stringing those musings out
into a narrative, liberally dosed with large chunks of unedited
transcript. The perspective is myopic—Munk through Munk’s eyes. No
broader context is provided. Glowing adjectives—everything is
“moving” and “star-studded”—are endlessly applied. “Power
people” abound. A photo of Munk and his wife dining with Prince
Charles is captioned “[t]he Munks have a coterie of rich and powerful
friends.” Metaphors are mixed: geologist John Felderhof adds “fuel
to the fire by holding out the sugared carrot.” Rohmer has given us an
exemplary biography, but it is not the sort of example he intended.