Books in Brief: Looking for Trouble

Looking for Trouble: A Journalist’s Life and Then Some, by Peter Worthington (Key Porter Books, 469 pp., $24.95)

Peter Worthington describes his kind of foreign correspondents as “the firemen” of the trade, the guys who rush to the scene when bullets start flying. Not for him and his like the finer nuances of international diplomacy. He’s in Suez days after the British-French-Israeli invasion, the first Canadian reporter in Damascus after young King Faisal is assassinated, knows where and how Patrice Lumumba was tortured to death. He has met them all from Dr. Tom Dooley (whom he disliked) to Dr. Albert Schweitzer (whom he liked, but who never would have passed Hygiene II. The hospital in Lambarene was a disaster, but how that old man could play the piano!). Worthington was born to create waves (his father’s early history deserves a book of its own) and make them he did, first as the Toronto Telegram’s man on the international beat, then as a co-founder of the Toronto Sun (from which he has just been fired), as an editor who ran afoul of Pierre Trudeau for his revelations of the extensive Soviet espionage organization in Canada (he was indicted under the Official Secrets Act), and finally as an independent-minded, ultimately successful Tory parliamentary candidate. In this fascinating, graphic, iconoclastic recounting of news events, Worthington gives us a refresher course in late-twentieth-century history, an insider’s look at Canadian politics, and the best read in ages. He has little patience with pretensions, particularly among his journalistic colleagues. In 1980, he tells us, “The American people, brainwashed by the media, were reluctant to admit they were voting for him, even though on TV Reagan seemed mild, unfailingly courteous, and not nearly as wild-eyed and erratic as Jimmy Carter, who, like Britain’s erstwhile Labour leader Michael Foot, had the appearance of The Man Who Had Just Seen the Most Awful Thing in the World. On election day 44 out of fifty states went for Reagan, much to the media’s consternation.” Four years later little had changed except the number of states Reagan would win. Looking for Trouble is jam-packed with witty asides and political insights by that rara avis, a right-wing journalist.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Looking for Trouble: A Journalist’s Life and Then Some, by Peter Worthington (Key Porter Books, 469 pp., $24.95)

Peter Worthington describes his kind of foreign correspondents as “the firemen” of the trade, the guys who rush to the scene when bullets start flying. Not for him and his like the finer nuances of international diplomacy. He’s in Suez days after the British-French-Israeli invasion, the first Canadian reporter in Damascus after young King Faisal is assassinated, knows where and how Patrice Lumumba was tortured to death. He has met them all from Dr. Tom Dooley (whom he disliked) to Dr. Albert Schweitzer (whom he liked, but who never would have passed Hygiene II. The hospital in Lambarene was a disaster, but how that old man could play the piano!). Worthington was born to create waves (his father’s early history deserves a book of its own) and make them he did, first as the Toronto Telegram’s man on the international beat, then as a co-founder of the Toronto Sun (from which he has just been fired), as an editor who ran afoul of Pierre Trudeau for his revelations of the extensive Soviet espionage organization in Canada (he was indicted under the Official Secrets Act), and finally as an independent-minded, ultimately successful Tory parliamentary candidate. In this fascinating, graphic, iconoclastic recounting of news events, Worthington gives us a refresher course in late-twentieth-century history, an insider’s look at Canadian politics, and the best read in ages. He has little patience with pretensions, particularly among his journalistic colleagues. In 1980, he tells us, “The American people, brainwashed by the media, were reluctant to admit they were voting for him, even though on TV Reagan seemed mild, unfailingly courteous, and not nearly as wild-eyed and erratic as Jimmy Carter, who, like Britain’s erstwhile Labour leader Michael Foot, had the appearance of The Man Who Had Just Seen the Most Awful Thing in the World. On election day 44 out of fifty states went for Reagan, much to the media’s consternation.” Four years later little had changed except the number of states Reagan would win. Looking for Trouble is jam-packed with witty asides and political insights by that rara avis, a right-wing journalist.