Humanity’s future: will it be “earthbound” or “spacebound”? My uncle, the artist Gerald Gladstone, posed this question to me recently outside Yorkdale shopping centre in North York. We were standing in the parking lot near The Bay, beside one of his major works, a bronze colossus called Universal Man, which was installed there in late…
Tag: canada
Crossing the Yellow Line into Murder-Mystery Territory
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Toronto lawyer and writer Robert Rotenberg has produced a credible “police procedural” murder mystery called Old City Hall that is set in Toronto and features the famous building of the title — now home to an array of criminal courtrooms — as an iconic centrepiece of the story. Rotenberg’s debut novel focuses on Kevin Brace,…
My Life in the Mossad
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Nearly 30 years ago Michael Ross, a Canadian from Victoria, went on a backtracking tour to Europe and decided to spend the winter on an Israeli kibbutz, a decision that changed his life. In Israel, he fell in love with both the land and a local woman. He got married, converted to Judaism, became a…
Travel: Winter interlude in Montreal
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Snow was gently falling as I boarded the train at Toronto’s Union Station for VIA Rail’s recently-introduced overnight sleeper car service to Montreal. Before long I was sipping a drink and engaged in conversation with a fellow passenger in the glass-roofed dome car. “What is it about Toronto? They’re such amateurs when it comes to…
Obit: nursing sister Dorothy Ann Macham (1910-2002)
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Dorothy Macham, a former army nurse who received an Associate Royal Red Cross medal from King George VI and headed Women’s College Hospital for three decades, died in Toronto in July, one week shy of her 92nd birthday. Ms. Macham had several years of operating room experience when she joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps…
Jack Klajman’s Out of the Ghetto
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Jack Klajman, a 69-year-old furrier in London, Ont., has written Out of the Ghetto, a book that describes how he survived the Holocaust. The book was published recently by Vallentine Mitchell, a British publishing house, and should soon be available at bookstores in Canada. Out of the Ghetto details Klajman’s experiences as a child in…
Obit: Eddie Goodman, lawyer, political power broker (1918-2006)
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Eddie (Edwin) Goodman, a prominent lawyer, decorated war veteran, philanthropist and political power broker, died in Toronto from Alzheimer’s and heart disease on August 23, 2006. He was 87 years old. Head of a large law firm employing nearly 200 lawyers, Goodman was a lifelong Conservative who befriended Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and was a…
Obit: folksinger Wade Hemsworth (1916-2002)
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Wade Hemsworth, who was a career draftsman for the Canadian National Railway, once explained, “I build bridges with a slide rule and paper and pencil.” But after office hours, he crafted brilliant folk songs about life in the Canadian north that will likely prove as durable as any bridge he ever designed. Celebrated for the…
Travel: Edison Museum & the sleepy hamlet of Vienna
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Six kilometers above the northeastern shore of Lake Erie, the sleepy hamlet of Vienna, Ont. boasts a strong but little-known connection with the family of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the legendary American inventor, who might have been born on Canadian soil but for a quirk of history and fate. Four generations of Edisons lived in…
Canada’s influence in decline, writer asserts
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In his recent book While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, Ottawa writer Andrew Cohen examines what he calls “our three D’s” (defense, diplomacy, development), presents irrefutable evidence of our declining influence and reputation in these spheres, and suggests that it’s time for us to regain some of this lost ground.…
