Newfoundland- General

Rex Murphy- Points of View With TV commentator and journalist Rex Murphy, it's easy to put a twist on the old parable: when he is good he is very very good, and when he's angry, he's awesome. Uncommonly dignified, relentlessly honest, unencumbered by de rigueur political correctness, and solidly grounded by his Newfoundland roots, Murphy is that rarest of TV types. He's an everyman who happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, and a personality treasured for his brain, not his looks. This collection of monologues and op/ed pieces originally written for broadcast on CBC's The National and the Globe and Mail among others gives us Murphy full-stop, weighing in on everything from Canadian icons (Glenn Gould, Wayne Gretzky) and celebrities and their culture (Spice Girls, rappers) to politics, immigration, cell phones, the state of the union, and anything else that's made headlines during his tenure as the country's foremost barometer of current events. That Murphy is singularly wise is a given; even those who disagree with his viewpoints would grant him his due as an intellect. A cranky intellect, maybe, but an intellect just the same. It's Murphy's almost reluctant cynicism--delivered in language as sharp as shattered glass and aimed squarely at those in ivory towers--that makes Points of View a must-read. Take his frosty summation of Liberal MP Tom Wappel, who infamously told a legally blind, 80-year-old veteran and constituent to buzz off. "There are worse ways to get publicity than Tom Wappel. You could nail a five-day-old kitten to the floor and use it as a doorstop. You could take a chainsaw to the last redwood that was also the home of the last eagle and have it fall on the last panda." Or his take on music of the esteemed Dylan era: "The hootenanny was a horror of my youth, an ersatz festival of acoustic guitars wedded to mush so ripe it invited seizure." Or best, his indictment of Ottawa over the deportation case of Nancy Latetia Cables, a live-in nanny whose error was "exceeding the work quota for a live-in nanny": "Well naturally, Canadian Immigration is not going to stand by idly while people come to this country and work harder than expected… who set an example by not bleeding the welfare services or mocking the courts or arriving by the hundreds as camouflage refugees." It's one thing to give voice to the dispossessed but it's quite another to kick ass and name names. Murphy does both in rants so eloquent and with arguments so considered that the pages practically hum. His millions of fans will hear Rex's voice in every line of this wide-ranging selection Rex Murphy left his outpost home in Newfoundland to go to university at the age of 15. Since that time (including a spell at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar) he has been writing and talking. His skills in that area have made him Canada’s most-watched TV commentator – with an opinion spot on CBC-TV’s “The National” – while his speeches have earned standing ovations from coast to coast. And, always, his audience wants to know “When will you put this in a book?” The answer is “NOW.” Here, Rex has selected the best from thirty years of writing and speech-making – a variety that reveals the range of his mind. Here you’ll find tributes to people as apparently unlinked as Joey Smallwood and William Shakespeare; book reviews that turn into instructive essays about other places in other centuries; hard-hitting attacks on politicians and other malefactors that will have you cheering as you read; hilarious satires on human folly; and gentle memories of Newfoundland and its people. You will close this book with a sense of a wide-ranging intelligence and fascinating mind at work. Quantity :  CAD $ 24.99  Click here to ask a question about this item