Renowned journalist and author of the international bestseller Wordstruck, Robert MacNeil reflects on a life lived between nations, and why he finally decided to call himself an American. Growing up in Halifax during World War II, it seemed to Robert MacNeil that nothing of significance ever happened in Canada. From his mother’s obsession with all things English (even the marmalade) to his own love for American music like Rhapsody in Blue, Canada seemed too small, too parochial for his ambitions. Moving to Britain in his mid-twenties, MacNeil was suddenly exposed to a country with thousands of years of history, extraordinary theatre and culture. But it was in America that MacNeil finally found his country -- America, a land of contrasts and possibilities. A journalist for NBC and later for PBS on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, MacNeil was a witness to many of the current events that shaped the last century: the erection of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy’s election and assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate and finally September 11, 2001. As the well-respected and trenchant news reporter brought world issues to the American public, he discovered that his Canadian values and upbringing allowed him some valuable detachment and perspective. And when MacNeil returned to Nova Scotia after 40 years, he found his country of birth much changed -- multiculturalism and diversity had caused Canadian culture to blossom in his absence. With charm and warmth, but also with a piercing eye on the century, MacNeil looks at the meanings of patriotism, nationalism and home, and explains why he finally made the decision to become an American citizen. Excerpt from Looking for My Country I grew up in a nation trying to build a distinctive culture in an environment that constantly threatens extinction, physical from the north, and political/cultural from the south. Each fear, in its own way, reinforces the other. The inhospitality of the northern climate induces Canadians to drift southwards and the magnet of American material prosperity and opportunity reinforces that urge. Yet the fear of being swallowed, ingested by the American leviathan, makes Canadians draw back, shrinking from the smothering embrace, to find a source of national pride and identity in overcoming the natural human fear of perishing in frozen wastes. Peter Gzowski, the late, beloved CBC radio host, once ran a contest which produced this inspired response, “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”
Famous for his nearly forty years in broadcast journalism, Robert MacNeil is one of the most respected television journalists in America. Now in Breaking News, a blistering, behind-the-scenes novel about the savagely competitive world of television news, he writes about this world he knows best--a world where integrity is held hostage in the relentless pursuit of the bottom line. Anchorman Grant Munro is at what should be the pinnacle of a brilliant career. Having covered every major story from the Kennedy assassination to the Clinton sex scandals, Munro has won the admiration, respect, and trust of his viewers. About to turn sixty in an industry no longer controlled by top-notch journalists but by profit-hungry conglomerates, Munro suddenly feels his career threatened--especially when Bill Donovan, a handsome reporter with little experience but a high Q rating, vies for his anchor post. Dragged into a media circus where "soft news" and tabloid television are becoming the staples of nightly news broadcasts, Munro negotiates a minefield of scheming, greed, and betrayal to hold onto what he prizes. Acclaimed for his two previous novels, Robert MacNeil is a proven storyteller, now triumphantly on his home turf. Breaking News is not only an intimate look at a fascinating industry, but a profound study of character under pressure.
Is American English in decline? Are regional dialects dying out? Is there a difference between men and women in how they adapt to linguistic variations? These questions, and more, about our language catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran—the authors (with Robert McCrum) of the language classic The Story of English—across the country in search of the answers. Do You Speak American? is the tale of their discoveries, which provocatively show how the standard for American English—if a standard exists—is changing quickly and dramatically. On a journey that takes them from the Northeast, through Appalachia and the Deep South, and west to California, the authors observe everyday verbal interactions and in a host of interviews with native speakers glean the linguistic quirks and traditions characteristic of each area. While examining the histories and controversies surrounding both written and spoken American English, they address anxieties and assumptions that, when explored, are highly emotional, such as the growing influence of Spanish as a threat to American English and the special treatment of African-American vernacular English. And, challenging the purists who think grammatical standards are in serious deterioration and that media saturation of our culture is homogenizing our speech, they surprise us with unpredictable responses. With insight and wit, MacNeil and Cran bring us a compelling book that is at once a celebration and a potent study of our singular language. Each wave of immigration has brought new words to enrich the American language. Do you recognize the origin of 1. blunderbuss, sleigh, stoop, coleslaw, boss, waffle? Or 2. dumb, ouch, shyster, check, kaput, scram, bummer? Or 3. phooey, pastrami, glitch, kibbitz, schnozzle? Or 4. broccoli, espresso, pizza, pasta, macaroni, radio? Or 5. smithereens, lollapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan? Or 6. vamoose, chaps, stampede, mustang, ranch, corral? 1. Dutch 2. German 3. Yiddish 4. Italian 5. Irish 6. Spanish
Burden of Desire centres on the love triangle between bohemian Halifax south-end belle Julia Robertson, Dalhousie professor Stewart MacPherson, and young Anglican minister Peter Wentworth. Julia keeps a diary detailing her sexual fantasies, which she has with her at the moment of the blast that was the Halifax Explosion. She hides her diary in her coat, which is subsequently donated to a clothing drive for the individuals from the north end of the city who've lost everything in the explosion. Peter discovers the diary and becomes fixated on its author, enlisting the help of his friend Stewart to find her. Burden of Desire explores the repression and expression of sexual desire at the time of the First World War. It also offers a compelling fictional account of the impact on Halifax society of the Halifax Explosion.
A collection of the Medal Day remarks of Robert MacNeil, given during his seventeen years as chairman of the board of The MacDowell Colony. Also included is the text of the Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, which he delivered in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of Americans for the Arts, in 2007 during MacDowell's centennial year.
David Lyon, a star of Canada's foreign service, is on the brink of a career breakthrough. The Prime Minister himself has mapped out his future, leading to a post as Minister of External Affairs. It's the chance fo a lifetime, an opportunity to shape the foreign policy he has so long followed as a diplomat. But Lyon's new life may crumble before it even begins. A yacht has been found adrift off the coast of Finland, the woman who chartered it missing and presumed dead. Francesca D'Anielli, the former model who has disappeared, was at the heart of the double life Lyon lived during the early years of his diplomatic career. Once her personal effects are discovered, Lyon knows, their affair will be exposed and he will face scandal, humiliation, personal and professional disaster. The Voyage is a brilliant and beautifully told story of love and its unforeseen consequences, by an award-winning journalist whose fiction is as penetrating as his reporting.
“Nothing could stop it now. They’d tried everything. Round the corner, out of sight, he broke into a run. Stooping under the twisted, steel arches, he scurried along between the snaking rails of the narrow track. He hadn’t expected to survive this long…” The Enemy Within is set around the time of the 1980s miners’ strike, a tumultuous era that continues to fascinate. It tells the story of how Jim, a young manager at a British colliery, and Paul, a miner, confront the threats to the survival of their mine, their community and their industry. Half a mile underground, they’re faced with an impossible deadline before being forced to confront the deadly hazards of fire, flood and roof collapse. The miners’ strike casts them onto opposing sides of a conflict which severs the bonds of family, friendship, and love, turning their pit village into a battlefield. The women’s stories are told, as their parts in their community’s struggle cause them to see themselves in a new light. As the story races to its cliff-hanging climax, only time and events will determine who of them and which of their relationships will survive… The Enemy Within is a true-to-life story of a fight for survival, in which a cast of unforgettable characters battle, above and below ground, to preserve their communities, their way of life and their industry. This positive portrayal of British coal-mining will appeal to anyone with an interest in both the history of the industry and the human impacts of the miners’ strike.
The television commentator decribes growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, his journalism career, his odyssey throughout the United States as he experienced watershed events of the twentieth century, and his decision to become an American citizen.
In 1920 Julia Robertson is a young, beautiful war widow, aware of the radical new ideas bursting into the settled thinking of post-Victorian Canada. That new thinking, about the human unconscious through Freud and Jung, about sexual frankness, about women as well as skepticism about religion, shaped the emerging 20th century world and infused modern painting, music, and literature. Julia struggles with her conscience over the man she most trusts when she is passionately infatuated with another, an Englishman. He leads her into the orbit of the young and charming Prince of Wales. Leaving behind the stuffy world of Halifax, she goes to London and Paris and then the South of France where she renews her close friendship with one of the great Canadian painters of the period, J.W. Morrice. She becomes part of Morrice's circle of artists and admirers, among them Henri Matisse, who was Morrice's close friend. Ultimately Julia has to resolve a dilemma that dramatically tests all her progressive ideas. With this novel Robert MacNeil returns to a character who first appears in his bestselling novel set at the time of the Halifax Explosion, Burden of Desire. "Julia's appetite for life and her bold embrace of the modern world was so vivid to me that I had to follow her life into the postwar world," says MacNeil. The result is a fascinating account of a young woman in the midst of a world in transformation.
This book explores how Washington’s efforts to act on climate change have been translated under conditions of American neoliberalism, where the state struggles to find a stable and legitimate role in the economy, and where environmental and industrial policy are enormously contentious topics. This original work conceptualizes US climate policy first and foremost as a question of innovation policy, with capital accumulation and market domination as its main drivers. It argues that US climate policy must be understood in the context of Washington’s broader efforts over the past four decades to dominate and monopolize novel high-tech markets, and its use of immense amounts of state power to achieve this end. From this perspective, many elements of US climate politics that seem confusing or contradictory actually appear to have an obvious and consistent logic. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of IPE, as well as individuals generally interested in gaining a stronger understanding of US climate politics and policy, and the role and influence of neoliberalism on contemporary economic governance.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. "To all concerned, this book is meant to send a ghostly signal across the dark universe of ill-health that says 'you are not alone.'" - Robert McCrum On July 29, 1995, Robert McCrum, 42, married only ten weeks, suffered a paralyzing stroke. Overnight, his life shifted irrevocably. But this admired novelist and former editorial director of the London publishing house Faber and Faber decided to chronicle what became a remarkable journey "into that mysterious, unexplored territory, the neighbourly world of the unwell," as well as a deeply moving love story.
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