McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

Portrait of an Unlikely Artist- review by Joel Yanofsky of The Gazette for Mordecai Richler : Leaving St.Urbain

                                                                      978-0-7735-3355-4          April 2008

Of his prospective biography, Oscar Wilde said it "lends a new terror to death." There are two reasons authors, especially famous ones, dread the genre. First, literary biographies get too much wrong; second, they get too much right. Both occurrences are inevitable; both go with the territory.

Ken McGoogan of the Globe and Mail Reviews Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain by Reinhold Kramer

                                            978-7735-3355-4           April 2008

As I approached the three-quarter mark of Mordecai Richler: Leaving St.Urbain, I found myself reading more and more slowly, and even occasionally setting the book aside.  Finally, I realized that I didn’t want the biography to end. Mordecai Richler seemed so vividly alive that I wanted to keep hanging out with the irascible old master.