Lord Beaverbrook
David Adams Richards
As part of a series of brief biographies of “Extraordinary Canadians,” novelist David Adams Richards tells the story of fellow Miramichi (then Newcastle) native Max Aitken, a kid from the “backward province” of New Brunswick who became the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and, during the Second World War, an important British cabinet minister. Richards feels an obvious kinship, identifying with Aitken’s status as the “consummate outsider” and his lifelong struggle against spineless, condescending toffs. But while providing some local insight, filtered through Richards’s tirelessly paraded moral and political biases, the book includes no original research and in the end only offers a quick character sketch of its subject.
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