Uncrowned King
The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
Kenneth Whyte
Random House Canada
$35

Anyone who has read the biography of William Randolph Hearst by W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961) will welcome Kenneth Whyte's biography The Uncrowned  King  which reveals much new information about the media baron who dominated the aggressive newspaper market in New York at the end of the 19th century.
Whyte's biography is impeccably researched and gives a much more professional insight into the remarkable rise of Hearst, his battle with Joseph Pulitzer, and the outrageous editorial promotions that launched the derided but phenomenally successful "yellow journalism" in New York.
It is not so surprising that this new biography of Hearst should have been written by a Winnipeg-born Canadian. An ex-editor of Saturday Night (1994), Whyte (now publisher and editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine) was the editor-in-chief of the National Post which exploded onto the Canadian scene in 1998, bravely battled the dominant Globe and Mail, and grew in circulation from 100,000 to 300,000 in less than three years. Whyte only left the paper after a purge of management following Conrad Black's sale of the Post to CanWest.
In a sensational exposé of Hearst's early publishing practices in New York Whyte outlines how, between 1895 and 1899, he battled New York's leading two-cent papers, which had a combined circulation of about 600,000, with his Morning Journal. Whyte is openly critical of former biographies and explains that, far from stealing its staff from rival papers in the first instance, Hearst imported his executives from the San Francisco Examiner, the losing paper deeded to him by his wealthy gold-mining father. Hearst may have spent as much as $5-million before the Journal began to pay.
More conservative editors have described Hearst's paper "as a chamber of horrors, a procuress, a brothel, a criminal, a moral disease, a rattlesnake, and a licentious vulgarian, without example in the history of journalism." Nonetheless there was little doubt that Hearst's rise was fast and destabilizing.
He also found time for romance. The showgirl who would win Hearst's heart was Millicent Willson. At just 16, she was appearing with her sister Anita, 18, in the musical comedy The Girl from Paris at the Herald Square Theatre Ö a risqué show featuring "as much leg as possible without getting arrested." Hearst and the sisters were inseparable. He took them everywhere, but his overwhelming preoccupation was still his newspapers, particularly the coverage of the 1895 Spanish-American war that fired America's imagination like no other and sold papers.
Inevitably, by the end of 1897, the McKinley administration succumbed to the newspaper outcry and to public opinion that U.S. intervention in Cuba was needed. In this episode, Whyte joins three earlier biographers in blaming Hearst for America's eventual entry into war with Spain: "It was the newspapers' war. Above all, it was Hearst's war."
Incredibly Hearst, whose Journal was now selling over a million copies a day, headed to the battlefields of Cuba to cover the popular war, taking with him the two Willson showgirls. In fact, the Journal was so revered by the Cuba Liberating Army that a battle-scarred headquarters flag of the Eastern Department of the Republic was presented to Hearst by the son of General Calixto Garcia, a Commander of the Liberating Army.
By 1898, the war with Spain was over, and Hearst returned to New York where he began to concentrate on expanding his publishing empire and finding a place in the political arena.
He launched a daily newspaper in Chicago and won election to Congress in 1902, the same year he established two new papers in Los Angeles and Boston. In 1903, Hearst married the twenty-one-year-old Millicent Willson and the couple eventually had five sons.
In 1904, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination but never did achieve his ambition to win high office. Instead he continued to expand his publishing base, the quality of which was diluted as its numbers and profits soared. Described as "a ruthless dangerous bully, a man with power and money but without friends or a home or scruples, Hearst's legend grew in scale and perversity, together with his newspaper chain."
Yet bank borrowings and prodigious spending would keep his finances in a perpetually precarious condition throughout his career. "By the late 1920s Hearst owned twenty six papers in eighteen cities, a large and profitable stable of magazines, Ö a burgeoning radio network, a motion-picture studio, vast property holdings, and one of the world's great art collections," Whyte writes.
He also started building the 71,000 square foot hilltop castle above the old Pacific whaling station of San Simeon which would serve as Hearst's home for the remainder of his active years ­ which he spent, not with his wife Millicent, but with eighteen-year­old Marion Davies, a Brooklyn-born chorus girl only a third of Hearst's age.
Sadly, Whyte's excellent biography concentrates only on Hearst's early New York days. One yearns for more, hoping that Whyte will find time to write a second volume examining the rest of Hearst's long life which ended in 1951 when this extraordinary newspaper proprietor died at age 88.  Christopher Ondaatje

Poison
From Steel Town to the Punjab,
The True Story of a Serial Killer
Jon Wells
John Wiley & Sons
$19.95

The crime novel has long had an allure because people are voyeuristically fascinated with the dark side of the human experience. As long as the tale is carried out in the writer's imagination or on the screen it qualifies as entertainment.
That said, Poison, the third book by award-winning crime writer Jon Wells, is not entertainment. Rather it is the intimate detailing of the all-too-true case of used car salesman Sukhwinder Dhillon of Hamilton Ontario who was convicted of a string of murders from the Punjab to Steeltown.
The weapon? Poison.
The story begins with the collapse of Dhillon's wife, Parvesh, in the living room of their Hamilton home. Parvesh died quickly though it was a painful death.
The pathologist was baffled over the cause of death. Yet soon after another mysterious death struck the community. This time the victim was a healthy young man who, it turned out, had named as beneficiary of his life insurance policy his close friend, Sukhwinder Dhillon, who had already collected on the insurance of his dead wife .
After interviewing Dhillon, a veteran insurance claims investigator became suspicious and called in the Hamilton Police, setting off an international investigation and manhunt for a serial murderer.
The pursuit took them to the Punjab where they discovered that Dhillon's poisoning spree had continued, although the name of the poison was yet to be determined. Finally, through exhaustive forensic analysis of saved tissue, it was identified as a form of strychnine that is extremely difficult to detect.
Dhillon's fate was sealed.
Poison chronicles in great detail the rocky and frustrating road to Dhillon's final conviction, which required the dogged determination of a Hamilton homicide detective and his cohorts as they sought to build their case against this cold-blooded predator who had coolly dispatched two wives, his infant twins and a friend.
In thorough-going journalistic fashion, Wells also provides ample and engaging background on the principle characters and events, although his metaphors are occasionally a stretch ó such as his description of the prosecution team's walk up a hill on Frederick street in Kitchener as "the last mountain to climb," prompting one to wonder how this got by his editor. Nevertheless, this riveting piece of crime reporting earned Wells a National Newspaper Award in 2004 as a contemporary journey into a true heart of darkness. Jerry Todd-Jenkins

Corvettes Canada
Convoy Veterans of WWII Tell Their True Stories
Mac Johnston
John Wiley & Sons
$39.95

To the casual observer, World War II was won on land, but the war was actually decided by the Battle of the Atlantic.
It was control of the seas that enabled the Allies to fight on land in Europe, and in the air over the continent.
As such, the Battle of the Atlantic was a dangerous and deadly six-year struggle to deliver supplies of food and war materials from North America to the United Kingdom.
The Allied effort consisted of merchant ships sailing in convoys protected by warships always on the lookout for German U-boats determined to cut this supply chain and strangle the UK into submission.
Canada played a prominent role in this endeavour by producing and sending to sea more than 100 small escort vessels known as corvettes.
Like its sports car descendent, the corvettes of the Second World War were sleek, fast and highly manoeuverable.
In this historical portrait, former Legion Magazine editor Mac Johnston recreates life aboard these ships, through the words of 250 veterans who served on them.This splendid volume is the product of their memories.
Initiated by a letter to Corvette veterans, Johnston's project began in 1990. It chronicles, through interviews and archival photographs, life aboard these vessels as the crews battle daily routine, together with the cold, ice and storms of the North Atlantic ó punctuated regularly by the fierce action of marauding German U-boats.
In addition to the famous Newfie-Derry Run on the North Atlantic, Corvettes also saw duty in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (on the triangle run to New York and Boston), in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in the Mediterranean and in the English Channel.
Most of the Corvettes were named after the towns and cities that supplied the men assigned to these dangerous missions. And it is worth remembering that, overall, the Royal Canadian Navy expanded during the course of the war from 2,000 full-time sailors to 100,000, a ratio of 50 to 1 by population, as compared to the American ratio of 20 to 1 and the British of 8 to 1.
Richly illustrated, this collective memoir of the Atlantic war is a fitting tribute and enduring legacy to the courage and resilience of young Canadian sailors whose efforts were critical to the victory in Europe that came finally in 1945. JTJ