Margins
Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog book cover
Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog
1998
First Published
3.26
Average Rating
155
Number of Pages
Where are we, three years into Ontario’s Common Sense Revolution? Hospitals and schools are closing by the hundreds; thousands of nurses and teachers and other workers are jobless; schools are in chaos; pregnant welfare mothers have lost their nutrition allowance because the Premier thinks they’ll spend it on beer; Toronto the megacity is collapsing under the weight of its own amalgamated administration; the Premier’s last cultural experience was Mr. Silly; the rich are getting larger tax cuts while the province won’t spring to bury the homeless; welfare recipients deserve to be fingerprinted, but motorists running red lights shouldn’t have their pictures taken because it would violate their privacy. What can you do but laugh? That’s the approach taken by Linwood Barclay, who’s been skewering the current occupiers of Queen’s Park in his Toronto Star column since they took office. His new book Mike Harris Made Me Eat My Dog comes just in time; it’s an informed and viciously satirical look at the Ontario Tories, who’ve polarized public opinion unlike any other government in the province’s history. Chapters include a look at the so-called Whiz Kids advising the “There’s Tiffany, age 6, whose political credo is ‘Mine! Mine!’” Find out what happens at a meeting of the Tory cabinet’s book club. Learn how the homeless can help you get a big-screen tv, and discover 10 fun things to do, in your final moments, while waiting in the emergency room. This book will become increasingly relevant, and a much needed stress-reliever, as Ontario approaches its next election.
Avg Rating
3.26
Number of Ratings
31
5 STARS
16%
4 STARS
32%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
13%
goodreads

Author

Linwood Barclay
Linwood Barclay
Author · 37 books

Linwood Barclay is the #1 internationally bestselling author of seventeen novels for adults, including No Time for Goodbye, Trust Your Eyes and, most recently, A Noise Downstairs. He has also written two novels for children and screenplays. Three of those seventeen novels comprise the epic Promise Falls trilogy: Broken Promise, Far From True, and The Twenty-Three. His two novels for children – Chase and Escape – star a computer-enhanced dog named Chipper who’s on the run from the evil organization that turned him into a super-pup. Barclay’s 2011 thriller, The Accident, has been turned into the six-part television series L’Accident in France, and he adapted his novel Never Saw it Coming for the movie, directed by Gail Harvey and starring Eric Roberts and Emily Hampshire. Several of his other books either have been, or still are, in development for TV and film. After spending his formative years helping run a cottage resort and trailer park after his father died when he was 16, Barclay got his first newspaper job at the Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily. In 1981, he joined the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper. He held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, and Life section editor, before becoming the paper’s humour columnist in 1993. He was one of the paper’s most popular columnists before retiring from the position in 2008 to work exclusively on books. In 2004, he launched his mystery series about an anxiety-ridden, know-it-all, pain-in-the-butt father by the name of Zack Walker. Bad Move, the first book, was followed by three more Zack Walker thrillers: Bad Guys, Lone Wolf, and Stone Rain. (The last two were published in the UK under the titles Bad Luck and Bad News.) His first standalone thriller, No Time for Goodbye, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim and great international success. The following year, it was a Richard and Judy Summer Read selection in the UK, and did seven straight weeks at #1 on the UK bestseller list, and finished 2008 as the top selling novel of the year there. The book has since been sold around the world and been translated into nearly thirty languages. Barclay was born in the United States but moved to Canada just before turning four years old when his father, a commercial artist whose illustrations of cars appeared in Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post (before photography took over), accepted a position with an advertising agency north of the border. Barclay, who graduated with an English literature degree from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, was fortunate to have some very fine mentors; in particular, the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Laurence, whom Linwood first met when she served as writer-in-residence at Trent, and Kenneth Millar, who, under the name Ross Macdonald, wrote the acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring detective Lew Archer. It was at Trent that he met Neetha, the woman who would become his wife. They have two grown children, Spencer and Paige.

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