Book review 41 years late

   This interesting little time capsule from Montreal in 1967 is undermined by unforgivable hackery and blissful obsequiousness.
   There's a fine line between being supportive and being a total suck and Mike Gutwillig's 1967 Montreal-book From the Heart frequently ends up on the wrong side of that divide, making the young author's book laughably insipid.
   Gutwillig was a PR guy for Place Bonaventure and launched a little magazine called En Ville to help in that effort and then got caught up writing about Montreal. (poor guy! - Chimples)
   Gutwillig ignores the cardinal rule of writing: show it don't say it
   The cover is great and occasionally he'll drop a name that catches the eye.
   He sets off with a love letter to Mayor Drapeau, which sets the tone for some unmatched obsequiousness - culminating in a tribute to reporter Leslie Roberts (grandfather of the newsanchor).
    He writes a bunch of off-the-cuff stuff, one concerns witnessing a woman getting beaten up by a man on St. Antoine.
   Gutwilig feels guilty that he didn't intervene but muses that it's possible that she had it coming.
   Then he goes on about Frank Hanley who was apparently not a great fan of Israel, so he seems not to be a fan of hanley.
  Gutwillig's father was a shoemaker who didn't charge much for repairs.
    Gutwillig loves football. He doesn't understand why kids don't play the same games in the alleys as he did as a child.
   He's obsessed with Wilensky's and thinks that a major set of high rises be built around the restaurant.
   Eighteen years after the book came out Gutwillig wrote a play about a Wilenskys with Galt MacDermot, who wrote the music for Hair. It went to New York and was panned.
   Gutwillig is still going strong, at least he was when I rang him up last year.
   He also freelanced a business story about fast food restaurants in Montreal last year for the Gazette, so perhaps he has some interest in that domain as well.