ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards Bronze Award
- Autobiography/Memoir
Quebec Writer''s Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for
Non-Fiction Winner (2004)
Canadian Jewish Book of the Year Award Winner
(2004)
Canadian Jewish Book Award for
Memoir/Biography
Drainie Taylor Biography Prize Nomination
Alberta Trade Nonfiction Book of the Year
Nomination
Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of a Kind is the
story of one writer''s obsession with another. In this "really
unauthorized biography," Joel Yanofsky, a veteran
Montreal book reviewer, literary journalist and novelist, tracks
the elusive legend of Mordecai Richler in the year following his
death. This insightful and quirky quest leads Yanofsky to
consult-though pester may be more like it-a rabbi, a shrink and a
dream analyst.
What starts out as a literary appreciation turns into a literary
stalking, propelled as much by envy as admiration, irreverence as
affection, confession as critical judgment.
A Montrealer himself and a journalist by trade, Joel Yanofsky
has covered the Canadian literary scene, interviewing and reviewing
Richler, while taking the measure of the city that he believes was
destroyed culturally by the reign of separatist governments.
Yanofsky cuts through the recent public adoration, as well as
through Richler''s own carefully protected persona, to reveal the
depth and contradictions hidden beneath.