FRIENDS & ENEMIES

More enemies than friends take center stage in Amiel's fiery recollections of her eventful life.

The conservative newspaper columnist grew up in England during World War II and then moved with her family to Canada as a teenager after the suicide of her father. In the first half of her observant and unforgiving account of a life that “has always been a precarious mix of gutter and ballroom, of intense work and absolutely unhealthy play,” Amiel discusses her unhappy childhood, a series of career moves, a “backroom” abortion, years of clinical depression, and four marriages, the last one to former newspaper magnate Conrad Black, to whom Amiel has remained ferociously loyal. This half is packed with enough memorable characters, household moves, dinner parties, and jewelry shopping excursions to fill at least three typical memoirs. The second half, a tough slog, is devoted almost entirely to Black's legal problems, which culminated in a 2007 trial and incarceration in a federal prison in Florida. “Knowing profoundly that my husband was innocent and being relentlessly persecuted for crimes that hadn't taken place”—and noting to readers who may find the subject less compelling than she does that “this is my book and my game”—the author proceeds to excoriate at length the “slithering creatures rising from the regulatory swamp” who brought her husband to trial, the lawyers (on both sides) “indifferent to anything but their own success and greed,” the jurors she feels weren't up to the task of evaluating her husband's guilt or innocence, and the society “friends” who slipped away upon Black's imprisonment. Even Amiel's most enthusiastic admirers will grow weary of the massive amount of attention devoted to this relentless onslaught. “This book,” she writes, “is simply an account of a woman’s life that…ran into a late autumn storm that continued with droughts and predators to this, the very last flight.”

A celebrity memoir with an uncompromising kick that could stand to shed at least 200 pages.