SOURCE: "The Great Recycler," in Books in Canada, Vol. 24, pp. 29, 32.

In the following brief review, Denoon notes some "minor irritants" in the second volume of Berton's autobiography, but states that they are "counterbalanced" by "snappy writing."

Pierre Berton's sixtieth published book picks up where Starting Out, his first volume of autobiography left off, and begins with his arrival in Toronto in 1947. The postwar metropolis he evokes in My Times was still essentially the Good, with delusions of worldclassness decades away. The journalistic band Berton joined may seem equally quaint to younger readers: an alcohol-fuelled, almost all-male, visible-minority-free milieu in which only the widespread anti-Semitism of the time allowed personal tolerance to be put on the line.

(The modern types, including Berton, who formed a co-operative community in rural Kleinburg in 1948 inverted the then commonplace "restrictive" clause to exclude known bigots, but he does not record whether any Jews...