Archive for February, 2008

The first commandment about writing a book is to care passionately about your topic. For each of my dozen books, I have spent two years researching and writing the work, so you have to care deeply about what you are doing. If there’s any chance you’ll get bored along the way, don’t take on the project. If you lose interest, imagine how readers will feel.

OK, how do you recognize the right topic? You can’t simply say, “I’ve always wanted to write a book,” you have to say, “I want to write a book about [fill in the blank].”

The best ideas can strike like a bolt of lightning. For example, Sandy and I were holidaying in France in August 1994. One day, when we visited the hilltop town of Cordes, I stopped at a newsstand where a page one headline in the Financial Times leapt out: the Canadian government had seized Confederation Life. Without reading further, I knew immediately that was my next book. The result won the National Business Book Award.

A simple question can also launch a probe. In February 1997, George Eaton told a news conference that T. Eaton Co. Ltd. was bankrupt. He blamed recent economic events. I was at the news conference and remember asking myself, “How could a Canadian icon, founded in 1869, fall so far, so fast?” My search for an answer won the Canadian Authors Association prize for history.

When Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, was asked how she chose one idea over dozens of possibilities presented at a story meeting, she replied, “My nipples get hard.” My physical reaction is a little lower down; a good idea literally hits me in the solar plexus.

Of course, all of this applies only to non-fiction. Fiction is far more mystical. I’ve had a novel on the go for longer than I care to say that may never see the light of day. “There are three rules to writing a novel,” said Somerset Maugham. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

When last we looked in on the life of Edgar Bronfman Jr. (July 13, 2007), he’d just sold his Manhattan townhouse on East 64th Street for $50 million, a stratospheric sum that remains among the top prices ever paid in New York. He’d bought the 31-foot wide townhouse in 1995, renovated the heck out of it, then dwelt there starting in 1999.

Edgar Jr., subject of my book, The Icarus Factor, now appears to be seeking an even faster real estate flip. Last month he paid $19.5 million for an eleven-room co-op on Fifth Avenue at 85th Street, with views of Central Park. He never moved in and has put the property back on the market for $24 million, a tidy 23 per cent bump. Did the furniture not fit?

Edgar Jr.’s also in the news because he’s come under formal investigation by French authorities for insider trading in Vivendi shares dating back to alleged activities in 2000. Hard to imagine there’s anything to this, given the fact that Edgar Jr. managed to lose three-quarters of the family fortune in the misbegotten merger with Vivendi then led by the Napoleonic Jean-Marie Messier, who also is under investigation.

Much more worrisome for Edgar Jr. is his current role as CEO and an investor in Warner Music Group. After he and his private equity partners bought Warner, cut costs, and took the company public in 2005 at $17 a share, they had one good year as share price rose to almost $30. Warner has been sinking ever since and now languishes at $6 a share.

When he first acquired WMG, I believed he might achieve redemption, away from the pressures of the family dynasty but - sad to say - at this rate, such an outcome may never occur. As F. Scott Fitzgerald has written, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Paolo Bruscoli, one of many artisans featured in Fantasy in Florence, has been chosen by the city as part of a twenty poster display at the railway station that illustrates the most representative local businesses for history and art handicraft.

The station, known as Santa Maria Novella (SMN), serves as a gateway to the city for millions of visitors a year and offers a wonderful venue to introduce artisans as the celebrities they should be. Built in the 1930s by Mussolini’s Fascists, the station was among the first structures in what became known as the National style. The flat-roofed three-storey yellow brick building is modernist, stark and relentless with, to my mind, no redeeming features. The station in Milan, built about the same time, is much grander with a facade in the Liberty style that includes statues of winged horses and is among the most beautiful depots in the world.

The joke about Mussolini was that he kept the trains running on time. Well, they still do run on time, even during a strike. We planned to take the train one Friday from Florence to Rome but on Tuesday, transport workers announced a work stoppage beginning at 9 p.m. Thursday that would last twenty-four hours as a protest about unsafe working conditions. The government proposed an eight-hour strike on Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Art Historian Peter Porcal found a ticket seller at SMN station who claimed inside knowledge. The wicket wizard said that two Eurostar trains would leave Florence on schedule Friday morning for Rome regardless. We bought our advance tickets, with reserved seats, and crossed our fingers. The wizard was right. Despite the strike our train departed and arrived on time.

All of which leads me to one of the secrets to understanding Italy: the country might not work but everything functions. Strikes make appropriate statements, but travelers can still move about. “Italy is like the cartoons, everything is possible,” said our friend, Kerima, a manager at Luisa Via Roma. “And you are never bored.”