August 20, 1979

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Canada

The people who need people

For 34-year-old Hua Van Thinh, bone-tired and impatient, Montreal’s Mirabel Airport was little more than a necessary nuisance stop in a terrifying odyssey that ended late last week with the promise of a new life in Central Canada. With 197 fellow boat people, Hua listened quietly to welcoming speeches by federal and Quebec officials, applauded perfunctorily and quickly headed for army bunkhouses designed to handle the real business at hand: resettling part of the expected influx of 50,000 outcast Vietnamese in other locations across Canada. By Ken Becker7 min

Energy

NUCLEAR POWER: DEBATE FOR THE'80s

It is an incredible thing, undeniably alien, a complex fortress of power sitting on the edge of Lake Ontario, close to the tidy bungalows of Pickering, only 20 miles east of Metro Toronto in the nation’s largest, most densely populated urban area. By Warren Gerard12 min

Theatre

Deferred glory— same time next year

Like Jesus, the Stratford Festival’s artistic director Robin Phillips is intent upon saving the good wine until last, “last” referring, of course, to his final season there next year. Word has it that he’ll bring back some of the big guns—Maggie Smith, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy—and lavish protean portions of time and energy on those forthcoming productions, to add further glory to the fanfare surrounding his departure. By Lawrence O’Toole7 min

Frontlines

A tip of the old toupee

"You wanna know what actors eat for lunch? I’ll show you— I canned salmon with a little white vinegar.” George Burns allows himself a slow chuckle, but no old vaudevillian ever made money laughing at his own jokes, so Burns stifles his mirth in a bite of buttered bagel. By Rita Christopher6 min

People

By now, the monumental indiscretions of Margaret Trudeau are a household embarrassment and the legend throbs on even though Pierre Trudeau has lost his throne. In a devastatingly revealing interview with Celeste Fremon, a contributing editor to malenudie magazine Playgirl, Margaret claims that the so-called “Southerner” in her book, Beyond Reason—the man she “fell in love with” after a tennis tournament in New York—was Senator Edward Kennedy, even though reports of a romantic liaison between the couple were adroitly dismissed when first published in Maclean’s last March 26. By Marsha Boulton6 min

Letters

I enjoyed going through A Good Man Can Be Expensive to Find (July 16) on the dowry system in India. Your expository treatment of this archaic but aliveand-well institution deserves praise. To make your treatment of the subject more complete, two glaring aspects may be noted in conjunction.

Frontlines

Highland fling on new sod

Bonnie Prince Charlie would have been proud. More than 200 years after they were beaten by the English on the battlefield at Culloden, the Scots finally got their revenge. This summer they captured and held New Scotland—if not by force, then at least by ceilidh, a Gaelic word that translates roughly as “partying.” By Stephen Kimber5 min

Column

Thurman Munson and the American thirst for further maudlin heights of mourning

I can tell you, as a matter of fact, when it first started. It began, I can tell you with great certitude, on a January day in 1965 when they buried Winston Churchill with proper ceremony and circumstance. I used to live, by the way, about a block away from the Grand Old Man and could glimpse, on special days, the pale, fading face at the window as he made occasional feeble attempts to satisfy gawking tourist cameras. By Allan Fotheringham4 min

U.S.A.

California dreaming: the odd man in

On the face of it, California’s Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown—former seminarian, current adherent of Zen Buddhism—seems a most unlikely candidate in the race to wrestle the presidency away from Jimmy Carter. But the odds against him are certainly not greater than those faced by the unknown peanut farmer with “bornagain” religious convictions who took on Gerald Ford in 1976. By William Lowther4 min

World

Prophets of a super-race

At first glance, it looked like another intellectual novelty. In the land which gave the world the New Wave in films, les nouveaux philosophes in the classroom and la nouvelle cuisine on the restaurant table, every newspaper and dinner party conversation was suddenly humming with the discovery of a new political right wing, une nouvelle droite. By Marci McDonald4 min

August 131979