Time Zones

Before reporting from Parliament Hill in Ottawa Canada, Joe Schlesinger had made a career of covering more exciting places Iran, Vietnam, El Salvador, China, Poland, and his native Czechoslovakia among them. His quickness of mind and clarity of expression are even more evident in the pages of Time Zones, his sort-of memoir, than on our TV screens. Schlesinger was born a Jew in Czechoslovakia. His family sent him to England before the advent of the Final Solution. He was repatriated to his homeland, still a student, at war s end. After the Communist takeover he was obliged to flee, once more, this time on his own initiative; he crossed river ice to Austria one winter morning in 1950. Soon he was in Vancouver, going to university and working on the Ubyssey. From there he moved to the Province, to the (Paris) Herald Tribune, the Toronto Star, and at last to the CBC, where he has stayed. Apart from occasional vivid anecdotes, the autobiographical information in Time Zones is scant. Most of the book is given over to the places and stories Schlesinger covered in two decades as a foreign correspondent. He had been head of TV News for the corporation but says, in 1970, I jumped off the ladder I had been climbing. . . . I went off to the Far East Bureau of the CBC. Many foreign correspondents write I was there books. Few transcend genre boundaries as this one does. Schlesinger knows the historical context of the events he describes; he makes deep-rooted, alien conflicts understandable in words so clear they seem inevitable. And when personal experiences enter into the narrative always to illuminate a point he tells his stories with the self-deprecating detachment that is the sanity-saving mark of the sophisticated Central European exile in a mad world. His last chapter is ostensibly about Vaclav Havel s Velvet Revolution, but it s really an essay in praise of decency: a too-rare quality, but one that permeates Schlesinger s personal times zones.…