Barbara Amiel Memoir

About The Book Shockingly honest, richly detailed, and pulling no punches, Friends and Enemies traverses the highs and lows of Barbara Amiel's storied life in journalism. Barbara Amiel's long-awaited memoir is shockingly honest, richly detailed and pulls few punches. An instinctive feminist and now a foe of feminism's political correctness, her own memoirs cover a formidable array of experiences - political, sexual, marital and material. While I don’t particularly admire Barbara Amiel's view on life (or her politics), she does write particularly well, which made this autobiography an interesting read. I had a hard time getting my head around things like a New York apartment with a poorly placed dining room, or a $100,000 monthly spend to keep up a 27,000 square foot house.

For many readers, the main appeal of Barbara Amiel’s memoir is its story of a woman who grew up in an unhappy family, achieved wealth and social status through marriage to the Canadian newspaper magnate Conrad Black, and then fell rapidly from grace when he was convicted and jailed for fraud. For others, it will be her bracing honesty about both herself and others. Douglas Murray, however, came to the book because of Amiel’s talents as a journalist. Yet others may be curious about the book because of what it reveals about anti-Semitism: