Robert Moss has written a story on Joseph Roberts Smallwood (Joey) and this account has already turned into a narrative which has not only promises to enlighten Canadians, but people all over the world.

Robert Moss was born in Keels, Bonavista Bay, Newfoundland. He was raised up in times when food was a scarce commodity and education was a luxury affordable by only the affluent. Bob was affected with a disease that crippled him when he was only six weeks old, and it left him a misfit later when he could not participate with the other commercial fishermen as fishing was the principal occupation in his community.

Bob went through his high school education in Summerville and attended college for a brief time in Newfoundland before joining the School of Graphic Arts at the Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto where he pursued journalism. He spent forty years of his life there involved in reporting news. He spent three good years also as a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa and considered himself as `a product of great social change’.

It was during this period that Moss was deeply influenced by what he read and absorbed about how one man brought Newfoundland to its current state as a Canadian Province, not so long ago in the nineteen forties. That man was Joseph Roberts Smallwood who went on to become Newfoundland’s premier. 

Joseph Smallwood was born in Gambo, Newfoundland. He grew up in poverty and attended day schools in the neighbourhood. He dropped out of Bishop Field College and did not complete his studies. He went on to become a printer’s apprentice and gained experience in news reporting.

He became so successful that he was offered a post in the New York Call, a socialist newspaper, in 1920. When he returned back after five years to Newfoundland, he became a union organiser. He was elected into politics as a delegate for the Bonavista Centre in 1946. This is where he used his radio broadcasts to motivate the cause of Confederation as a referendum option. In May 1949, he won a decisive victory and single-handedly transformed Newfoundland into a province of Canada and put it on its path to progress, out of the quagmire of poverty.

Joey had one of the best stocked private libraries in Canada. He was aggressively outspoken in his outbursts on the governing systems in Canada, to the point of stunning several news reporters.

This biographical account of Joey by Robert Moss is thought provoking when he brings out Joey’s aggression in the form of statements like `private financing of elections, a form of prostitution’. This book is a must have not only for every Canadian researcher but for all libraries that exist across Canada.

It is good to note that the book has been sold out on the order catalogues of Indigo and Agora Cosmopolitan.