AUBIN, Henry (Trocmé) 1942-

PERSONAL: Born December 16, 1942, in New Brunswick, NJ; son of Robert Arnold (a professor) and Elisabeth Gabrielle (a teacher; maiden name, Trocmé) Aubin; married Penelope Morgan (a library editor), December 22, 1968; children: Seth André Morgan, Nishi Elisabeth, Nicolas Charles, Raphaëlle Trocmé. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1964; studied at Washington Journalism Center, 1968, attended Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, 1981-82. Religion: Protestant.

ADDRESSES: Home—622 Victoria Ave., Westmount, Quebec, Canada H3Y 2R9. Office—Montreal Gazette, 1010 Ste. Catherine Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3B 5L1, Canada. Agent—Beverly Slopen Literary Agency, 131 Bloor Street west, Suite 711, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1S3.

CAREER: Philadelphia Bulletin, Philadelphia, PA, urban affairs reporter and Washington correspondent, 1966-70; Washington Post, Washington, DC, urban affairs reporter, 1970-71; Montreal Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, urban affairs reporter, editorial writer, and columnist, 1973—. Military service: U.S. Army Reserve, 1965-71.

MEMBER: Canadian Centre for Investigative Journalism (co-founder).

AWARDS, HONORS: B'nai B'rith Canadian Human Rights Award, 1973; Canadian National Newspaper Award, 1973, 1976, for enterprise in reporting and in 2000 for editorial writing; Canadian National Business Writing Award, 1974, 1975, 1976; Quebec Writers' Federation Award for history, 2002; Canadian Jewish history award, 2003.

WRITINGS:

City for Sale: International Financiers Take a Major North American City by Storm, James Lorimer & Co., 1977.

Questions d'éthique: Jusqu'où peuvent aller les journalistes? Québec-Amérique, 1991.

The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 B.C., Soho Press (New York, NY), 2002.

City for Sale has been translated into French.

SIDELIGHTS: American-born journalist and author Henry Aubin once commented to CA that working in Quebec allowed him "to be amidst as much cultural vigor as anywhere in North America" due to the fact that the eastern region of Canada "is trying to burst out on its own after centuries as a sat-upon backwater." Much of Aubin's work has been investigative journalism; his newspaper articles, were the foundation of his 1977 work City for Sale: International Financiers Take a Major North American City by Storm. Aubin's examination of "who owns Montreal" quickly became a best-seller in its French-language version, Les Vrais proprietaires de Montreal.

"Most of my stuff deals with economic power and who wields it rather than with politics," Aubin added, "since there are so many reporters who probe the latter and since without scrutiny business is all the more easily unaccountable. I am more interested in getting the facts out on how a society is being run and letting people form their own opinions than in trying to deliberately shape those opinions."

A conflict of the distant past is the subject of Aubin's 2002 book, The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 B.C. When the Assyrian army approached the gates of Jerusalem, the city seemed fated to fall to the invader. But according to the Old Testament, God sent an "angel of the Lord" to save the fortress and devastate the Assyrians. In Aubin's reading, the "angel" came in the form of the African Kushite army, made up of warriors from the Sudan. That the African army remained uncelebrated, the author argues in his book, can be attributed to "a racist campaign over the last two centuries to erase the Kushite contribution to Israel's survival," as a Kirkus Reviews critic explained.

According to Clay Williams in Library Journal, Aubin asserts that "The Kushites played the decisive role in one of the most important conflicts in history." Much of The Rescue of Jerusalem's critical response concerns this controversial finding, which, according to Donald Akenson of The Globe and Mail, suggest that "an entire century of scholarship—the twentieth—was dead wrong on one of the turning points in Western history..."He added that "Aubin has mastered the relevant Near Eastern, biblical, and Egyptological material . . . And he argues with real brilliance." A Publishers Weekly contributor, while labeling portions of the book "arduous," still found that Aubin "may offer the best solution to a biblical problem that has long troubled scholars."