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| Mizanay Gheezhik, (Murray Sinclair) 1951-2024 |
Runners-up were Gary J. Bass for Judgment at Tokyo, on the post World War Two trial of Japanese war crimes, and Dylan Pennington for Before the Movement, on antecedents to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
I'm not reviewing the Cundill shortlist for the Literary Review of Canada this year, so you will have to form your own opinions of these works.
For consolation, here's one of my previous group reviews, on a particularly interesting (I thought) group of histories.
Update, November 6: I have to dissent from Ken White's recent suggestion, in his ever-lively booktrade SubStack "ShuSh," that the Cundill Prize is too academically-insular and needs more input from generalist nonfiction writers/jurors. Generalist nonfiction writer that I am at heart, I have to say nonfiction book prizes are a dime a dozen, even in Canada. Big, ambitious, deeply researched historical writing need the kind of attention that major book prizes can provide. The Cundill is one of the few in the world that hits that niche. There was a journalistic tilt to last year's nominees, and it was not their best year.
I was kinda delighted to be greeted by this (above). As far as I know, I have never before been to an archives with its own subway signage before. It's really close too -- steps away once you get to this spot.
Speaking of the Ontario Archives, there was a document I needed but was not sure how to find and to order. I sent an email to the Reference Help email address and got a reply back promptly with all the guidance I needed. I confirmed a date to be there, and I arrived to find a desk booked for me and my documents waiting on a trolley beside it. Nice crunchy tangible paper documents, too, looking like no one had opened them since they were created fifty-odd years ago.
There have been a lot of problems with the conversion of archives to the digital world. But when it works, it's pretty good. Sad to say, there was only one other person in the spacious and well furnished Reading Room all day.
The lead book (be a member and you get one) is Adam Dodek's Heenan Blaikie, about a law firm that blew its own brains out and went out of business in 2014. (Previously noted here.)
The other new books are two lawyers' legal history of the Canadian income tax, volume 2; a philosophy professor's exploration of a early 20th century Saskatchewan murder that practically no one has paid any attention to since the execution of the perpetrator, who was probably wrongfully convicted (tho' he did kill the guy!); and historian Ian Radforth's exploration of a celebrated nineteenth century murder in Ontario.
A close and serious exposition of income tax law is not a pageturner, as the author wryly admitted last night, but damn useful if that is precisely the thing you need to know. Histories of bankruptcy law, of adoption law, of the Torrens land holding system, and others similar in kind preceded it -- and how many would have been written and published without an effective legal history publishing organization like the Osgoode. Two strong historical accounts in criminal law, and a contribution to law firm history -- not a bad haul.
Nice to see lots of friends and colleagues too. Well catered as ever, too.
There's a big poll out in the US that has Kamala Harris leading in every single age and gender grouping except one: men over sixty, who prefer the other guy by 12 points.
Well, the dementia stats are starting to grow in that group too.
A couple of historically-connected speaking events coming up at this Toronto speaking series -- one involving me.
The first features actor RH Thomson talking about his remarkable global Remembrance Day projects and about his new memoir of his family and its many wartime losses. In person in Toronto, and free via Zoom.
And the second features Marsha Faubert discussing her book Wanda's War, about two young and unremarkable Polish people's hellish experiences during the Second World War and how they happened to survive and to come to postwar Canada, where they met and married -- and eventually became Marsha Faubert's mother- and father-in-law.
Wanda and Kazimierz (later "Casey") never really spoke about their wartime experiences, and Marsha's discoveries about that make for a remarkable piece of historical research and writing. I'll be interviewing Marsha about that story at Yorkminster Park in Toronto, and free via Zoom everywhere.
In his new book, Heenan Blaikie, Adam Dodek, offers a detailed and lively account of a still uncommon historical topic: how a prominent law firm can dissolve into non-existence. Dodek, a law professor in Ottawa, delves into the collapse in 2014 of Heenan Blaikie, a law firm that grew from small beginnings in Montreal in 1973 to a five-hundred lawyer business with offices across the country, blue-chip corporate clients, and names like Jean Chretien, Pierre Trudeau, and hockey tycoon Marcel Aubut on the letterhead. Dodek interviewed scores of the talkative lawyers who were left to rebuild their careers while still burdened with the dead firm’s enormous debts, and he is able to enliven his story with first-person quotation throughout.
Heenan Blaikie was a law partnership that believed that having great “culture” and being a fun place to work would guarantee success. Its leaders recruited starry new partners -- hired mostly on instinct – with income guarantees that could not be renegotiated when the partner failed to bring in business. They considered management and administration to be work that smart guys like them could handle in their spare time without professional advice. The firm spent more time debating what street its new Toronto office should face than what lines of work it should focus on. It invested fortunes in vanity-project foreign offices and glossy consultants long after competing firms had proved that such sidelines were costly diversions. Talented and savvy lawyers at Heenan Blaikie continued to bring in enormous fees from well-heeled clients and yet the firm managed to spiral into collapse. It was, in fact, the firm that did everything wrong.
It’s a great story. Dodek lavishes time and attention on all the ethical lapses and failures, all the nasty headlines that decorated its fall. and generally the decline of Heenan Blaikie’s vaunted “culture” into a toxic stew. I enjoyed reading it and learned lots.
If there’s a weakness, it is focussing too much on the toxic culture
and the lurid misbehaviours. Dodek shows many things that Heenan Blaikie did badly.
But the book doesn’t much reflect on what they should have been doing well: what kind
of management had become essential for big law firms with the aspiration to greatness that Heenan Blaikie certainly had.
Heenan Blaikie emerged in the late 20th century moment when leading
law firms in Canada (and around the world) were suddenly changing from local
enterprises of a few dozen lawyers at most, to become large, geographically-dispersed operations with multi-million dollar annual revenues.
During the last fifty years, the victors in this fight for growth developed a
consensus on how big law firms could and must organize themselves. They managed
to turn legal practice, long idolized by many lawyers as single-combat warfare for heroic
individuals, into a corporate enterprise, driven by empowered leadership,
carefully strategized goals, targeted marketing, and a ruthless attention to overall
profit and loss.
Dodek makes clear that Heenan Blaikie was clueless and dismissive about all the new ground rules of the corporate law business – which is why its competitors ate its lunch.
But Dodek is hardly more interested in law-business fundamentals that the firms leaders were.
His book sometimes gives the impression that Heenan Blaikie failed because it did a lot of things badly. It did, and he describes them all. But the book would be stronger with some attention to all the things it never really considered doing – the things successful big-law firms learned to do in order to thrive and survive.
It is still a terrific book, but it occurred to me while
reading that Adam Dodek is a law professor. University departments are among the few places that can still
attempt to run by the kind of non-management management that doomed Heenan Blaikie to
extinction.
(Despite these quibbles, I should note gratefully that in the book Adam Dodek generously cites my writings on law-firm history and an interview we did during his research. Thanks also to UBC Press for an advance reading copy.)
In the process of adding some podcasts to the list (at right) of sites worth following , I discovered that Donald Smith, longtime professor at the University of Calgary and noted historian of indigenous histories long before they were fashionable ... has a podcast.
I have not listened to it yet, but it seems to be an original mix of historian's memoir and historian's historical reflections. There are 21 episodes to date, "relaxed, with an abundance of anecdotes," and most run less than 30 minutes. It's called "In Hindsight" and it's on the Ontario Historical Society website.
The OHS's other podcast is about the glories of the Canadian crown... but I'll let you find that one for yourself.
"The Ford government wants sewer pipes that send raw waste into Lake Ontario to be diverted into a channel used by swimmers and rowers, the Star has learned."
-- Toronto Star, October 9, 2024, page 1.