Less of a safari, this tour put me in mind of Frank Capra's film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The plot has the upright, honest James Stewart character campaigning against corruption and hypocrisy in the capital. This book shares a similar campaigning zeal. Mr. Mintzberg and his co-authors, Bruce Ahlstrand and McGill alumnus Joseph Lampel, go to Boston, the capital of the strategy business, to bag big game business schools (Harvard), management gurus (Michael Porter) and consultants (Boston Consulting Group). The bad guys in the plot are the faceless managers who shape firms' destinies while sitting in hermetically sealed corporate offices. The good guys, according to the authors, are the "right-minded people who simply wish to serve the organization despite its leadership" and the "foot-soldiers on the firing line." It's heartwarming stuff and its people-first message coincides with the empowerment fad currently sweeping through North American organizations.

Safari's itinerary is not so much strategy as the strategy process: the way people in organizations decide what to do. As a result, the tour is somewhat truncated. The core question in the strategy field is why firms' economic performances differ. And this is as much to do with what they do as the way that they do it. But there is little here about the outcome of the strategy process -- namely, strategy content or the actual goals, business practices and actions undertaken by a firm. If you want to understand the logic of corporate diversification, the reasons for downsizing or the theory behind compensating senior executives with generous stock option packages, you won't find it here.

Mintzberg is Canada's most respected management scholar and his 25-year career has seen several original contributions to our understanding of organizations. In a field full of the self-important, his style is refreshingly offbeat and iconoclastic. So it is ironic that Mintzberg has emerged as Canada's only internationally renowned management guru. Now in the guru business you have to sell books, and one way of doing this is knocking the competition. And that's what the authors do. The book categorizes the strategy field into ten schools of thought, then knocks them down. All except one. The tenth school, called Configuration, is largely the work of McGill scholars. Indeed Australian academic Lex Donaldson once described their approach as "McGillomania." Not surprisingly, Mintzberg will brook little criticism of his colleagues' work. One fault he does allow is that Configuration's main theories may have no practical use. In some businesses having a useless idea may be fatal, but in the management theory market it hardly matters.

Dr. Michael Carney
Associate Professor of Management
Concordia University

Florida Bound: The Essential Guide for Canadian Snowbirds, Macmillan Canada, 1998, $19.95, by Andrew Cumming, BA'90.

This is the time of the year when butterflies, birds, whales -- and a significant chunk of retired Canadians -- pack up and head south. If they're smart, the human migrants will have a copy of Andrew Cumming's Florida Bound with them.

According to government statistics, the number of Canadians who winter in Florida -- known as snowbirds -- is more than 400,000, with about 130,000 of those owning a second home there. But seasonal Florida residency isn't just a matter of stuffing the car and pointing it south. Florida Bound lives up to its title of "essential guide," advising travellers on what to do before leaving (have a complete physical and get a doctor's report, convert currency to U.S. dollars -- it's cheaper in Canada), how to get there (I-75 has the most truck traffic, don't fly or drive at night), and, once there, how to cope with any eventuality from car-jacking to hurricanes to the death of a loved one.

Cumming, a lawyer who is a member of the bar in both Ontario and Florida, specializes in cross-border tax, estate planning and immigration law, so there is lots of solid information on the legal and financial implications of being a part-time U.S. resident. It may come as a shock, for example, to learn that the Internal Revenue Service and Revenue Canada agreed in 1995 to cooperate in exchanging information. Canadians who rent out their Florida properties and who fail to report the income may be faced with significant tax penalties. The author also takes readers through the tricky task of arranging the right health insurance.

But the fun side of Florida is not neglected. Cumming provides guides, schedules, web sites and phone numbers for cultural events, shopping malls, festivals and golf and tennis tournaments. All the information in the book is well organized, easy to understand and presented in a breezy style. With Florida Bound in hand, a snowbird's biggest worry might be coping with sunburn. Come to think of it, that's covered, too.

Diana Grier Ayton

Margaret Atwood: A Biography, ECW Press, 1998, $24.95, by Nathalie Cooke.

Margaret Atwood's response to the two unauthorized biographies of her on bookstore shelves this fall has been a terse "I'm not dead yet." True, but in Atwood's case, would-be CanLit biographers must have been champing at the bit for years now. While she's still young as biography subjects go (59), Atwood surely appears ripe for the literary bio treatment when you survey that luminous writing -- a substantial body of work by any measure (15 books of poetry, 14 books of fiction, for starters) -- not to mention a career winding up its fourth decade, filled with famous friends, international awards and cultural controversies. She is such an icon of Canadian literature -- the icon, or in Robert Fulford's words, the "standard bearer" -- that resistance to the biographical call must have been difficult indeed.

Nathalie Cooke, a McGill professor of English, has acquiesced with a splendid offering for Atwood students and general readers alike, taking on the whole life, from young Margaret in the woods of the Canadian North to Alias Grace. (Rosemary Sullivan's current biography, The Red Shoes, limits itself to Atwood's youth and early success up to Lady Oracle.) Cooke has Atwood refute the myth of the suffering artist straight off, and Atwood emerges as a model of sanity, creativity, humour and humanitarianism, so much so that she may be a little disappointed by the lack of skeletons in her biographical closet, unless a fondness for tarot cards qualifies as a dirty secret.

We follow Atwood through her years at Victoria College, University of Toronto, under the tutelage of poet Jay MacPherson and über-critic Northrop Frye, whose theories of myth and literary archetype have always been considered a primary influence on her writing -- an influence Cooke cautiously disputes. Then on to Harvard and the thrill of Atwood's first Governor General's award, for The Circle Game. Henceforth, it is a career in meteoric ascension, from her involvement in the fabled House of Anansi Press during the 1960s and '70s; to the early novels and the national tempest of her landmark critical work on Canadian literature, Survival; on through the '80s, when books like The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye made her an international celebrity.

"Implicit in any writer's biography is the comparison between life and art," writes Cooke, a comparison that perhaps dogs writers with extraordinary public profiles such as Atwood more than others. Is Atwood like her fictional heroines, many of whom are Toronto-based writers and artists? Atwood has always discouraged such comparisons and Cooke feels they ultimately short-sell the writer and her imagination.

Throughout the book, we're reminded of how terribly funny and mischievous Atwood can be, despite the seriousness of most of her themes. Reviewing her own collection of essays, Second Words, in the Globe and Mail, Atwood juxtaposes the image of herself as a "motherly, cookie-baking, pussycat-loving comedienne" with the "threatening succubus and man-devouring squid," taking on silly critics who had labelled her a "feminist harridan" for years and cutting them off at the knees. Indeed the satire that lurks at the edge -- and at times, the heart -- of much of her work is a key to the "strongly didactic impulse" Cooke sees in her writing.

Promoting and defending Canadian culture, furthering the rights of women, fighting for the environment -- serious business, these Atwoodian agendas -- her battles are usually fought with razor wit, style and deadly accuracy. Pointing out absurdity is a marvelous instructional tool. Cooke's book will no doubt jump straight onto bibliographical lists as a primary resource, but will be equally fascinating for the everyday enthusiast of Canadian literature.

Andrew Mullins

Books Received

Trudeau's Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Random House, 1998, $34.95, edited by Andrew Cohen, BA'77, and J.L. Granatstein.

The Northern Magus returns, this time in a fine collection of essays by Trudeaumaniacs and some less enthusiastic reviewers. Richard Gwyn, Bob Rae, Andrew Coyne, Rick Salutin, Linda McQuaig and many more offer perspectives on Trudeau as politician, philosopher, outdoorsman, sex symbol and elder statesman. Edited by Globe and Mail Washington correspondent Andrew Cohen and Canadian historian Jack Granatstein.

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, Doubleday, 1998, $34.95, by Denis Sampson, PhD'82.

A biography of one of the more elusive contemporary masters. Samson chronicles Moore's childhood in Belfast, his life in Montreal during the 1960s, and later years in the U.S. The book features extensive discussion of Moore's works, and material drawn from interviews with the writer and his family, his diaries, notes and letters provides fascinating insight into his literary career.

Health, Family, Learning, & Collaborative Nursing, McGill University School of Nursing, 1997, $60, edited by Laurie N. Gottlieb, BN'69, MSc(A)'74, PhD'85, and Hélène Ezer, BSc(N)'68, MSc(A)'77.

Writings on the McGill philosophy and perspective on nursing, collected from 20 years of teaching and practice at the University and its hospitals. The book provides nurses with a blueprint for education and a framework for practice.

Staying Human During Residency Training, University of Toronto Press, 1998, $15, by Allan D. Peterkin, DipPsych'92.

A comprehensive guide for medical students, interns and residents, packed with tips on coping with stress, sleep deprivation, finances, ethical and legal problems, and many other concerns for hospital residents. Peterkin is a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and a health columnist for the Toronto Star.

Breaking Up Solvent: A Woman's Guide to Financial Security, Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 1998, $17.95, by Suzanne Kingsmill, BSc'78, and Stephen Stuart.

This book is about Kate, who quit her job to raise kids and who found when her marriage dissolved that she was financially unprepared to handle it. With the coaching of Maggie, cleaning woman and financial expert extraordinaire, she learns all the things she should have known long before saying "I do."

The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, Harper Collins, 1998, $32, by Rosemary Sullivan, BA'68.

Sullivan, a poet and also biographer of Atwood colleague Gwendolyn MacEwen, examines Atwood's formative years, into the 1970s and the writer's first successes. The book takes as its central image the ballerina from the famous film, The Red Shoes, a woman forced to choose between pursuing her art and love, ultimately choosing suicide. It was a film that haunted the young Atwood, and Sullivan's book illustrates how Atwood's distinguished career and happy family life have been a complete repudiation of the film's message.