A couple of years ago, Greig Dymond and Geoff Pevere made a big, cross-Canada splash with a book called Mondo Canuck. This “Canadian pop-culture odyssey” was a delightfully snotty exercise in sacred-cow tipping: Rush got knighthoods, Gzowski got dissed, and everyone had a good laugh at Shatner. It was original, sharply written, and fun.

Fresh from that success, Pevere is at it again. Team Spirit tells the story of Roots, the company that brought funny shoes, branded sweatshirts, and doofy Olympic hats to millions of Canadians. The book looks a lot like Mondo Canuck – it has the same photo-heavy design, the same low word count, similar typefaces – and it tries hard to be like it, too. But where Mondo Canuck managed to offset its embarrassing grasps at significance with snarky wit, Team Spirit reads like a Brian Linehan TV special. It’s full of wordy, pretentious fawning, and it’s tough to sit through.

The Roots story itself has been told many times on TV and in magazine profiles, and it’s a charming little tale: Michael Budman and Don Green, two upper-middle-class kids from Detroit, fall in love with Algonquin Park. They adopt Canada as their new home. They build a retail empire selling “negative heel” loafers in stores decorated to recall the camp experience. They diversify into clothing, they outfit Elvis Stojko, they hang with celebrities. They get stinking rich.

Today, Budman and Green are celebrities themselves, and Roots is a worldwide success. A nuts-and-bolts business book about how they built their company would have been a great idea. So would a detailed, personal biography. But Team Spirit is neither. Instead, we get little pieces of the Roots story, each surrounded by ponderous ruminations on What It All Means.

Pevere’s made a career as a pop-culture thinker, and when he’s on, he’s fabulous. But this is a book about two pretty nice guys who built a pretty nice company. Without any targets for Mondo Canuck-style nastiness, without any real cultural hook to hang his essays on, Pevere just drifts.