Quill and Quire

REVIEWS

« Back to
Book Reviews

The Mavericks: Lessons from the West’s Winning Entrepreneurs

by Paul Grescoe

Paul Grescoe is talented as a writer and connected as a businessman. The two qualities result in a well-crafted book of profiles of merchants and manufacturers in his part of the world. A continuation of The Money Rustlers: Self-Made Millionaires of the New West, written with David Cruise in 1985, this book wraps around a dozen business stories the proposition that innovation is different in Western Canada than in the rest of the country.

The subjects for profiles are risk-takers and innovators including Century 21 Canada real estate baron Gary Charlwood, entertainment producer Tim Gamble, and sausage maker Yves Potvin. Also featured are winemaker Harry McWatters, submarine tour impresario Dennis Hurd, railroad baron Peter Armstrong, flak jacket makers Brad and Lori Field, kitchen gadget marketers Jim and Bruna Scharf, navigation instrument makers Ed and Shirley Fitzhenry, data manager Chuck Lowen, biotech entrepreneur Julia Levy, and brewer Kazuko Komatsu.

Grescoe seeks to avoid embarrassment by excluding Western entrepreneurs who have fallen from grace, such as Ray Loewen, the undertaker who reached for the sky trying to turn family-run mortuaries into a chain of casketerias and fell to earth in a web of lawsuits and cash crises.

Quibbles about the durability of fame aside, The Mavericks is a good read and prime fodder for bestseller status in Western Canada. It won’t hurt that the men and women who are profiled may buy truckloads of Mavericks for business, friends, and sheer vanity.

 

Reviewer: Andrew Allentuck

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Ryerson

DETAILS

Price: $32.99

Page Count: 304 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-07-560437-X

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1999-9

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs