Takeover

by Donald Grant Creighton

196 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1978

About the author

Donald Grant Creighton studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1927 he was hired as a lecturer in U of T's Department of History, becoming professor in 1945, chairman 1954-59 and professor emeritus in 1971. The first of his many books, THE COMMERCIAL EMPIRE OF THE ST. LAWRENCE (1937), established him as the foremost English Canadian historian of his generation.

Under the influence of Harold INNIS, Creighton adopted as a first principle the idea of the St Lawrence as the basis of a transcontinental economic and political system: the LAURENTIAN THESIS. He was also committed to history as a literary art, and his 2-volume biography of John A. MACDONALD won the Governor General's Award (1952, 1955). As a nationalist with a centralist bias, Creighton in later years spoke out against the threats of continentalism and regionalism.

Reviews

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The back cover promises a story of intrigue and murder in "the bedrooms and boardrooms" of Toronto's elite. You do get that in a sense, although I don't think any character enters a bedroom once in the whole story. The book opens with the owner of a prestigious Canadian whiskey distillery being approached by an American to sell the firm; the owner then spends the rest of the book trying to convince his entire extended family to permit the sale, despite being the majority shareholder and the only member of the family doing any actual WORK for the company. The murder in question feels like a hasty afterthought, and would have served the plot better if it were left as a surprise rather than being telegraphed by the cover blurb.