Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black

The authors promise a critical examination of Conrad Black and Hollinger International, and that is what they deliver. With the exception of Richard Breeden, and perhaps Christopher Browne, none of the major characters in the book go uncriticized at some point in it. The narrative is not only engrossing, but also is sufficiently fact-driven to allow a reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the causes of the implosion of Hollinger. (It is vaguely worded in spots, but that would only be a drawback for those who would use it as a textbook or monograph.) It also has a new relevance thanks to the current trial of Conrad Black, Peter Atkinson, Jack Boultbee and Mark Kipnis. In fact, a recent prosecution witness, Fred Creasey, could have used this book to refresh his memory before his testimony in the trial. (Near-bottom of p. 53.) One other nice feature of this book is that it quotes the E-mails that Conrad Black wrote, recently excerpted in the media, in more copious detail than those excerpts reveal. This level of detail will satisfy the curiosity of anyone who's already read those quotes. I have only one quibble with the book, which does not relate to its self-imposed limitation of time scope. In the Epilogue, the authors portray Conrad Black as a relic of a bygone age, but their sense of history is somewhat inaccurate. Rather than being a holdover from the nineteenth century, Conrad Black, to the extent to which he is a relic as a CEO, is a holdover from the management culture of the 1980s. When a proper history of that period is written, it will be found that the grandfather of that era was Frederic Donner, chairman and CEO of General Motors from 1958 to 1967. The ever-growing scandals of shareholder abuse are distorted mirrors of Mr. Donner's image; the distortion comes from the relaxation of Donner's well-known probity.