Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy

by Jacques Poitras

Winner, Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award and Best Atlantic Published Book Award
Shortlisted, British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and National Business Book Award Were the Gallery's treasures gifts or loans? Was Lord Beaverbrook careless or devious? Jacques Poitras sifts through the personal correspondence, takes stock of the witnesses and testimony at the 2006 arbitration hearings, and interviews the combatants of a bitter legal battle that rocked the art world on both sides of the Atlantic. Deftly connecting the pieces of this historic jigsaw puzzle, he tells a fascinating tale peopled with an arresting cast of characters — from the self-proclaimed "master propagandist" to the present-day heirs of the Beaverbrook legacy.

318 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

JACQUES POITRAS is a journalist and author of five books of non-fiction, including Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires and the Stories They Won't Tell, a national best-seller shortlisted for the National Business Book Award; and Pipe Dreams: The Fight for Canada's Energy Future, shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the John W. Dafoe Book Prize. He is also the author of The Right Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, and Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border. Poitras lives in Fredericton and has been the provincial affairs reporter for CBC News in New Brunswick since 2000.

Reviews

[Julia]

Who owns the Turner and the Freud at the Beaverbrook Gallery in Fredericton New Brunswick? The author presents the evidence. The story is anything but dull as we read about eccentric characters, control freaks, deference and disillusion, romantic and political scandals, the earning of vast wealth and the next generation losing it all. A great summer read.