Edited by journalist Andrew Cohen and historian J.L. Granatstein, Trudeau’s Shadow is a collection of newly commissioned essays on the former prime minister from a broad range of sources, including actress Linda Griffiths, former Ontario NDP leader Bob Rae, journalists Larry Zolf and Linda McQuaig, Trudeau political allies Jim Coutts and Donald S. Macdonald, and cultural essayists Mark Kingwell and B.W. Powe. Interestingly, in spite of the retrospective tone of the essays, there is no sense of Trudeau as anything less than a continuing presence in the country’s political and intellectual life.

The contributions range in political orientation and personal reaction. Anybody who holds the opinion that economic performance is the surest way of judging the worth of a country’s leader need only read the back-to-back essays by McQuaig and fellow journalist Andrew Coyne. Coyne finds ways to show the former prime minister’s guilt in the creation of our current economic distress, while McQuaig finds ways to show his innocence. Linda Griffiths’ memoir of dancing flirtatiously with Trudeau while researching her play “Maggie and Pierre,” gives a more indelible, vital portrait of the man than journalist Rick Salutin’s ruminations on Trudeau’s leftist credentials – contrasted, of course, with his own.

Like many collections, the book is an uneven read, but its general tone of fascination, rapt or grudging, acts to unify the hand-wringing and finger-pointing, the memoirs of encounters in friendship or political service, and the ruminative speculations on the significance of Trudeau. While hardly useful as a biographical resource, Trudeau’s Shadow will doubtless be pressed into use by future writers, looking for a pithy quote or a telling anecdote to further explain the phenomenon of our country’s 15th prime minister.