Team Spirit: A Field Guide To Roots Culture

Michael Budman and Don Green were two twenty-something Detroit natives with zero business experience when they introduced the negative heel shoe in their first Roots store in 1973. Inspired by their childhood experiences at summer camp in Algonquin Park, they adopted a stylized beaver as their logo and Canada as their new home.

Team Spirit is a book about the business of culture, specifically the wilderness camp culture that inspired Michael Budman and Don Green to create an incredibly successful fashion and lifestyle empire whose most recent success has been the striking outfits for the Canadian athletes at the 1998 Winter Olympics. Geoff Pevere looks at the lifelong friendship of two men and their vision of creating a business built on integrity and quality. Through the years, the Roots entourage has included some of the brightest names in music, film, fashion, art, literature and sports. Their rise wasn't easy, nor without setbacks, but these two unconventional Americans managed to build a $100 million-a-year enterprise by promoting Canadian culture to Canadians.

Geoff Pevere is a noted culture critic and co-author of the bestselling Mondo Canuck. He has worked as a journalist, festival programmer, broadcaster, screenwriter, story editor and teacher. He hosted CBC Radio's "Prime Time" from 1989-1993, and is the movie critic for CTV's "Canada AM." A Toronto Star columnist and a regular contributor to Saturday Night and The Globe and Mail, Geoff is also the host of "The Independent Eye" on the Knowledge Network in British Columbia. He lives in Toronto.