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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting and easy reading,
By
This review is from: Enterprising Americans: A Business History of the United States (Hardcover)
This is an interesting book that is easy to read and not at all academic in tone. As stated in the introduction, this book was originally published (in a more condensed form than in this book) as a series of 13 articles for Fortune Magazine. These articles were written in response to a request of a daughter of one of the editors of the magazine for something to counteract the "robber baron" depiction of American businessmen. This book certainly does this, as it depicts American business history in terms of the inventiveness of Americans and how the inventions that they developed were turned into great businesses. The book begins with pre-Revolutionary War America and goes up to the time of the books publication in 1974 (for the new and updated edition that this review is based on). Since a period of over 200 years is covered in only 264 pages of text, the coverage of individual inventions and businesses is brief. However, a lot of interesting material is covered. In addition to well known inventors and business men, such as Samuel Colt and Thomas Edison, the book provides a lot of information about much less well known men such as Fredric Tudor (who made a business of shipping ice from the ponds of New England to the tropics) and Dr. Wallace Carothers (who led the team that developed nylon for the DuPont company). The book details the growth of the railroad, steel, electrical generation, oil and automobile industries (and many others), and the men who pioneered these businesses. It also details the financial aspects of American businesses, particularly the impact of J. P. Morgan. The end of the book gets a bit political, as the author is a staunch conservative who was at odds with much of the New Deal legislation. Actually, I found his conservatism and anti-Keynesian position to be an interesting counter point to the Keynesian approach taken by most US textbooks, and while you may not agree with the author's views they are nonetheless interesting.
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