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Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now
 
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Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now [Hardcover]

Robert Coles (Editor), Albert Lafarge (Editor)
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Book Description

August 1, 2008
Entertaining and illuminating literary selections that explore the ethical quandaries of the workplace, collected by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Moral Lives of Children.

"They don't know me anymore."—Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman

In a course he taught at Harvard Business School and elsewhere for many years, esteemed psychiatrist Robert Coles asked future money market managers and risk arbitrageurs to pause for a semester and reflect on the ethical dimensions of their chosen profession.

Now, for corporate professionals, armchair entrepreneurs, and other students of commerce, Coles has gathered a generous and stimulating collection of classic literary reflections on the ethical and spiritual predicaments of the business world.

From John Cheever's descriptions of a businessman who endures a moral crisis after stealing a neighbor's wallet and Gwendolyn Parker's "Uppity Buppie," in which an African American woman ascends to the upper ranks of corporate America, to Death of a Salesman and Tolstoy's "Master and Man," Minding the Store offers a richly human vision of the business world. With selections by, among others, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, William Carlos Williams, Edith Wharton, and Vladimir Nabokov, Coles gives us the essential literary gems that illuminate the human predicaments of commerce and the moral quandaries of the marketplace.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robert Coles is the former James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, where he taught at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the "Children of Crisis" series of books and lives in Concord, Massachusetts. Albert LaFarge is the former deputy editor of DoubleTake magazine. He lives in Boston.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 303 pages
  • Publisher: New Press, The (August 1, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1595583556
  • ISBN-13: 978-1595583550
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #982,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A book of literary selections about business, January 30, 2009
This review is from: Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now (Hardcover)
The title on Amazon is actually more accurate than the title on the book cover. On the cover, it's "writing" but Amazon's heading say's"literature." And literature it is, meaning the likes of John Updike and Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver and Arthur Miller and a host of other great fiction writers.

The book is based on a course taught at the Harvard Business School by Robert Coles. The writing is excellent and that makes this book worth your time. Just be prepared that most of the businesspeople portrayed on these pages won't be quite like the businesspeople you know or the businessperson you are.

Most literary writers imagine business as a grotesque but necessary sideshow to the beautiful things in the world. I think of them the way Flannery O'Connor thought of Northern readers when she said:

"I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Minding the Store for the Unhappy, October 24, 2008
By 
Philip R. Miller (raleigh, nc United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now (Hardcover)
Not at all what I anticipated after reading the WSJ review. I thought these would be insightful ideas for someone interested in the business mindset, instead it played up to minorities and their efforts to get ahead in the business world and the always failed efforts of the poor to get ahead. Why was Upton Sinclair not included ?
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