Customer Reviews

Passion for Reality: PaulCabot and the Boston Mutual Fund

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I bought this book on a whim and really enjoyed it. It's not the best-written history I've ever seen, but it certainly does a lot to uncover the lifestyles of the Brahmin class in late Victorian and early 20th Century Boston. I would recommend it to specialists in that period of history, literature, or social studies because it uses many primary sources and interviews to tell the story of one man from a powerful family. The specific is, obviously, favored over the general and that's what makes it very interesting--you get a sense of what Paul Cabot's personality and life really were. I found it interesting, too, because of the financial aspect of the research.

"Passion for Reality: Paul Cabot and the Boston Mutual Fund" recounts the life of Paul Cabot, a 20th Century financial pioneer of immense force and accomplishment whom biographer Michael Yogg portrays exquisitely in this intriguing and witty account published recently by Xlibris Books.

Best known as the founder of the first operating mutual fund, in the 1920s, Cabot, along with a team of partners, compiled an extraordinary investment record with this first fund, largely through the then innovative practice of interviewing company managements at their headquarters and other facilities.

Later Cabot discovered and publicized financial fraud in the fund industry in the 1920s which put him in position to lobby on behalf of key New Deal securities legislation. Subsequent accomplishments include (as Harvard College's treasurer) increasing Harvard's endowment allocation to equities just in time for the bull market of the 1950s and (as a corporate director in the 1960s) campaigning against abusive takeover tactics of the aggressive conglomerates.

Author Michael Yogg wrote his book, however, "as much for who Paul Cabot was as for what he did." One commentator has said, "No reporter would have had enough imagination to create the real Cabot!" Michael adds in the book's dust cover notes, "It would have taken the combined talents of Melville, Twain and Whitman to invent a character of such passion, humor and joy."

Currently a Managing Director at Putnam Investments, a leading mutual funds and investments products firm, Michael Yogg is a trained historian as well as an investments expert. Previously, he served as an analyst, research director, and portfolio manager at State Research & Management Company where he found himself in the presence of Paul Cabot, the firm's founder, on a regular basis. He has also been a teaching fellow in the Harvard University history department and holds a history degree from Yale and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Michael and his wife Joan live in Wellesley Massachusetts and have three grown children.

NOTE: This review also appears on my website www.thoughtleading.com