Skip to main content
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2017
I read this book because I liked the idea of a collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s and because of Bill Gate's blurb ("John Brooks is an unbelievable business writer"). And the best essays in the collection are indeed excellent. Brooks is at his best when he can tell stories through the experiences of a small number of people involved, and when he can maintain an tone of detatched amusement as he describes things going wrong. This includes the piece about Texas Gulf and advances in insider trading case law and the piece about Piggly Wiggly and stock corners, and the piece on Goodrich, Latex and intellectual property law. The wholly (or nearly wholly) respectful pieces about the Ford Edsel and the history of Xerox were also excellent. A couple of the pieces were, for me, clinkers. Unless you have a special interest in the subject matter, you may find yourself skipping the article about the history of the U.S. income tax and, similarly, the closing article about the 1964 devaluation of the British pound.
New Yorkers in the 1960s were, perhaps, smarter than me. Brooks casually uses words like mulct ("to extract money from somebody via taxes or (especially) fines."), reticulated ("having the shape or appearance of a web"), gelid ("extremely cold, frosty"), expatiate ("to speak or write at great length on a topic"), ukase ("originally, an edict from a Russian tsar having the force of law, now more generally an arbitrary command"), etc.
One can easily imagine how much John Brooks would have loved writing about the abuses in modern markets, such as the 2008 corner that Porsche ran on the shares of Volkswagen, or about LIBOR manipulation by big banks, or Harbinger capital and its disastrous investment in Lightsquared Inc.
New Yorkers in the 1960s were, perhaps, smarter than me. Brooks casually uses words like mulct ("to extract money from somebody via taxes or (especially) fines."), reticulated ("having the shape or appearance of a web"), gelid ("extremely cold, frosty"), expatiate ("to speak or write at great length on a topic"), ukase ("originally, an edict from a Russian tsar having the force of law, now more generally an arbitrary command"), etc.
One can easily imagine how much John Brooks would have loved writing about the abuses in modern markets, such as the 2008 corner that Porsche ran on the shares of Volkswagen, or about LIBOR manipulation by big banks, or Harbinger capital and its disastrous investment in Lightsquared Inc.
