| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 28, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
| ||||||||
 | ||||||||
| BOOKS
Ah! Peace and Quiet and a Good Book Summer can be exhausting: touring exotic places, sunning and swimming at the beach, hiking, picnicking, ball games--whew! But when it's time for solitude, nothing beats a good read. Here to help you pick from among the daunting pile of booksellers' wares is BUSINESS WEEK'S annual summer paperback roundup. Where better to lose yourself than in an engaging biography? Perhaps no character in modern business history inspired such strongly held views and left such a legacy as the subject of The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel (Penguin, $17.95). Taylor, the father of scientific management, came from a wealthy Philadelphia family and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, from which he was expected to move on to Harvard University. But at 18, he broke rank and apprenticed himself at Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a steam-pump maker in Philadelphia owned by family friends. The opportunity changed his life--and with it, the entire practice of work. In this ''marvelously done biography,'' reviewer Robert J. Dowling reported, the author showed Taylor to be a complex man whose 30-year barnstorming crusade on behalf of scientific management attracted supporters from the left as well as the right--and opponents from every part of the political spectrum. The book reads so well, says Dowling, that ''I was sorry when it ended.'' In A Beautiful Mind (Touchstone, $16), Sylvia Nasar, an economics correspondent for The New York Times, tells the fascinating story of John Forbes Nash Jr., the creator of modern game theory who, in 1959, while in his 30s, developed an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia. Driven by voices and visions, Nash left his tenured post at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for the next 30 years languished in obscurity. Miraculously, over time, he recovered. And in 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science as a result of his youthful work on game theory. Reviewer Michael J. Mandel found that even though the book fails to explore game theory adequately, it ''represents a staggering feat of writing and reporting and includes an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Nobel prize committee.'' Memoirs have become popular in recent years with book publishers and readers alike. In Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet (Touchstone, $14), journalist and entrepreneur Michael Wolff describes his experiences during the Net's exhilarating early days. It's a world, he says, where hype matters more than reality and where a mere idea can be dressed up and sold to eager investors, creating paper fortunes overnight. As evidence, Wolff describes how his own modest publishing venture became a hot property, sought after by venture capitalists and investors even though it had revenues of only slightly more than $1 million a year and losses of around $3 million. In time, as deal after deal collapsed, Wolff's fantasies unraveled. He was hardly alone in taking a wild ride, as Burn Rate's history of the commercialization of the Internet demonstrates. Reviewer Amy Cortese said: ''Burn Rate is a fascinating cautionary tale that should be required reading for all would-be Net entrepreneurs.'' If art and culture are more your dish, consider Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss by former Forbes and Wall Street Journal reporter Cynthia Saltzman (Penguin, $14.95). In the spring of 1990, at the peak of the art market's frenzied boom, a Japanese paper magnate paid a record $82.5 million for one Vincent van Gogh painting. The portrait, of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, the provincial French doctor who last treated van Gogh (and whose own art collection is currently on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art), had first sold for $58. How did the piece so escalate in value? That is what Saltzman set out to discover. Among other things, she found that van Gogh's work was one of the first beneficiaries of the late 19th century rise of the modern art market. Saltzman's well-researched account traces the painting's sales and eventual rescue to the U.S. following its condemnation by the Nazis as ''degenerate.'' Reviewer Thane Petersen found the book ''fascinating,'' noting that ''it provides a case study of how the modern art market developed and how the forces of commerce and connoisseurship can ensure that genius will out.'' Dramatic expenditure is also the subject of Juliet B. Schor's The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need (Harper Perennial, $13). Americans are engaged in an intensifying ''national shopping spree'' rooted in competitive emulation--keeping up with the Joneses on a manic scale, alleges Schor, a Harvard University economist. ''We are impoverishing ourselves,'' she writes, ''in pursuit of a consumption goal that is inherently unachievable.'' It's not just that we want to have the same things as the next-door neighbors. Rather, Schor says, the problem is that we want--and buy--the stuff that we see those with more moolah enjoying. In recent years, the gap between rich and poor has widened, creating a highly visible class of the superwealthy who set outrageous spending precedents for everyone else. At the same time, television ads, not to mention the programs they accompany, have brought images of Lexuses and Rolexes to the attention of average Joes. Reviewer Keith Hammonds found that Schor's book ''employs imaginative economic analysis to show us the inner workings of our materialism.'' A very different social problem is examined in Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Vintage, $14). Despite its conspiratorial tone, the book provides ''an enormously convincing and terrifying'' picture of environmental mismanagement, according to reviewer Eric Schine. For example, Davis observes that when firestorms engulf whole mountain ranges, taking with them multimillion-dollar Malibu mansions, it's not some freak of nature, as the local tv news reports proclaim. Rather, asserts the author, it's the consequence of a misguided policy that allows the chaparral to accumulate for years only to ignite into uncontrollable conflagrations. Davis, a MacArthur Fellow who has taught urban theory, discusses such diverse phenomena as the return of mountain lions to the metropolitan area and L.A.'s lack of preparation for the coming giant earthquake. At the root of all the city's problems: the ignorance of ''Anglo'' settlers who have insisted on irrigating the parched land, leveling mountaintops, and erecting endless rows of flimsy stucco houses. Even with its growth-related problems, Los Angeles probably seems like a great place to many inhabitants of the developing world. Why do some areas seem so economically blessed while others lag behind? That is the subject economic historian David S. Landes tackles in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (Norton, $15.95). Although he ranges widely in his choice of locales, the Harvard University professor emeritus is admittedly and unabashedly Eurocentric, arguing that ''for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity.'' Why? The author emphasizes Western civilization's encouragement of literacy and learning, the relative openness and flexibility of political systems and social institutions, and its ability to use, adapt, and invent technologies. Reviewer Karen Pennar found the book ''fascinating'' and ''a rich source of information,'' though ''irritating because of Landes' opinionated and crotchety style, which is particularly on display as he drags the reader into academe's culture wars.'' Could the New World have attained its current level of development without that peculiar institution, slavery? Historian Hugh Thomas, author of the 908-page The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (Touchstone, $20) doubts it could have. His account focuses on the intricacies of the transatlantic trade--its origins, methods, and economics. Moreover, the author observes, this commerce became ''an essential part of the economies of all advanced countries'' by the end of the 1700s. Key participants included Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, Scandinavia, and England. But the 1800s saw a turnabout: The growth of abolitionist sentiment in Britain led to that country's transformation from the world's most active slave trader to global antislavery policeman. Still, slavery lived on in Cuba and Brazil till the end of the 19th century. The Slave Trade, with its uncompromising show of erudition drawn from a wealth of original and secondary sources, is an indispensable account of a repugnant institution. On the lighter side, even the savviest baseball fan can profit from Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans by Tim McCarver and Danny Peary (Villard, $12.95). This book is the Gray's Anatomy of the national pastime, as McCarver, the game's renowned broadcast analyst, along with sportswriter Peary, identifies, isolates, and then fuses the ganglia of this remarkably complicated activity. For example, the authors tell us that ''a curveball on a 1-1 pitch slows the bat down; a fastball on 1-2 can cause the batter to swing late.'' Reviewer Ray Hoffman observed that the book ''peels away at the Great American Game, revealing layers of strategy and action that even the most serious fans have rarely, if ever, considered.'' Or for a humorous peek into the experiences of single women trying to make their way in a hostile world, try the hot-selling Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (Penguin, $12.95). An outgrowth of a popular British newspaper column, the book is a fictional account of the life of a disorganized, insecure, weight-obsessed woman who stumbles through a world full of couples and ''singletons'' while trying to cope with her job at the bbc. ''Bridget is silly, self-absorbed, man-obsessed--everything that the modern single woman is meant to abhor,'' noted reviewer Catherine Arnst. But, she adds, ''there is a ring of familiarity about her day-to-day struggles.'' So there you have it, a homework assignment to keep you blissfully preoccupied through Labor Day--about which time publishers will provide us with an avalanche of new books. Seems a reader's work is never done. COMPILED BY HARDY GREEN _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
|  |
 | |
INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
