Wealth, influence, and politics are dominant chords in several of the top 10 business books of 2002 selected by BusinessWeek reviewers. Nowhere are the themes woven together more provocatively than in Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (Broadway Books). This volume presents the same basic argument as the political commentator's 1990 book, The Politics of Rich and Poor. The wealthy use their money to buy influence and then employ their resulting influence to accumulate more money. This time, the argument is placed in a broad historical context. Today, says the author, we are at the end of a third great historical cycle in which egalitarian policies get replaced "conclusively by the language of Wall Street, Darwinism, and tax-cut worship." Each time, the result has been a greater concentration of wealth and power at the top. However, the author cautions, more than once the superrich have gotten a comeuppance in the form of stock-market crashes that accompany the wealth-accumulation cycles. Reviewer Paul Magnusson found that "Wealth and Democracy is enough to make any but the most privileged Americans deeply suspicious about the growing influence of the wealthy on their government."
The rich come off better in Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (Simon & Schuster) by Jennet Conant, a former Newsweek and Vanity Fair writer. This is the story of magnate and self-taught physicist Alfred Lee Loomis, who in the late 1920s installed a state-of-the-art physics lab at his sprawling Tuxedo Park, N.Y., estate and hosted such notables as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. Later, at the outbreak of World War II, Loomis played a key role in winning support for research in radar technology that proved essential to Allied victory. Reviewer Otis Port said Conant's account would be of interest to fans of World War II history, adding that "it will captivate students of science and technology."
The name Rockefeller is synonymous with privilege. David Rockefeller provides readers with an inside look at both his life and the postwar American Establishment in Memoirs (Random House), which reviewer Bob Dowling called a "revealing, forthright account." After his student years and service in the army during World War II, Rockefeller, at age 30, took a job at Chase Manhattan Bank, where his maternal uncle Winthrop Aldrich was chairman. It took David 23 years to become chairman, at which point he greatly expanded the bank's international presence. But he hardly limited his efforts to business. He carried missives for Presidents and negotiated with potentates. Indeed, some thought Rockefeller took on too much--with the result that in the early 1970s, Chase landed on the Comptroller of the Currency's problem-bank list. But once Rockefeller focused on the difficulties, he was able to turn things around in just four years.
Wall Street power is the subject of Take on the Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don't Want You to Know; What You Can Do to Fight Back (Pantheon) by former Securities & Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur J. Levitt, with BusinessWeek's Paula Dwyer. In addition to offering advice on how to invest wisely, Levitt describes his term, which ran from 1993 to 2001, and his efforts to overcome the "unholy alliance" among corporations, stock analysts, and powerful institutional investors. In particular, Levitt describes how he took on the accounting industry over the way it allowed corporations to mislead investors on earnings. As he shows, the industry hardly took this lying down, enlisting allies from both parties and leading corporate executives to oppose reforms. In the end, Levitt got about half of what he was seeking--he wanted to ban consulting by auditors, for example, but ended up banning only certain kinds of consulting. A year after Levitt left office, the corporate scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, and others broke--and Congress hurriedly passed legislation providing just about everything Levitt wanted in the first place.
Speaking of scandals, does Martha Stewart know how to keep her name before the public or what? For a scathing portrait of the domestic diva, check out Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (Wiley) by journalist Christopher Byron. The book was published before Stewart's insider-trading scandal erupted, and therefore can't provide the details that many readers crave. Nonetheless, it colorfully chronicles Stewart's life and rapid ascent following the publication of her book Entertaining in 1982. Although Byron clearly admires Stewart's ability to turn herself into a multimillion-dollar brand, he revels in unflattering anecdotes from such sources as her former catering partner, ex-colleagues from Kmart Corp., and the tour guides, neighbors, and journalists she has alienated. It's not exactly a balanced effort since those who might feel more positively about Stewart, such as business partner Sharon Patrick--not to mention Stewart herself--did not grant interviews to the author. Byron's best moments come when he examines the business, underscoring the difficulty of maintaining any operation built around one human being. "It makes for a fascinating, if clearly lopsided, read," said reviewer Diane Brady.
Copyright 2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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