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Business Adventures
Book

Business Adventures

Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

John Brooks
Open Road Integrated Media, 2014

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Background
  • Engaging

Recommendation

John Brooks’s collection of classic New Yorker articles – cited by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as a favorite read – offers gripping behind-the-scenes sagas of epochal events in 20th-century business. Originally published between 1959 and 1969, Brooks chronicles 12 business war stories, including four highlighted here: the spectacular rise of Xerox, the equally spectacular fall of the Ford Edsel, a landmark insider-trading case, and corporations’ attempts to protect trade secrets by keeping their employees from going to work for their competitors. Brooks’s elegant prose outshines the usual business writer’s; he eschews jargon for understated wit, vivid characters and restrained drama. Even though this 1969 anthology does show its age in some places, getAbstract recommends Brooks’s insights and singular style to anyone intrigued by pivotal moments that shaped the modern US economy.

Take-Aways

  • Twelve tales of 20th-century commercial legends explore behind-the-scenes events.
  • When the Ford Edsel failed in 1959 after barely more than two years – due to poor performance and worse market sense – Ford lost an estimated $350 million.
  • Xerox Corporation, which released its first copying machine in 1959, was one of the great successes of the 1960s.

About the Author

Time contributing editor and New Yorker staff writer John Brooks also wrote Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938 and The Go-Go Years.

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