Ever since the Sony story, in the form of Akio Morita’s Made in Japan, won a nitch on the best-seller lists, Japanese executives have been turning out memoirs on business success for American audiences. Sadehei Kusumoto’s biography, written with the help of Edmund P. Murray, is a chronicle of Minolta’s rise from the ashes and...
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The Crash of the Greed Machine
“Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” —Acts, 20 The Big Board’s 508-point market meltdown was investigated by presidential commission, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges. Each of these bodies concluded that stocks fell because they were already much too high....
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More Money Than God
“How shameless and how greedy all these people are!” —Fyodor Dostoevsky Once there were three finance firms and then there were none. One was a Ponzi scheme, one a tax fraud, and the last was sold to American Express for $380 million. One CEO is broke and in jail; one is a wealthy fugitive from...
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Marxism & Motorcycle Maintenance
“The revolutionary loves a man who does not yet exist.’’ – Albert Camus In recent years, critics of culture have given the imagination a one way ticket to the left. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling is followed by The Radical Imagination by Irving Howe, which is followed in turn by The Sociological Imagination of...
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Dreams of Avarice
Ivan Fallon and James Srodes: Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. Delorean; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. Elizabeth Drew: Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption; Macmillan; New York. Ethics in America, a recent Gallup survey conducted for the Wall Street Journal, finds that business-class marijuana smokers are twice as...
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Maturing (& Remembering) in Print
Sam Holman by James T. Farrell Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. Achieving self-definition through self-division is a truly impossible mission, but the cordless ego of contemporary liberalism continues to try to repopulate the world with its own image. That the result would be a universe of images reflecting a totalitarian state does not disturb the liberal...