No comments about Mr. Felton's Bequests.

1 comments about Huschke Von Hanstein.

1. For those who have recently become interested in Porsche cars & their history, this book should be read to understand how their products & fame evolved over the years. In the early days, Huschke von Hanstein literally "put them on the map" with his press releases & dedicated innovative efforts to gain deserved attention for a fledgling Porsche KG.

   For the many automotive enthusiasts who are knowledgeable in any degree about the history of Porsche, this book is an absolute "must-have". In contrast to some others, this book is packed with incredible photos, never published before to my knowledge. The photo of Damon Hill with "others" is wonderful ! The copy is a joy to read, detailed, accurate, & factual. It is full of trivia tid-bits, which will delight all readers. The English translation deserves special commendation.

   There is no hype or fluff in this book. The comments & reminiscences are by the very best. The Huschke & Ursula charm, courtesy, & attention is shared by all who knew them.

   Incidentally, this book is a bargain at twice the price.

1 comments about Business As a Vocation: The Autobiography of Wu Ho-su (Harvard East Asian Legal Studies).

1. This extraordinary tale of success of a low-born man, honestly and against all obstacles, to me reflects how we understand the modern United States to have been created. Mr. Wu built his business on straight-dealing and hard work. His story might be rare, but its the example that we'd all like to follow. In particular, the way in which he adapted Western business practices to the local culture should be read by every entrepeneur looking for ethical profit. The first person narrative reveals the humility and humour of a truly great man.

1 comments about King of Sunlight.

1. There have been plenty of rich eccentrics, but to my mind none match the ones who thrived in Victorian Britain. Take William Lever. In each of his houses, his bedroom was left open to the elements. The only roof, if any, was partial, and if he and his wife spent the night in rain or snow, it was just the timely clime for a good night's sleep. Sleep well he did, every night, even if he had to brush off a layer of snow upon arising. He rose very early and took a cold bath. He dined well and chewed each mouthful 32 times; like his open air sleeping, it was a health practice he recommended to others. He planned grand schemes, and never backed down on them, never changing his mind. He didn't like discussing such plans: "We won't argue: you're wrong," he would say often to his employees. An interviewer in 1905 summed him up: "Mr. Lever seldom does anything like other people." This irascible, ridiculous, and yet enlightened man died in 1925, and his company, Lever Brothers', employed 85,000 people around the world and had formed global trade and benevolent employee relations in novel ways. He deserved a biography before now, but Adam Macqueen has written a jovial and well-researched one in _The King of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up the World_ (Bantam), a welcome rescue from obscurity of an odd and influential mercantile prince.
   
   He was not born to commercial royalty, but to a mere grocer in north England in 1851, one of ten children. He went into his father's trade, but was a natural salesman and transformed the simple grocery into first a wholesaler and then a soap manufactory. Sunlight Soap appeared in 1886, cut into one pound blocks ready for sale, in the innovation of a brightly-colored box bearing the firm's colors and Sunlight logo. Lever advertised in innovative ways. He liked paintings, and he liked to buy a picture, say of a girl and her dogs, and change it for advertising purposes, inserting a soap bar and bath in the corner, as if the purpose of the artist was to illustrate washday. Lever felt that if he bought the painting, he need not tell the artist of his intentions to use it as advertising, nor to pay extra for it for that purpose. His great social experiment was Port Sunlight, a pastoral suburb and soap factory near Liverpool, a planned village for his workers. "It was his village, his creation, paid for by his cash, and here he could indulge his control-freakery to the full." It must be said that he was an essentially benign dictator, and that his community system worked for decades. He was far in advance of laws requiring factories to have fresh air, fire alarms, or sprinklers; he was genuinely concerned that employees get well treated, even in the mills which he established in the Congo, with schools and hospitals for the workers, an example of care that was unprecedented in that continent.
   
   There are many funny episodes in his life detailed here, including the preposterously blown-up incident of his cutting his head from a portrait of himself which he had commissioned from Augustus John but which he did not like. He had feuds with the newspapers, most famously with the _Daily Mail_ which turned on him after cancellation of an advertising contract; he won the suit against the paper and gave the damages to Liverpool University. His world was completely changed by the First World War, and he had a bizarre and expensive scheme for development of Hebridean islands that was a failure late in his life. Macqueen's account has to include the sad later years, when Lever could not adjust to his inability to control in detail his enormous empire, but his was overall a vastly successful entrepreneurial life, and one that remains influential today. Macqueen has drawn analogies with British contemporaries that may not be immediately recognizable by Americans, but his book is full of humorous detail that is easily appreciated. Lever was obsessive and dictatorial, but he was also humane and funny, and both sides are here in full.

No comments about A Life of John Julius Angerstein, 1735-1823: Widening Circles in Finance, Philanthropy and the Arts in Eighteenth Century London.

No comments about Beyond the Mine: A Steelworker's Story.

No comments about Chatelaine Presents Who's Who of Canadian Women.

2 comments about Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist (Economics and Sociology Thematic Issue).

1. This volume of collected essays on Fisher,edited by Robert Dimand,establishes that he was in fact one of the greatest economists of the 20th century.What has hindered Fisher's historical reputation was the problematic,incorrect,notorious forecast he made in late 1929 that the stock market was on an upward path.The Great Crash of October,1929 cost him 11-12 million dollars in losses personally.His response to this catastrophe was to publish his debt-deflation theory of depressions which correctly points to the debt load in the economy as a whole as the best indicator of a possible depression resulting from some exogenous shock that starts the snowball rolling downhill.The excessive debt loads get worse as the price level falls.This leads to a first round of personal and business bankruptcies and home foreclosures .These bankruptcies force furthur rounds of bankruptcies as the debts of one individual were the assets of another.There is no substantial difference between Fisher's analysis and Keynes's General Theory conclusions.Unfortunately, Fisher's work was ignored in the rush to accept Keynes's work.This volume reestablishes Fisher's overall standing .It has great relevance today given the excessive debt loads that have again been created since 1981 in America.



2. Few American economists have the reputation Irving Fisher has--he is probably second only to Henry George as an economist of whom the American public was aware in the early twentieth century--and no other economist has undergone such dramatic reversals of fortune over time to achieve his reputation. Fisher's ideas and life seem, in some ways, stranger than fiction....
   
   Fisher was always more than a theorist. Like other public intellectuals, such as the late Milton Friedman, he often engaged in supporting public-policy positions. Unlike Friedman's policy advocacy, however, Fisher's concerns--which ranged from good eating habits and life extension to public health, eugenics, and Franklin Roosevelt's monetary and gold policies--often interfered with his ability to perform his teaching duties. He was away from Yale more than he was there. Toward the end, he did little teaching. Fisher's driving passion to engage in public political debate, to run businesses on the side--he invented a card index system and sold it the company that became Remington-Rand, and he published a weekly index-number newsletter that at its peak reached 7 million readers (p. 51)--and to raise Yale's profile even as he raised his own rankled many of his Yale colleagues. No doubt some were simply envious of his pre-1929 crash wealth (he was a millionaire), and others were jealous of his celebrity. Many also doubted the wisdom of his positions on issues such as backing 100 percent reserves for banks and setting up a mechanism that he claimed would produce absolute price stability.
   
   Fisher's personal ideological proclivities were all over the political map and sometimes changed as circumstances did, especially after the Great Depression suggested empirical difficulties with his quantity-theory approach--an approach that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz resurrected in 1963 and argued had been true all along. Even though Fisher had studied with William Graham Sumner, he was never an advocate, as his professor had been, of total laissez-faire. As Joseph Dorfman mentions, "he opposed any all-out laissez-faire. He supported such liberal measures as high inheritance taxes and wider dispersal of corporate ownership through profitsharing, employee ownership, and co-operation. As examples of existing types of activities which were neither pure private ownership nor pure government ownership, he cited `government regulation; leases to private capitalists with reversionary rights to the city, state, or nation; subsidies; price-fixing; guaranteeing prices, underwriting against loss; taxes on profits or on excess profits'" (The Economic Mind in American Civilization [New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969], 5: 298). To this list, one may add Fisher's sometimes-successful Progressive Era crusades for pure food, abolition of alcohol consumption, human eugenics, government manipulation of the international gold price, and even national health insurance.
   
   At the height of his fame, Fisher did something of which economists should always be wary: he made an economic prediction. Two weeks before Black Friday, in October 1929, he proclaimed that stocks "have reached a permanent high plateau." Ouch! One has to admire, however, the fact that Fisher, unlike so many of his contemporary colleagues in the quirky discipline of economics, at least put his money where his theory was: he then went completely broke in the market crash. Only Yale's forgiveness of the rent on Fisher's New Haven residence, which had been sold to the university, prevented him from declaring personal bankruptcy. His prestige took a huge blow, and he found himself ridiculed, his reputation diminished. Even the economics profession in later years seemed to agree that he had become a fascinating curiosity. At the first Fisher commemorative conference at Yale in 1967, however, another famous economist, Paul Samuelson, made his own prediction: professional economists would ultimately come to recognize Fisher as "this country's greatest scientific economist" (p. 54). Unlike Fisher's unfortunate prediction, Samuelson's has been borne out. Today, most of the citations to Fisher's work pertain not to the history of economic thought, but to his theoretical work. He is, among other things, the father of the Federal Reserve's problematic quest for "price stability" and hence of the entire field of contemporary monetary policy....
   
   Had Nobel awards in economics existed during Fisher's lifetime (he died in 1947, and the first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1969), there is little doubt he would have been a recipient. His wide-ranging theoretical ideas have influenced modern neoclassical theory probably more than any other individual's ideas, and many remain relevant for policy decisions today. Most conference proceedings are mixed bags, at best, but Celebrating Irving Fisher is a happy exception: the level of analysis is high and the discussions always on point. Any reader interested in the life and ideas of one of the nation's foremost economists will find much of value in the book. Whether your interest is the history of ideas or Fisher's analytical contributions, Celebrating Irving Fisher is a wonderful place to begin to understand why Fisher continues to be widely regarded as a pioneering economic theorist.

No comments about Golden Phoenix: The Biography of Peter Munk.

No comments about Staying in the Game: The Remarkable Story of Doc Seaman.