Critical Review – „Business Adventures – Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street“

The book “Business Adventures – Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street” written by John Brooks was first published in 1969. It consists of twelve chapters concerning business and stock-related matters and issues. John Brooks intended to share his experience and wanted to point out some really important changes in the business world.
The author, John Brooks was a writer, who won certain awards. He worked for the New Yorker magazine and his specialty was to illustrate financial topics. Additionally Brooks was the author of various fiction and non-fiction books, which were mostly about business. To name a few of his most famous books: “Once in Golconda”, “The Go-Go Years” and “Business Adventures” are books with mainstream fame.
Chapter four of the book „Business Adventures – Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street“, written by John Brooks, is called „A Reasonable Amount of Time“. A new found mineable body in the Canadian Shield was the cause for a lawsuit, filed against the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company and 13 directors of it. The purpose of the text is to show that defraud will be enforced by the law and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The fifth chapter of the book is called “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox”. In the middle of 20th century a lot of companies had the issue that the production of copies came along with high costs and a complicated process.
Xerox Corporation, which was based in Rochester New York, grew big in the 1960s under the direction of Joseph C. Wilson. Wilson’s family company was Haloid Photographic Company, which produced photographic papers. In the post-World War 2-period Haloid found Chester Carlson, who was an inventor with the idea of building a new and cheaper copying machine. He invented a new process - electrophotography - to be able to simplify copying. Haloid made a deal with Carlson to inherit the process. This led to a change of name to xerography and to the renaming of the company to Haloid Xerox. The company relied on loans of money. Every stockholder of Haloid Xerox made a lot of money when the first xerography machine was released in 1959.

The author, John Brooks, wrote these twelve case histories from American business for the readers of the New York Times. But he does not group the chapters in any way or offer any introduction or conclusion. The chapters are different from another and there is no particular order in his structure.
The author mostly uses primary sources. All events and issues happened in John Brooks’s lifetime. Most of the time he makes use of his own experience and if not, he takes opinions from legitimate business characters.
These two chapters have the same overall organization. The author starts off with a long introducing paragraph to describe the background situation. Throughout these chapters he tends to run off the track many times. The main body of these two chapters have about the same amount of pages.
In chapter five I only want to cite one sentence, which describes Brooks writing style depending on too much side information: “When he joined Haloid Xerox in 1958, his laboratory was a loft above a Rochester garden-seed-packaging establishment; something was wrong with the roof, and on hot days drops of molten tar would ooze through it and spatter the engineers and the machines.” (page 95 in my ebook) This sentence refers to Horace W. Becker, who was a Xerox engineer. It is a long sentence like most of Brooks sentences.
His multi-clause style can also be seen here: “But once the machine was on its way out of the shop and on to showrooms and customers, Becker related, his troubles had only begun, because he was now held responsible for malfunctions and design deficiencies, and when it came to having a spectacular collapse just at the moment when the public spotlight was full on it, the 914 turned out to be a veritable Edsel.” (also page 95) An author like him could easily transform this into more and simpler sentences, but he chooses to stick to his unusual style.
Brooks uses characters to underline his stories. They are real people and he does not change their names. He describes them thoroughly and gives a lot of information about them. In chapter four he describes Richard Clayton and David Crawford just to name a couple. In chapter five he describes Sol Linowitz and W. Allen Wallis.
One difference I noticed reading these two chapters was that in chapter four Brooks did not write in first-person narrative because he never used the form of “I” or “we”. But in the fifth chapter you can see the form “I” a lot of times.
The content of the two chapters contributes to our classes because we often discuss financial and business topics. It gives us a look from a different angle of things and it illustrates that you have to observe an issue from all standpoints possible. It is written in a very informal style which contains many multi-clause sentences. The book had its own huge hype train behind it which was caused by Bill Gates declaring the book as the best business book he has ever read. The text is heavy-going and is only of interest to someone who is especially into a certain topic or subject. Personally I do not like Brooks writing style at all because it is making me fall asleep. My interest is certainly on business topics and also past events, which is the case here, but Brooks gives too much unnecessary information which makes you lose focus and makes you read the same sentence all over again. The title “Business Adventures” is not really applying. Although a lot of the stories are about business matters, many are actually about economics and finance. Additionally since there are more disasters than triumphs, misadventures would be the better call for the title of this book.

words: 1005

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[ 1 ]. cp. Backcover of „Business Adventures“