A Devil's Dictionary of Business: Monkey Business; High Finance and Low; Money, the Making, Losing, and Printing Thereof; Commerce; Trade; Cleve - Softcover

Von Hoffman, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156025906X ISBN 13: 9781560259060

Publisher: Nation Books, 2006

Synopsis

This book is an incisive and entertaining overview of the business world, worthy of its antecedent, Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. Told from the perspective of the legendary Nicholas von Hoffman, it is catty, sharp, funny, mean and informative. Arranged alphabetically, from "Abacus" to "Zukor, Adlph" the dictionary elucidates the business world from top to bottom, from the ancient world to the present. The Devil's Dictionary of Business is an ideal gift for your stockbroker, bank manager, loan shark or that anticapitalist, Starbucks-bashing cousin of yours, all of whom will enjoy von Hoffman's sardonic and dizzying tour of mammon.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas von Hoffman, a Pulitzer Prize–losing author, has had a long and bumpy career in journalism, during which he has been fired more than a few times by editors and TV executives who have a limited tolerance for curmudgeonly behavior. For years he wrote a syndicated column for the Washington Post that ended in a lynch-or-resign situation. He is the author of 13 books, the best known of which is Citizen Cohn, several plays, and an opera libretto. He is a columnist for the New York Observer.

From Publishers Weekly:

The mixture of jargon, euphemism and cant that is the language of business gets a well-deserved demystification in this curmudgeon's lexicon. Von Hoffman, a New York Observer columnist, author of Citizen Cohn and self-defined "grouchy cynic," directs his disdain at Wall Street and CEOs, government and labor unions alike, and often bends over backwards to be unfair, as in this explication of "Analyst": "a human steam calliope employed by stockbrokers to tout securities the brokerage owns (or has a hidden financial interest in) and wants to unload onto the naive and ever hopeful." In between the wisecracks, he offers a trove of information on business topics from the basics of double-entry bookkeeping to the arcana of Hello Kitty merchandising, and draws grudgingly appreciative biographical thumbnails of such figures as Andrew Carnegie, Jimmy Hoffa and yo-yo mogul Donald Franklin Duncan. Throughout, von Hoffman pays tribute to capitalism's achievements in conferring organization, technology, low prices and high quality on society while bemoaning its wholesale re-engineering of that society to eliminate family meals, foist on us a culture driven by the youth marketing demographic and make the consumer "the central person in the American universe." Readers will enjoy the book either as an entertaining casual browse or as a socioeconomic soapbox.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 156025906X
• ISBN 13: 9781560259060
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 326