A Devil's Dictionary of Business: Monkey Business; High Finance and Low; Money, the Making, Losing, and Printing Thereof; Commerce, Trade; Clever Tricks; Tours de Force; Globalism and Globaloney
Von Hoffman, Nicholas
ISBN 10: 1560257121 ISBN 13: 9781560257127
Published by Nation Books, 2005
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hardcover
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Seller Inventory # 1560257121-4-35364861
Synopsis:
A Devil’s Dictionary of Business is a godsend to those looking for an incisive and entertaining overview of the business world, told from the perspective of the legendary Nicholas von Hoffman, the former Washington Post columnist and commentator for 60 Minutes.
From the Abacus to Zukor, von Hoffman summarizes, details, bewails, and elucidates the business world from top to bottom, from the ancient world to the Enron world. This catty, chatty, sharp, funny, mean, informative, and engaging book is worthy of its antecedent, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, and 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.
From the Abacus to Zukor, von Hoffman summarizes, details, bewails, and elucidates the business world from top to bottom, from the ancient world to the Enron world. This catty, chatty, sharp, funny, mean, informative, and engaging book is worthy of its antecedent, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, and 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.
Reviews:
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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Bibliographic Details
Title: A Devil's Dictionary of Business: Monkey ...
Publisher: Nation Books
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Fair