cover image Capitalist Fools

Capitalist Fools

Nicholas Von Hoffman. Doubleday Books, $22.5 (313pp) ISBN 978-0-385-41674-0

Common though antibusiness books have become, there's notable wit in this rip-up of American capitalists. Von Hoffman's ( Citizen Cohn ) laceration of J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk et al. (who at least ``did something'') and latter-day money-combs such as James Robinson, Robert Campeau, Henry Kravis, Carl Icahn and Michael Milken reads like the monologue of a standup comic. Taking the story of business publisher B. C. Forbes and his bon vivant son Malcolm as a jumping-off point, von Hoffman heat-strips 100 years of big-bucks, behind-the-scenes corporate capers undertaken at the expense of stockholders, labor, taxpayers and consumers. Among the juicy bits: National Cash Register Co. founder John Patterson fired executives who had the wrong phrenological bumps; turn-of-the-century steel magnate Charles Schwab built himself a 90-bedroom Hudson River mansion; and top-level corporate hiring once routinely amounted to ``affirmative action for a white upper-class male.'' Von Hoffman prescribes an Rx for errant big-business persons, but doesn't suggest how to make them swallow it. ( Sept. )