cover image In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, the World's Most Powerful Retailer

In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, the World's Most Powerful Retailer

Bob Ortega. Crown Business, $25.95 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-6377-9

It's fun when a talented reporter tries to cut someone he doesn't care for down to size, and that's exactly what the Wall Street Journal's Ortega does here. ""It's not hard to picture Sam Walton as a Victor Frankenstein,"" he writes of his late, multibillionaire subject, ""snatching ideas from other businesses as if they were body parts...and setting into lurching motion a creation that would enthrall his business counterparts, but that many others would come to regard as a monster."" But beyond his dislike of Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart executives past and present (whom he accuses of engaging in unfair labor practices, paying near minimum wage salaries and driving manufacturers out of the country), Ortega has unearthed new information. For example, it appears that Walton's decision to call his employees ""associates"" and to offer them profit sharing and stock options was made, in part, to help stave off unionization. Although Ortega does an excellent job of providing a context for Wal-Mart's remarkable rise to becoming the nation's largest retailer, the book takes on the feel of a one-sided fight because virtually no one in a position of authority at the company would talk to him. Still, Wal-Mart, as one of the nation's largest booksellers, could get the last laugh: Will it carry Ortega's book upon publication? Author tour. (Nov.)