Book Reviews

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The White Sharks Of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans And The Original Corporate Raiders
By Diana B. Henriques
Scribner Books

Harnessing Complexity Organizational Implications Of A Scientific Frontier
By Robert Axelrod and Michael D Cohen
Published by Free Press

The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living
By Martin Clark Knopf

The White Sharks Of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans And The Original Corporate Raiders

Danger in the water.

The first in-depth portrait of the life and times of the trailblazing financier Thomas Mellon Evans -- the man who pursued wealth and power in the 1950s with a brash ruthlessness that forever changed the face of corporate America.

Long before Michael Milken was using junk bonds to finance corporate takeovers, Thomas Mellon Evans used debt, cash, and the tax code to obtain control of more than eighty American companies. Long before investors began to lobby for "shareholder's rights," Evans was demanding that public companies be run only for their shareholders -- not for their employees, their executives, or their surrounding communities. To some, Evans's merciless style presaged much that is wrong with corporate life today. To others, he intuitively knew what was needed to keep America competitive in the wake of a global war.

In The White Sharks of Wall Street, New York Times investigative reporter Diana Henriques provides the first biography of this pivotal figure in American business history. She also portrays the other pioneering corporate raiders of the postwar period, such as Robert Young and Louis Wolfson, and shows how these men learned from one another and advanced one another's takeover tactics.

Harnessing Complexity Organizational Implications Of A Scientific Frontier

Recent advances in the study of complexity have given scientists profound new insights into how natural innovation occurs and how its power can be exploited. Now two pioneers in the field, Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, provide leaders in business and government with a guide to complexity that will help them make effective decisions in a world of rapid change.

Building on evolutionary biology, computer science, and social design, Axelrod and Cohen have constructed a unique framework for improving the way people work together. Their approach to management is based on the concept of the Complex Adaptive System, which can describe everything from rain forests to the human gene pool, and from automated software agents to multinational companies.

This simple, paradigm-shifting analysis of how people work together will transform the way we think about getting things done in a group. Harnessing Complexity is the essential guide to creating wealth, power, and knowledge in the 21st century.

The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living

It is not usual practice to review novels in The Galt Global Review, but I am prepared to make an exception for this book, as the first-time author is not well known and the publicity make not be great. But it deserves to be. It deserves to win prizes and be adapted for film just so we can all say: "Well, it was good. But the book was better."

Evers Wheeling of Norton, North Carolina is a semidissolute judge, unincumbered by children, hobbies or a fulfilling marriage. Then he meets Ruth Esther English, and attractive young woman whose dim-witted brother is up before the judge on drug-charges. The story then winds its merry way through an incredible comic plot, richly woven with potheads, white trash, and trailer dwellers. Moving along through interstate treasure hunts, marital vengeance, stolen money, love letters, murder, ancestry and mysterious alabaster tears.

Martin Clark's grand storytelling lends a melodramatic mix of the gothic and the legal. It should come with a warning: 'do not start this book before bedtime'. It makes for a long night when you can't put a good book down. Reviewed by Lindsay Wood.

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