"At the Top" by Marylin Bender

One-paragraph review: "At the Top" functions best as a time capsule -- an aggregation of business stories collected in the early 1970s, telling a number of tales from an era in which American business was, perhaps, lost in the wilderness. The post-war boom of the 1950s and 1960s was over, the economics that favored individual stockholders and large conglomerates had been displaced, and forces like inflation and a general managerial sclerosis were starting to take a toll. The stories about General Motors, for example, are eye-opening, particularly to those of us who know what happened next. And to a modern reader, the way women and minorities are discussed almost exclusively as peculiarities is jarring. While the content is modestly useful, the writing is tedious. Some writers can make the leap from columnist to book author; this one could not. The language is somehow both stacatto and rudderless, reading like a gossip column with the paragraphs rearranged at random. The result makes "At the Top" too much work to recommend, unless the reader is highly motivated by the particulars of one of the many featured businesses. Newspaper columns should be easy to digest, but this collection of them is a chore.

Verdict: Read only if you have specific interest in one of the featured businesses (General Motors, Revlon, Kohler, Cummins Engine, or a few others) from the time period.