Business Adventures

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
by John Brooks
Published in 1969
464 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5


Business Adventures is a collection of 12 true news events written as narrative stories set in the United States of the 1920s through the mid 1960s. The stories come into two categories: legal and regulatory history, and business history.


The legal and regulatory histories are quite dull, and include a very cursory overview of the US income tax. I’ve already read a lot about the income tax in the United States, and found this particular story to be kind of annoying to read because he leaves out too many critical details. I suggest skipping over all the chapters dealing with regulators instead of businesses.


The rest of the book is pretty interesting. I enjoyed the chapters dealing with the Ford Edsel and the Texas Oil Inside Trading the most. The chapter on the Ford Edsel deals with Ford’s greatest failure, where they waste millions of dollars on a massive marketing campaign that proved useless. I enjoyed hearing about the endless waves of useless market research that included doing opinion polls to see if people would associate automobiles with sexual terms.


I enjoyed this book, and recommend it to people who are already interested in business. ​