Business Money Books

Mr. Jenkins' use of humor and provision of very practical ways of solving financial woes, is dynamic. Using questions that everyday people ask, he addresses issues that are very relevant to today's economic crisis.

I really appreciate Lee Jenkins addressing the Black Community on financial issues. I ordered these books for my nephew in Detroit. I have copies. They really like his writtings. As a Pastor...I share a lot of the information with the congregation...even this morning!
Thanks Lee...we need you!
Pastor Rene' Whimtore
Denver,CO

SO FAR SO GOOD - NOT ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE BOOK YET, BUT I DO THINK I FOUND UNCLAIMED MONEY ON THE RECOMMENDED WEBSITE AND HAVE ALREADY SUBMITTED MY CLAIM TO THE STATE TREASURER. GOOD TIPS INSIDE, WORTH THE READ FOR THE SMALL COST - ESPECIALLY IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR STUDENT LOANS WORK.

Personal finance expert and television personality Lynnette Khalfani presents Zero Debt for College Grads: From Student Loans to Financial Freedom, a guide that lives up to its title. Written in plain terms for readers of all backgrounds, Zero Debt for College Grads covers money management lessons not taught in school, how to negotiate with a lender for better terms on a loan (or with an employer for help with loan repayment), determine what to do if immediately paying off a loan is not possible, clear up defaulted loans, establish a good credit rating, and much more. The tips range from cutting housing, transportation, and clothing costs to earning extra money at home (sell extra stuff, get a roommate or tenant, and itemize your deductions) to the pros and cons of loan consolidation to how to wipe out the plague of credit card debt. A "must-have" for anyone about to graduate from college.

I recommend any one with college debt or any considering going to college to read this book. Its wonderful. I have alot of debt and this is helping eliminate it quicker thank I thought. Thanks!

I was very disappointed in this book after seeing it highly praised in my daily newspaper's finance section. The useful information would make a much smaller book. The first third wastes time and pages saying, "you will learn...this book will teach you..." Well, I already have the book. You've sold me the book! Get to the point! The info about different types of college loans and refinancing them I had just found myself on the college financing Website, so I was disappointed she had no new information there. And how to pay off your credit cards quickly...duh! Pick a strategy: pay off higher interest rates first, lower balances first, or highest balances first, whatever floats your boat. The problem with that is it all requires money. I never learned how she paid off $100,000 worth of credit card debt in three years unless she made $100,000 more than she needed to live on in those three years. All she is teaching you is how to manage your vast income so it quickly pays off your vast indebtedness. The book I really need is how to pay off vast debt with inadequate income. This is not that book.

My mother loves saving money and making a budget so I grew up in an atmosphere of financial gain. After college, grad school, and entering the "real world" for the first time I found myself charging too much on my credit cards and having to pay high student loan fees. I heard Ms. Khalfani on the Russ Parr Morning Show and I decided to give her book a try.

Now there was a lot of information that did not pertain to me because I'm not heavily in debt, BUT everything she said was on point. She offers great money saving suggestions/options that I forgot about or was too lazy to actually do; she provides wonderful links and info on ways to "beat the system." For example, my mother has been nagging me for months to call my credit card company's to lower my interest rates. I slowed around to doing it but I was glad to read that Ms. Khalfani mentioned the same advice, she tells ppl how to get through to creditors, how to lower their interest rates, how to move their payment dates and why. Most of all she provides one of the best suggestions for credit card debt reduction.

Overall I found her book to be full of great information. This book is for those who truly want to pay off their bills and not just pay on them or live paycheck to paycheck. If you want to eventually, have more money in your pocket I suggest you buy this book.

Edited Aug. 7, 2007:

I strongly believe the author provides the readers with enough suggestions to bring in additional income. She spends an entire chp. discussing how to cut corners how to help you manage your debt. I can see her getting out of 100,000 dollars of debt by slicing her living expenses in half and getting another income flowing. I think anyone even with limited means can do this. Essentially what the author is saying is that if you live in a 1 bedroom, downgrade to a studio and get a part time job. Or move into a 2 bedroom with a reliable roommate. I think a lot of her tips are helpful. However, I do think for some who are aware with budgets and how they work I would recommend her other books, such as, The "Money Coach's Guide to Your First Million." If money is extremely tight and you are working on a really tight income with high debt I also recommend: "Girl, Make Your Money Grow!: A Sister's Guide to Protecting Your Future."

* At first, I thought when we deposit our money into our bank account, the value of the money just stay the same but after reading this book, it has totally change my opinion on this subject.
* Although the percentage we get from our bank account is not that much, but at least the money is flowing and the advantage is given to us as the consumers.
* Spending or leaving our money inside our bank account may not be a good idea. We better spend the money on something that will invest for our future like mutual funds or something.

I bougth this book thinking iwill find some quick answers about the money but the only thing i found was that this book is for people who has a lot of time or people in vacation who want to read something about the money in a nice story, but if you are the people that want quickly answers about the money, i recommend to you a book named ECONOMIC EXPLAINED Autor: Rober Heilbroner and Lester Thurow.

Where do you think the book advanced payment coming from? THe book only tells half of the story.

Barbara Garson's look at globalization manages to be thoughtful and breezy at the same time. Garson, a leftwing activist and writer, decided to follow her own money - specifically, her book advance - as it coursed through the global economy from a small-town bank to mighty Chase Manhattan and points beyond. Her odyssey took her to a rowdy shareholder meeting in New York to an oil project in Thailand to small towns in America devastated by corporate "restructurings.'' Although she has a clear political point of view, she is unfailingly open-minded and fair about the people she meets and writes about - with the possible and understandable exception of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. Her writing is more nuanced than her just-folks style sometimes suggests. She gently hints at the claustrophobic atmosphere in small town America by describing the demise of a pizzeria that failed to do business with the local bank (a bank she otherwise writes about with considerable warmth). Garson also has a gift for explaining complicated stuff. I was especially enlightened by her account of the origins of Eurodollars and her description of how oil refining works. Sometimes her loosey-goosey style can get annoying. I occasionally wished she'd be more specific, especially on financial terms. Several times she referred to 20% profits without saying what she meant - return on equity? Increase in stock price? Something to do with dividends? Garson's call for a more humane form of globalization is hard to argue with - though the specifics are debatable. For this reader (of somewhat confused politics) one conclusion emerged crystal clear from Garson's description of working poor parents scrimping on medical treatment for themselves and their kids: America's refusal to enact universal health coverage is shameful and wrong.

Some books set out to accomplish the impossible and come admirably close. Barbara Garson's volume is a prime example. Can you deposit money in a little rural bank and really trace its spread across the global monetary system? How do you know that a multi-million dollar loan to, say, shrimp exporters in Thailand, really has anything to do with the actual dollars you deposited? But that's not the point of this book. The author embarks on a whirlwind, worldwide tour of the global financial juggernaut, and shows how money falls like a drop in a pond and emits waves of disruption that seemingly spread out forever. Garson concludes that deregulation needs to be reigned in, a reasonable anticipation of the Enron mess. We from getAbstract highly recommend her book to business people and consumers who want a better feel for what the "global economic order" is all about, why people are protesting at each meeting of the WTO and whether you should be steamed as well.

Born in Scotland but an immigrant to the United States as a teenager, Andrew Carnegie has been variously characterized as a "captain of industry" or a "robber baron" by those who have chronicled his rise to wealth and fame in the latter nineteenth century. After selling his steel company to J.P. Morgan at the turn of the century, Carnegie devoted himself to philanthropic goals. He gave away more than $350 million to various causes and endowed more than 250,000 libraries. His philanthropic activities were underpinned by a fundamental belief in the virtue of hard work, perseverance, and self-improvement through education, hence his emphasis on libraries and the endowing of other educational organizations. Fundamentally, this book offers a restatement of the "Horatio Alger" myth of the "American dream" of success through personal commitment. At the same time Carnegie seeks to pass on his wisdom gained through a lifetime of effort. A significant and fascinating statement of American industrial individualism that is required reading for all who wish to understand the history of the United States in the latter nineteenth century, Carnegie's autobiography also served as a model for many others to follow. Unfortunately, few achieved the success that Carnegie enjoyed despite the diligence they may have registered.

It has been over a year since I ground my way through this book. My lack of adaptability to the Olde Worlde English may have contributed to this. I found this to be a long book about an interesting individual whose sole purpose for writing the book, I have concluded, was to leave a lasting, self-congratulatory reminder of his own life. I must disagree with a previous review that stated it was a must for any young ambitious person. I am; it wasn't.
For sheer inspiration from another person's life, I would recommend works on Lincoln, the Wright brothers (Kill Devil Hill), Richard Branson, Edison, Spielberg, Mme Curie, Bruce Lee, Iacocca and Einstein.

The vanity of today's uneducated society is breathtaking. White is black and black is white and 'a little knowledge' is indeed proving very dangerous. This book (along with the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin) should be read by every American citizen - to relearn what America once represented.

For example, Carnegie Steel, the world's largest company in 1900, was NOT a corporation; it was a private partnership. The sale of the company to JP morgan (for half a billion dollars) was done on a handshake; a contract was a mere afterthought. Reputation and honesty and customer service were THE guiding principles of the era. 'Individual responsibility' was considered a good thing in those days.

America now has more lawyers per capita than any other nation on Earth. Our politicians now attempt to micro-manage every detail of our lives. You break a fingernail and sue the universe. We have become terrified of freedom. Read this book if you want to understand how America rose from a third world country to a superpower between 1800 and 1900 - without government intervention or welfare or all the millions of rules and regulations we now hold so dear. We have traded away our freedom for security. The price is higher than you think.

I'll admit that my primary motivation for reading this book was somewhat shallow--I basically wanted to read about how one of history's most successful businessmen amassed so much wealth. To be honest, the book didn't really give as many details as I would have liked on that particular interest. But what I got along the way made the book worth it.

First and foremost, after reading 350 pages of Carnegie writing about his life you feel like you really start to know him, to get a sense of what kind of human being he was, and even to get a sense of his somewhat remarkable confidence level that exists in conjunction with his pretty inspiring level of benevolence and compassion. But I think even more than getting a sense of Carnegie, you get a sense of the time he lived in. Some of the most engaging parts of the book for me were the first-hand accounts of Lincoln during the Civil War, or Carnegie's conversations with President Harrison about a small uprising in Chile. You also hear about how he handled the strikes of steel workers, an occurence I'd only read about in history books but never learned directly about from the perspective of the manager.

All throughout Carnegie peppers with his nuggets of wisdom, and you get the feeling he knows people want them really badly but that he chooses to give them sparingly.

In the end, I probably will never re-read this book, but I feel better educated about one of history's greatest industrialists, greatest benefactors, and the time he lived in after having read it. If you have a nascent interest in history, you will most likely enjoy this book; if you're looking for a "how to make your millions" from a master, I would look elsewhere.

This book was pracitically written for the ambitious young man, as there are many references to this. Mr. Carnegie serves as a great role model, which I feel is quite important, especially considering the terrible events in schools lately. Carnegie emphasizes the importance of self-improvement, knowing your talents, being kind, and also the importance of public speaking. You will learn important lessons thru personal anecdotes of his life. This book should be required reading for every adolescent attending high school.

I'm an undergraduate student in Finance and Economics. I picked up this book for a term paper for my Public Economics class.

If there's one thing to say about De Grauwe's book is that it seemed very useful, down to earth, in contrast to other economics books I've read. The concepts covered in the book were explained very clearly, and for someone interested in the area, the theories seemed ready for use for application in understanding the important issues of monetary integration.

Whether there are flaws in the theory are--honestly--beyond my grasp; I'd have to read more. The book seems written and revised fairly enough and hasn't received negative comments from the faculty at my university. If someone else has a contrary opinion, I'm sure it'd help for people to hear.

Check the sample pages if you want to see if this book would be good for you.

Good economic history...not an easy read but if you are interested in post Civil War economics and the Guilded Age this book covers the subject very well. Most of the people who would be interested in this book are already well versed in the history of this era and this text may provive them with some detail tid bits that they were not aware of.

The book looks at mainly the administrations of Grant, Hayes, Authur and Cleveland and their relationships with Wall Street and the Rail Roads. One obsecure individual that is talked about is Tom Scott of the Penn. Central RR and his corruption of Congress. The major evens like the Great Rail Strike, Pullman Strike, The Hay Market, Homestead Steel are all covered in rather great detainl and make for interesting reading when taken in context with the political enviroments that created them.

If your taste runs with top selling histories writen by scribes for hire who think nothing of plagiarism and retelling the same old myths we were told in school, pass this book by. This is history the way it should be.

This is a classic, and worth the time to read. The parallels with the present era are obvious and instructive. On a personal note, I found it interesting to read the author's comments about John C. Fremont and the Texas Pacific sale and to juxtapose it with Sally Denton's biography of John and Jessie Fremont, Passion and Principle.

This probably rates higher than 3 stars if you are an economic historian. It is a detailed dislogue of the years between 1865 and 1900. It is not an easy read, but for the student of the era it is about as complete a recitation as you would ever hope to find and should prove useful. For the average reader however it is not an easy read, is not told in a narrative manner and three stars may be too many. It may tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

_Age of Betrayal_, I have to say, was a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read. Mr. Beatty, who demonstrates his probity, erudition and understanding time and again on NPR's _On Point_, easily imports these virtues into writing. His is politically inflected historiography in the best sense, comparing favorably to marxian British historians of previous generations like E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones. For the author, what is past is incontrovertibly prelude, and his treatment of the Gilded Age offers the perceptive reader as many insights into his own historical moment as of historical ones.

To his credit Mr. Beatty wears his learning and convictions lightly; the polemic is always subtle, never heavy-handed, and is seamlessly integrated into the prose; the gusto with which he tackles his subject proves infectious. Some chapters, such as those treating the rise and spectacular collapse of the Populists, and the labor unrest at the Carnegie steelworks, have a tragic sweep to them that will leave only the most jaded eye unmoist. As one who studies late-nineteenth century British literature, I really have to credit the author with deepening my understanding of events on this side of the Atlantic during the same period.

I do, however, have two quibbles with the text. First, the author's prose style, while generally graceful, does show a proclivity toward terseness, as well as Chicago-Manual economy of punctuation, which sometimes make even more formidable the dense thickets of data the author frequently drops his reader into. Second, while in the main Mr. Beatty confines himself to the period stated in the book's subtitle, 1865-1900, he does at times look forward to FDR's New Deal, and offers as a coda some words of Woodrow Wilson's in 1913. What the author fails to discuss in his small leap forward into 1913 is another significant event of that year, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a puzzling omission given that Lincoln's greenback paper currency and the free-silver of the Populists occupy such important places in his narrative.

Puzzling because the Fed did exactly what Lincoln did, and what the Populists proposed: replace metal-back currency with fiat. The only twist -- and a critical one, keeping with the theme of betrayal -- is that the power of fiat was removed from government and placed in the hands of private bankers through legislation drafted by representatives of the reviled caesariat of robber-barons. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest single greatest betrayal, ensuring as it does that the everyday wage-worker will lose around three percent per annum the value of his labors' fruits -- and it is one the author never mentions. I'd be interested to hear how the author would defend the creation of the Fed as an innovation on what the free-silver folk, whom Beatty, following Milton Friedman, claims would have triggered inflation of low-double digits. I am therefore led to ask: Is the steady, inexorable march of three-percent inflation preferable to that which the free-silverers would have engendered? Is it simply the rate of the progression that makes the former palatable? To me, this is like saying the prisoner condemned death by _lin chi_ died before the thousandth cut, and thus did not die by _lin chi_.

These are of course ancillary considerations, and they do not prevent me from recommending _Age of Betrayal_ as an instructive, entertaining read. I also recommend Louis Menand's magnificent _The Metaphysical Club_ for discussion of another dimension of the same era.

I was really interested in this book and have enjoyed listening to Mr. Beatty on NPR radio as a commentator. But I found his book to be a hard read, even hard to skim. It drifts away from the big picture and wanders endlessly in microscopic details that overwhelmed me. He's seemed more enamored with tricky sentence structure - I some times had to read a sentence several times to sort out all of the heavily comma'd parenthetical expressions. The endless references were useless. In today's age of electronics and hyperlinks a book like this would be much better if it wasn't on paper.

I'm interested in any of the works of C.H. I have read the Master Key several times - a truly amazing and ground breaking book. Unfortunately nothing else is available in the UK. Can you help please ??

If there is only one business book to own, this is it!

Doug Hall lays out a straight forward, highly logical, and common sense means to communicate with your customers. Using his approach of communicating through overt benefits, dynamic difference, and real reason to believe, your business is sure to grow. This is a keeper!

I buy about a book a week from Amazon and never write reviews - but I have to on this one.

Did you buy one of the original Apple Ipods? All the PR and reviews got your expectations up - only to find out that they went cheap on the battery. It lasts about 3-minutes. Big disappointment. It was capable of so much more.

Same with this book. I LOVED Hall's first book. Great breakthrough stuff. So when this one was released I got in the pre-publication line. I saved the book for a Saturday cross-country plane ride ready to savor. Had the highlighter all ready and - bummer. Couldn't believe it.

It's the equivlant of "Eat plenty of vegetables, get plenty of sleep and brush your teeth every day." Mundane, sophormoric stuff to be associated with the name Doug Hall. Not at all in the same league as his first book - a masterpiece. This guy is so much better than this cute little book of lists. I'll buy his next one, pay money to go see him - but this isn't the Doug Hall of the first book.

Up Your Business Success Odds to 80 percent/TESTED TO WORK!!

Is your business or business or product idea focused in a way that makes its success chances from 60 to over 80%?

Or is it in the 17 to 23 % range that most people achieve?

Would you like a guide that explains the 3 principles that can help you to make that upgrade & that has been tested to work ??

Would you like a way to test your marketing materials IN ADVANCE & know how successful they're likely to be--that also has been found to be accurate in practice to within a few percentage points?

How about detailed, reasonably easy to use, tips from a man who successfully teaches Fortune 500 exec's how to do all this?

If so, immediately buy, read, & use this book !!

You'll be dramatically glad you did !!

I think it's one of the 3 best business books ever written.

David Eller

The average 5-star rating that this book has received to date is interesting. My 2-star rating credits Doug Hall's follow-up to his classic "Jump Start Your Brain" text with introducing readers to basic marketing in an enthusiastic manner. However, unlike the first "Jump Start" book (refer to the associated 5-star review I wrote for that text), there really is no uniqueness to this book when compared to other business-related marketing books except for the style in which the material is presented. Hall constantly brings up his "Merwyn" probability success tool that is being sold to the reader as a good way to predict the outcome of their product ideas, but since it is a proprietary tool there is no concrete explanation of the analytics behind the tool. Often, the book seems like it is merely a 300+-page sales pitch for Merwyn (and by the way, there is even a coupon in the book to get a one-time discount on use of his tool through the author's firm). After reading "Jump Start Your Business Brain" line by line for the first few chapters, it became quickly apparent that there is definitely a large amount of non-value-added fluff in the material. I still highly recommend "Jump Start Your Brain", but I do not believe this new Hall effort is worth your time unless you are completely new to marketing theory.

The book is full of marketing truisms that are presented better elsewhere, but set forth here as if they were new discoveries. For example, "benefits sell more than features." Well, duh! You already know this if you have read a single introductory marketing text. That said, the book's positive point is the energy with which he conveys the information, and it is a reasonably engaging read. The negative point is the ego of the author rises to the level of distraction.

So what's with all the glib five star reviews this book has received? Was I missing the point, was I reading a different book, or were there a few reviews planted by the publisher?

Actually, there was nothing particularly shocking. The scandal of Halliburton's involvement in Iraq is pretty obvious, and the author adds no information about that. I would guess the more scandalous aspects will come out in the future. When it is clear that we went to war solely so that Halliburton could have the pipeline work, then I'll be mildly perturbed, but not surprised. There must after all have been some real reason.

If one is looking for dirt on Cheney, there really isn't much. He is completely overshadowed in this book by LBJ, Herman Brown, Alvin Wirtz and others, and actually, Robert Caro's books on LBJ are much more enthralling accounts of all that. Still, it's fun to read about these tough Texas mothers with their whiskey and bags full of hundred dollar bills. In fact, now that I think about it I highly recommend all of Caro's books about LBJ.

Coming back to this one, it kind of fizzles out. Halliburton and Brown & Root have interesting histories. People who naively suppose that modern day public officials are honest and that their words are related to their motives in any way may be alarmed, but I would guess that most people reading this book in the first place aren't expecting a tale gleaming with moral gems. And Cheney as a rogue is a humorless dud. The most surprising thing I learned about him was that he had his first heart attack at 37!

It was a good read. Pretty scary stuff. As far as Chaney goes, the only thing that would have been more of a surprise would have been that he was identified as one of the founding members of the Log Cabin Republicans but for someone who spends so much time at undisclosed locations, stranger things could happen.

Bud Brown

Did I get the wrong book from Amazon.com? The book is advertised to be a book about Cheney and Halliburton - it is about Halliburton but not Cheney. For example, pictures of Cheney appear on both the front and back covers of the book jacket. But that is very misleading. The book is not about Cheney per se; there are in fact only a dozen or so pages dealing with Cheney near the end of the book and he plays only a minor role; he finally appears on page 191 of the 237 added seemingly as an afterthought. Surprisingly, the dominant politician in the book is the former president and Texas native Lyndon Baines Johnson or LBJ. By my estimate and it is confirmed by looking at the index, LBJ takes up three times as much space in the book as Cheney, and furthermore he plays a much more important role in setting any "agenda" at Brown & Root - a subsidiary of Halliburton. Even though the book even if falsely promoted it is still an interesting read about two old US companies and their eventual merger; but at just 237 pages long in medium font is not a 5 star effort, just 3.5 stars, maybe only 3 stars at best.

The first company described is the oil well services company Halliburton started in approximately 1920 by Erle Halliburton in Oklahoma. Erle Halliburton died in 1957 leaving a successful and financially strong and independent business enterprise as his legacy. The second company is Brown & Root (B & R) that developed from being a Texas road construction company that was started around 1917 to become a major defense contractor. The business grew through political connections and after many decades B & R had become the largest engineering and construction company in the USA, boosted by the Vietnam war effort, and fed by a series of domestic and foreign construction and defense contracts stretching around the globe.

The book tells (very briefly) how these companies developed, merged in 1962 with R & B being bought by Halliburton, and how they became a major defense contractor. It also contains many side stories such as the influence of the rising political star LBJ in Texas, dam construction, back room operators such as A.J.Wirtz, political intrigue, the milking of Roosevelt's New Deal money, navy boat building, the fall of Leland Olds who was a bureaucrat blocking their expansion, the Johnson Space Center contract, Vietnam contracts, the LOGCAP contract, the Dresser merger, Henry Waxman's congressional charges against Halliburton and the sole sourcing, etc. Cheney appears near the end of the book and I did learn that Cheney flunked out of Yale and was arrested twice for DWI in his youth. There are a number of insights and comments on the current contracts to Halliburton. But since Halliburton had the LOGCAP contract before Cheney, it seems to me that Cheney played no more a dramatic role - I suspect - than any other good CEO or "rainmaker" might have played at Halliburton to boost its revenues.

As a book I would say it rates just 3 or 4 stars since as the author acknowledges that he uses and number of existing books such as "Erle P. Halliburton: Genius with Cement" and other publications, and most of the book is about the older history - as I said Cheney does not even appear until page 191 out of 237. So even when he appears the information is scant. Having said that it is clear the author has done extensive research, he has a nice reference section for further reading, he brings the story together, but overall it seems like a short collection of historical facts and tidbits. As it stands, it is more of a "gateway" book or introduction and it would have been a 5 star book if it was about 400-500 pages long and was more complete. But some of the references and 40 pages of notes at the back are worth a follow up read.

Author Dan Briody has written a book that goes beyond pundit finger-pointing over the controversial "no-bid" contracts relationship between Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a serious examination of the high-octane blend of profit and politics that fuels the Bush administration's agenda. Briody begins with an extensive history of two Texas companies, Halliburton and Brown & Root (now KBR). He deftly portrays how they made their fortunes despite Great Depression hardships, World War II and political intrigues aplenty. Briody pulls no punches while maintaining a reportorial (if not totally objective) tone, although people who hold different political views might argue with his opinions and conclusions. We recommend this saga to anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the ongoing tryst between corporate America and its politicians. While this book is not presented as a smoking gun, it portrays insider politics that smolder like an oil fire you can't quite extinguish, leaving sort of an ugly haze.

I actually enjoyed his book about Carlyle and it's the reason I bought this book. But there should have been another 300 pages. It did a pretty good job of describing the origins of Halliburton and Brown and Root and described the relationship both Brown and Root and later the combined company had with Lyndon Johnson. But it's other political relationships of the time were not fleshed out, and only briefly mentioned. Basically anything about the companies histories after the late 1950s was brief and I felt shortchanged once I got to this part of the book. (3/4 of the way into it) The change of name to Kellog, Brown and Root was not mentioned, nor were contracts such as Guantanomo or the base on Diego Garcia which sounds to me like it could have warranted quite some ink. Also Kellog, Brown and Root's bankruptcy was glossed over leaving me wondering what the story is on this. The asbestos issue was only briefly mentioned, and Cheney's attempts to reduce these losses by changing the laws wasn't mentioned at all. Information about the companies contracts in Iraq is almost non-existant and the reputed contracts the Company did with countries in Cheney's era under US sanctions (ie Iran) by diverting the contracts via it's overseas subsidiaries gets not even a fraction of a page.

Basically if you after information on these companies after 1962 you're better off researching it on the internet.

James Conway cuts to the chase in new money vs established money in a battle for land in Napa Valley. Detailed stories of conflicts between new money mentality of expand at any cost and old money in keeping things in check.

Good story lines. I hope James returns with an updated book as this was written in 2002 and much has changed since.

As a former Napa vinter, I eagerly looked forward to reading Conway's excursion into my home county. While there are interesting ideas in the book, they lurk beneath the soil like potatoes, never springing forth to see the light of day. Many of my neighbors (and, I should add, close friends) are presented in this book as gross parodies; this, I suppose, might be expected from an outsider to the region, but I had a difficult time getting past these rough characterizations.

Reading the other reviews, I cannot help but shake my head in astonishment...."Well Written"??? Ideas move in and out of paragraphs with no real logical flow of ideas. Few dates are presented to help the reader follow the timetable (which is likely because the scenes are re-sequenced for dramatic effect). I am an avid reader of literature, but found myself constantly rereading passages to try and decipher the idea being presented or the scene being described. I finally decided that the editor either gave up or never tried. Much of the book reads more like a stream of consciousness than a documentation of events witnessed by the author.

Furthermore, this book is an amalgam of ad hominem attacks on everyone who dares to make money in the wine industry. Those with family money are dismissed as "lucky spermers" unless like, Peter Mennen, they use their money to stop big business. Mennen is portrayed as the noble hero but seems to be more a naive idealist. Certainly, there are forces of good and bad in any capitalist industry, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ending vineyard development would lead to one of two things - more houses in place of vineyards or higher and higher prices for vintners as the scarcity increased their profits. Certainly, there is a middle ground yet Conaway, by following the bull-headed extremists, would have us believe that there can be no compromise.

Check this book out from the library if you must read it, but support more even-handed works with your dollars.

This is a book for people who hate Starbucks and complain incessantly about gentrification (while drinking expensive boutique coffee and loving the appreciation in their real estate). After reading half of it I got tired of the constant pot-shots and nasty, one-sided characterizations and had to put it down.

I'm not clear on who the author approves of, but he's clearly against anyone who lives, builds, or conducts business in Napa Valley -- plus anyone crass enough to actually visit for a weekend and enjoy the place.

If you are a part of the Napa community then you might enjoy the gossipy anecdotes in this book. If you are a hard-core, disgruntled environmentalist then you might find validation for your views. But if you are just interested in the region and land issues in general then you'll find a pissy, overblown screed that irritates more than it informs.

As a Napa resident and former winemaker, I can say that this book truly pulls back the curtains to expose the overinflated egos that are rapidly transforming our valley into just another trendy, overpriced tourist trap.

It is a much more entertaining and accurate read than Kolpan's Sense of Place which basically parrots Coppola's publicity agent's "approved" history. This is a must have book for anyone interested in what goes on behind the scenes in the Napa Valley.