This month's featured books all deal with conflicts that have shaped business and economic destinies. Though there may not be a War and Peace among these titles, each brings battles over strategy and values to life, retelling sagas in which profit and loss take on the dimensions of victory and defeat. If some of today's most successful business people occasionally behave like sociopathic warlords, well, maybe that's because so many of their role models were, quite literally, sociopathic warlords. In breezy prose filled with thought-provoking asides, Crossen traces the changing relationship between force and wealth over the centuries. The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry .
Reporters tend to be cynical critters, steering clear of commitments to causes of any kind.
When a journalist encounters a story of clear-cut right and wrong, then the work process becomes a form of euphoria. This book seethes with that euphoric passion. An entire industry spent decades engaged in a morally indefensible enterprise, and Zegart names the names of those responsible. Drawing on revelations that have emerged from the flood of anti-tobacco litigation in recent years, he presents the tobacco companies' actions for judgment in the harsh light of history. Zegart does not come across as an anti-tobacco zealot.