that's threatening, be they Brin and Page, Jobs or Milken at the time (quickly taking away much of the banks' bread and butter of providing loans). Understanding this, even if not wanting to articulate it, provides enough incentives for those in power to subsidize, spread, and promote ideas and institutions inhibiting the deepening of capital markets under a wide variety of jargons, and thus inhibiting the invention and reinvention of enterprises. With time, people get accustomed to these institutions, their origins lost in the mist of time, inhibiting entrepreneurship and business for centuries. Today this may be happening a bit before our eyes. Suddenly, everything becomes a "bubble" -- Internet, oil, houses, gold, bonds. Guess what: if everything is -- why have capital markets to start with? If pricing no longer offers guidance to allocate capital; if stock and bond markets are not there to help correct mistakes faster -- why should they continue to exist? And if they do not exist, who else remains but politicians, bureaucrats and the academics surrounding them -- none of whom ever worked in a business even one day in their lives -- who would then tax and borrow and subsequently allocate capital and "invent enterprises" based on -- well -- whatever.While I know who Schramm had in mind with this project -- and it is a worthy project -- I do not know what the editors wanted to convey with their selections, or who they had in mind as an audience for this book. Baumol warns that "entertainment is not the purpose of this book." That's an unnecessary warning: 90 percent of its pages are dry, tedious, and some -- especially those with bombastic titles such as "History of Entrepreneurship: Britain, 1900-2000," "History of Entrepreneurship: Germany after 1815," and "Entrepreneurship in the United States, 1920-2000" -- are little more than jargon-ridden, superficial texts, providing zero insight. They are filled with taxonomies and referenced sentences such as "Computer and computer-based technologies in particular, later collectively known as information technology, extended across all boundaries (Coopey 2004)" or "The one thing that it is impossible to have too much of is good judgment (Casson 2000)" -- Casson quoting himself on this observation. Apparently both sentences were unheard of before the years 2000 and 2004.Even just a little judgment by, perhaps, talking to some entrepreneurs and following them in the daily execution of their ventures before writing treatises about them, could have reshaped this book into something far more concise, sharply written and surprising. After all, learning means being surprised. There were very few pages where I was.Reuven Brenner, Repap Chair, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, is the author of _Force of Finance: The Triumph of Capital Markets_ (Thomson/Texere) and _A World of Chance_ (Cambridge University Press). His early books, _History: The Human Gamble_ (Chicago), _Betting on Ideas_ (University of Chicago Press), and _Rivalry_ (Cambridge University Press), were, in part, about entrepreneurship. His latest article, "Venture Capital: Building (or Restoring) National Wealth," appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of the _Journal of Applied Corporate Finance_.Copyright (c) 2010 by