A Devil's Dictionary of Business: Monkey Business; High Finance and Low; Money, the Making, Losing, and Printing Thereof; Commerce, Trade; Cleve

The mixture of jargon, euphemism and cant that is the language of business gets a well-deserved demystification in this curmudgeon's lexicon. Von Hoffman, a New York Observer columnist, author of Citizen Cohn and self-defined ""grouchy cynic,"" directs his disdain at Wall Street and CEOs, government and labor unions alike, and often bends over backwards to be unfair, as in this explication of ""Analyst"": ""a human steam calliope employed by stockbrokers to tout securities the brokerage owns (or has a hidden financial interest in) and wants to unload onto the naive and ever hopeful."" In between the wisecracks, he offers a trove of information on business topics from the basics of double-entry bookkeeping to the arcana of Hello Kitty merchandising, and draws grudgingly appreciative biographical thumbnails of such figures as Andrew Carnegie, Jimmy Hoffa and yo-yo mogul Donald Franklin Duncan. Throughout, von Hoffman pays tribute to capitalism's achievements in conferring organization, technology, low prices and high quality on society while bemoaning its wholesale re-engineering of that society to eliminate family meals, foist on us a culture driven by the youth marketing demographic and make the consumer ""the central person in the American universe."" Readers will enjoy the book either as an entertaining casual browse or as a socioeconomic soapbox.