Books briefly
Books briefly Egotrip Buy This Book, by Pete Wagner (Me Publications, P.O. Box 14004, Minneapolis, MN 55414. 216 pp. $6.95 paperback). You can tell right away that this is Pete Wagner's book: With...
...calls the memoirs "at once fragrant and melancholy...
...Corporate America is, to use a Churchil-lian phrase, a mystery wrapped in an enigma...
...built the twelfth-largest retail empire and how Revlon, one of the alchemists, "sells hope in a jar...
...Voices from the Kansas frontier Pioneer Women, by Joanna L. Strat-ton (Simon and Schuster, Illustrated...
...319 pp...
...And on the back cover, he provides a photo of himself at age five or so, and the startling news that "Pete Wagner has given a whole new meaning to the word 'book.'" Well, he has...
...In his introduction to the book, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Some pioneer women gave up and returned to their eastern roots or moved on west, but those who stayed learned "to depend on themselves...
...Wallace Abbott and "industrial heavyweights" like U.S...
...With typical understatement, he announces on the cover that as author, he will receive two cents for every copy sold...
...Looking inside corporate America Everybody's Business, an Almanac...
...Along the way we learn how Rowland Macy, a man with "an uncontrollable temper, an ulcer, and a severe case of stinginess...
...21 hardcover...
...We meet "health hawkers" like Dr...
...Stratton has distilled these personal reminiscences in Pioneer Women, and the accounts add up to significant social history...
...We are told that Exxon's sales exceed the gross national product of all but a dozen countries and that the Gillette company was founded by King C. Gillette, a man who hoped to use the firm to build worldwide socialism...
...Almanacs are supposed to be dull repositories of disorganized facts, but this one is as captivating as one of Studs Terkel's interview books...
...16.95...
...You can tell right away that this is Pete Wagner's book: With characteristic modesty, he admits on the title page that it was "written, drawn, edited, designed, typeset, laid out, and pasted up" by him...
...Her biggest enterprise, however, was collecting memoirs of 800 women survivors of the Kansas frontier period...
...916 pp...
...9.95 paperback...
...it means ego trip...
...This almanac not only provides insight into the workings of the American establishment but tells about it in a plain and lively way...
...Wagner, who at age twenty-five has made a small reputation for himself as the enfant terrible of radical cartooning, offers political cartoons (described—by him—as "incisive"), other drawings ("delightful"), autobiographical ruminations ("hilarious," "innovative"), and a running political commentary on the 1970s ("thoughtful, witty, and refreshing...
...The guide is divided into sixteen sections, ranging from food, clothing, and alchemy ("looking, feeling, and smelling good") to transportation, money, and distillers...
...In the early part of the century she was a suffragist, an editor of two magazines, and a supporter of progressive legislation...
...Despite the hardships, the overtones of the memoirs are zestful rather than grim...
...The Irreverent Guide to Corporate America, edited by Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz, and Robert Levering (Harper & Row...
...Steel, and we peek at corporate secrets on almost every page...
...That means we know little about it, but we suspect it is greedy to its roots...
...The hardships of survival demanded that husbands and wives work together as partners...
...You may like some of it, though it's unlikely you'll like much of it nearly as well as Pete Wagner does...
...Kansas pioneer life included blizzards, tornadoes, drought, floods, ceaseless winds, grasshopper invasions, and hazardous childbirth along with unforeseen crises of accidents, illness, and death...
...Isolation and loneliness in this bleak prairie country were hard facts of life...
...Joanna Strat-ton's great-grandmother, Lilla Day Monroe, was the first woman permitted to practice before the Kansas supreme court...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
