Book Reviews: Cocktail Parties and Dinner Tables

Alas, Canto's book does not delve here. In fact, it does not really delve into anything, but offers broad generalities under the tortured metaphor/guiding principle that an investor can be akin to a drink "mixologist," pouring big notions about macroeconomic changes into asset allocation.

There's nothing wrong with this strategy, but it's a little like telling people that if they jump, they should expect to land on the ground because of gravity. In fact, at some point in this interminable read, Canto, a consultant and former professor (beware that deadly combination in an author) writes: "One of Newton's laws states that everything that goes up must come down, and this is true everywhere. Gravity exists." Indeed, it does. I threw the book down, and it hit the ground.

It is hard to look trite alongside Cocktail Economics, but How to Get to the Top: Business Lessons Learned at the Dinner Table (Hyperion) manages to do it. While I'm often incredulous at how often authors feel the need to simplify business decisions and manners down to the lowest common denominator, I'm not against playing along.

But the level of thought in this book by Jeffrey J. Fox, who wrote Secrets of Great Rainmakers is so thin that it might just rot the brain of anyone who reads it. I'll give you one sample and then we'll quickly move on, careful not to get cooties. Writes Fox: "Moms who work have a tough job -- actually two tough jobs. Single moms have two super-tough jobs." It is not a tough job to give this book, which does not even rise to the level of a decent pamphlet, a "Hindrance" label.