Joseph Nocera
The author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker--where he won three Gerald Loeb awards--was
a surveyor of financial history who made business
interesting. He made his mark as a storyteller, able to find the
characters, good and bad, and the tales, right and wrong,
that lay underneath the fabric of Wall Street's numbers and
analysis. The Princeton graduate wrote three novels plus 10
nonfiction books on business and finance, including "The
Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's
Bullish '60s," and "Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall
Street, 1920-1938." His last book, "The Takeover Game: The
Men, the Moves, and the Wall Street Money Behind Today's
Nationwide Merger Wars," was published in 1987. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith referred to the "Go-Go
Years" as "a fine book, a small classic in the long history
of financial insanity." Mr. Brooks made business coverage interesting in a
nonbusiness publication, The New Yorker, and at a time when
financial news had not captivated the masses as it has
today. Mr. Brooks died in 1993. In business journalism, the name John Brooks may not
resonate instantly as do the names of, say, Ida M.
Tarbell, Barney Kilgore or Carol J. Loomis. He was not a breaker of big stories, or a shaper of
important journalistic institutions, or anything like
that. Mr. Brooks, who died in 1993, was simply a writer who
found business fascinating, and spent the bulk of his
career trying to convey that fascination to the rest of
us. That may not sound like much today--is there
anyone at this point who doesn't know how fascinating
business is?--but during Brooks' prime, in the
1960s and 1970s, his choice of subject matter and
approach made him a trailblazer. To put it another way: Long before there was Michael
Lewis, who covers business with wit and style and grace,
there was John Brooks. The line from one to the other is
a pretty straight one. The first crucial point about Brooks is that he wrote
for a nonbusiness publication--The New Yorker.
That alone made him unusual, for business then was viewed
as deeply boring by the nonbusiness press. Most business
coverage had the feel of duty, not passion. The second point is that he was a wonderful writer. He
was that rarest of birds, a gifted storyteller, with an
enviable talent for summing up a character with a single,
pithy anecdote or sentence. "Like Greta Garbo, he courted
publicity while quite sincerely shunning it," he wrote of
former Fidelity manager Gerry Tsai in his book, "The
Go-Go Years." In that book, he described Edward Johnson II,
Fidelity's founder and father of Fidelity chief Ned
Johnson, this way: "His talk tumbled out
enthusiastically, yet he seemed inarticulate because his
mind encompassed more than his tongue could often
convey." Lovely. "The Go-Go Years," written originally as a series of
reports for The New Yorker, was published in 1974. I
first stumbled upon it--and upon Mr. Brooks--more than a dozen years later, when I was
writing my own story about Fidelity for Esquire
magazine. Esquire was a nonbusiness publication, of course, as
was my previous employer, Texas Monthly. Yet at the
latter, I had written a number of business stories and
had found the subject fascinating! I was on to this great
secret, I thought to myself. Business, it turned out, was full of heroes and
villains, and triumphs and failures, and all the other
elements that make for good storytelling. I was going to
carve out this new turf and make it mine. And then I read "The Go-Go Years," and realized, to my
chagrin, that Mr. Brooks had found this niche long before
I showed up. And he had covered it with an elegance and
panache I could never hope to match. I've been in his
thrall ever since. Joseph
Nocera is an
editor at large at Fortune.
By Joseph Nocera
Joseph Nocera