The Business of America. (BookTalk: taking care of business).

The Business of America By John Steele Gordon Walker & Co., 285 pages, $27

Business writing has long been clotted with morality plays of arrogant tycoons and monopolistic corporations. Businessmen have created our tools, anti-businessmen our tales. John Steele Gordon attempts to correct this imbalance in The Business of America, a sympathetic collection of American capitalism's emblematic stories.

The book has 47 of these, each five pages long. Some are of triumph, some of defeat. Henry Ford, having succeeded with the Model T, failed with the Fordson tractor because he didn't understand farmers. Sewell Avery saved Montgomery Ward by being rightly pessimistic in 1930; he lost out to Sears Roebuck by being wrongly pessimistic in 1945. Here, too, is the story of Sears Roebuck, which, by Gordon's account ought to have been called Sears Rosenwald.

Despite their brevity, Gordon's tales are leisurely. He introduces health nut Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the Graham Cracker, by quoting the Bible on the virtues of wine. He begins his story of nineteenth-century California banker D. O. Mills by talking about Steve Jobs.

Many of Gordon's stories flesh out an idea. He presents J. Paul Getty's pithy explanation of his success--"I seen my opportunities and I took 'em"--and illustrates it with a story on onion farmers. Declaring that victory in war goes to the side that mobilizes wealth, Gordon tells the story of Jay Cooke, the financier who created the world's first war-bond drive to fund the Union army.

Another chapter proclaims, "Politicians don't really make economic decisions; they make political ones," and tells of two New York boondoggles: the Erie Railroad and the World Trade Center. Written before the September 11 terrorist attack, Gordon sees the Twin Towers not as shining symbols of American capitalism, but as a show-off project of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, built by the public Port Authority and run at a loss for more than 20 years.

Some government projects do pay off. Gordon explains the rise of New York City through the success of the Erie Canal. It is an exception, though; on the whole, he sees governments as "nothing more than very large committees."