David Owen

The flip side of the Wall Street Journal, these witty essays on American business, reprinted from Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly, probe less familiar issues and personalities. Among the subjects covered are donating one's body to a medical school (and being converted into "a dark form that suggested nothing so much as the week after Thanksgiving"), visiting Liverpool in the company of 66 American Beatles worshippers, attending a convention of convention planners and the history of the U.S. toy business. Owen has a knack for picking offbeat topics as well as a rich and delicious sense of humor: there isn't a paragraph in the book that doesn't sparkle.

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