Poor Richard's Legacy.

• Author: Schwartz, John

Poor Richard's Legacy Poor Richard's Legacy. Peter Baida. William Morrow, $22.95. Beware of an author who begins a sweeping history of American business and the literature surrounding it by writing about his own nightmares. In the first chapter of this book, Peter Baida lets us in on the stirrings of his subconscious while he attended the Wharton School of Business. It seems that Baida used to dream about stern old Benjamin Franklin and high-spirited young Huck Finn wrestling with his soul. This is reason enough for most of us to place the book gently back upon the shelf and congratulate ourselves for avoiding another dumb read. After all, Baida's hero, Ben Franklin, told us that "Time is Money," and few of us can afford to waste either.

Well, you probably ought to take it back off the shelf. Poor Richard's Legacy is a damn useful book, a kind of Cliffs Notes of business history and thinking. Baida draws from the classics to present brief biographies of personages ranging from John Jacob Astor to ad man David Ogilvy; he gives equal space to what he calls "dissenting voices," antibusiness thinkers from Henry David Thoreau to the muckrakers to Ralph Nader.

Who will want to read it? Anyone who reads the business pages. Most business journalism seems so shallow because, although many of the writers know the numbers, few have gone beyond them to learn the history that underlies the event they write about. A case in point: The late Malcolm Forbes's 1989 birthday bash was covered as if nothing so outrageous had ever happened. The writers could...