Ed Lin of Forbes writes a book review of Bill Hare's Celebration of Fools (Amacom, $24.95). Mr. Lin states that Bill Hare's book: tries to be two different books, neither of them well-written. The first half is an overview of the first 80 years of J.C. Penney's (nyse: JCP - news - people ) company history. The unlikely named James Cash Penney rises from a clerk in a store out in Wyoming at the dawn of the 20th century and becomes a retailing magnate based in New York. The second half of the book becomes a first-person narrative that seems to condemn Wall Street for being inherently evil. It's a case of weak writing and skin-deep research that disappoints readers looking for a true insider's account of this storied department-store firm.
Consider this dull and uninformative passage: " America changed in the 1950s. There was a migration from towns to cities and, with many collars changing from blue to white, from cities to the new suburbs. Tastes and interests were changing as well, with people making more money and spending more money."
"More money"? Just how much more money? What was the average household earning? What was the average shopper at J.C. Penney spending as America changed so? Why, "more," of course. There's a distressing lack of details and figures in Hare's book--which is inexcusable for a book purportedly about business. Hare writes that the company's stock closed at $13 the day the stock market crashed on Oct. 29, 1929--and never gives the stock price again. And surely that $13 isn't adjusted for subsequent dividends or stock splits. How can a reader judge a company's success (or lack of) when its growth (or shrinkage) in market value isn't charted?
"The year 1991 had been a disaster. Sales had sagged or dropped in the previous two years, but now they plunged, and profits plummeted."
It's true that "plunged" and "plummeted" sound more dire than "sagged" or "dropped," but Hare should have put down the thesaurus and picked up the company's earnings reports and just say what exactly happened from year to year.
Financials aren't the only area sorely lacking in detail. Here's an explosive footnote to the fourth chapter:
"Penney married Mary Kimball in 1919 and lost her to illness in 1923. He married Caroline Autenrieth in 1926 and remained contentedly with her until his death in 1971. There were children from both marriages."
Are you kidding me? The only Penney family member Hare introduces to the reader, apart from Penney himself, is his first wife Berta Hess Penney. That's a serious mistake. Business stories are about people, and the less you know about their personal lives, the less you know about their respective companies. Why aren't any (how ever many there are) of Penney's children named or even brought up in the entire text of the book? Surely there's a story in why J.C. Penney's firm didn't become the paternal gift of wealth to his children that Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT - news - people ) were to the offspring of Sam Walton. Who were Mary and Caroline? Well, at least Hare got their maiden names.
Reconstructing dialog is always a tricky thing. Some writers such as Gay Talese recreate conversations that the participants later say could have taken place. Some writers avoid it altogether. Hare should have strongly considered the latter. Some of his reenactments are less illuminating than the narrative:
"Okay. So what is it?"
"Fashion"
"Fashion?"
"Fashion." Both men were working to keep a straight face.
"You've got to be kidding."
"It's something we should look at."
'"Fashion?"
"Fashion."
Don DeLillo may get away with repetitive dialog as a comment on our consumerist society, but here it only serves to show a profound lack of knowing what is compelling to a reader--even if it is accurate. In the latter half of the book, Hare goes on to quote from pages (!) of speeches that he apparently had a hand in writing. (Hare was a speechwriter for senior executives at J.C. Penney.) As you can imagine, it's hard to take without an open bar and a buffet.
Worst of all is Hare's placement of himself as an "insider" of the company. The reader can feel Hare preening himself here:
"As for myself (your author), in 16 years as a speechwriter for senior executives--mainly at big corporations--I never saw [CEO W.R.] Howell's equal as a leader on his feet. Inspiring, fearsome, clever. Again and again he would improvise brilliantly. He was a special talent. And now the trick question: Was he the best CEO I ever saw? Not even close."
Hare never names the best CEO he ever saw--or any other CEOs or even a barometer of performance. Of course, Wall Street's standard of a chief executive is the stock's performance. During Howell's reign at J.C. Penney (1983-1995), the stock rose from the single digits (adjusted for subsequent dividends and stock splits) to the mid-$30s after cresting in the low $40s. Surely many shareholders were enriched by Howell's hand, but Hare brands him as "The Betrayer" for this very crime.
(Disgracefully, Hare includes a chart at the beginning of the book that contrasts J.C. Penney's share price with the S&P 500 from January 1998 through December 2000--a three-year period during which Penney greatly underperformed the index. Yet this was years after Howell's departure, and moreover it covers a period when most retail stocks were feeling the pain of the perceived threat of competition from online retailers. The chart is also rather out of date for a book published in 2004. It's not fair for Hare to highlight a period when the company's stock price declined, and imply that the retailer is on a collision course with Death Valley, when in fact Penney's shares have outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin over the two years since June 1, 2002.)
Hare has a soft spot for the early days of the company when individual store managers received a cut of the profits. But modern shareholders are the equivalent of those early store managers--after all, they both owned part of the company. J.C. Penney shouldn't be shunned for rewarding shareholders, for making a corporate relocation to Texas from New York City or for forcing the retirement of its marketing chief. On the other hand, one can justifiably crucify the company for its disastrous acquisition of the Eckerd drugstore chain in 1996 and subsequent stock slide. But Hare doesn't have the grasp required to fully render the picture. When he writes that J.C. Penney "paid a pretty price" for Eckerd--without ever actually giving the price--you know you're in the hands of a speechwriter. Readers love to hear the ugly parts in fine detail, but it's not here.
Although Hare romanticizes the early days, there's a negative side to the company's formative years. Here's another bombshell footnote, from the third chapter:
"One of the unflattering oddities of the Penney Company was that it never employed a single Jew until Mil Batten hired Jack Behrend in 1963 to run Penney's Treasury discount stores. This was despite the Isaacs brothers' pivotal financial help."
The Isaacs brothers advised on and help set up Penney's strategic move to New York--in 1914. One could even argue that the Isaacs were more crucial to the company's story than J.C. Penney himself, who was wiped out by the 1929 stock market crash but then bailed out with cash donated by his employees.
Celebration of Fools is not the "inside look" it claims to be. Riding the elevator in the corporate suites doesn't make you an insider (it's telling that Hare's most detailed settings are on the modern campus in Plano, Texas). It's not even a full-fledged "look"--more like a cursory glance at a company with a rich history that remains elusive to reader and author alike.
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