The games players

The business and financial world around us can be viewed as a vast and ceaslessly-active landscape on which an ever-changing body of great chieftans and their large corporate retinues engage one another in unending battle for profitable advantage and ever-larger growth. The last three decades-particularly the busy and bloody 70's--can begin to be seen as the time of the takeovers, and The Games Players recreates some of the classic conflicts and controntations of a fascinating and rapacious era in our national life. The first super tycoon to throw away the old rules and to reinvent the modern acquisitiongame, Robert R. Young, launches his now-legendary takeover assault, during the middle 50's, with nationwide newspaper ads and unprecedented stockholder hullaballoo. Later games players, during the 60's and the 70's , include the infinitely devious Juan March, an offshore marauder maneuvering mainly in Spain ; Saul Steinberg, an upstart Brooklyn boy who attempts to acquire a pillar of the Eastern banking establishment; an aggressive French baron, Guy de Rothschild, and his passionate courtship of a U.S. corporate grande dame. But all such clashes and acquisitions constitute the focus, the center, of a large, crowded canvas.