The Bradley Legacy: Lynde and Harry Bradley, Their Company, and Their Foundation

Rating:
Summary: Corporate biography, bought and paid for by the corporation.
Review: John Gurda is a pretty good writer of coherent sentences, tidy paragraphs and nicly titled chapters. And he takes dictation like a champ.

But the success of this book--sales of 10,000 copies since publication in 1992--means only that hordes of proposal writers (or "grant" writers, as they like to bill themselves) have been combing it for hints on how to pry loose a grant from the Bradley Foundation. The work was commissioned by this intensely conservative foundation which disperses the yearly earning from the modest pile (roughly a half billion dollars) the Bradleys left to promote the troglodite social philosophy they had lived by.

They paid Gurda to write this book. There are significant omissions and distortions. How could it be otherwise?

Next up: contract scrivening for Northwestern Mutual Life, another home town company with a story to tell.