Adventures of a bystander / Peter F. Drucker.

Preface, vi -- Prologue: A bystander is born -- Report from Atlatis. Grandmother and twentieth century, 9 -- Hemme and Genia, 24 -- Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy, 62 -- Freudian myths and freudian realities, 83 -- Count traun-trauneck and the actress Maria Mueller, 100 -- Young man in an old world. The polanyis, 123 -- The man who invented kissinger, 141 -- The monster and the lamb, 158 -- Noel Brailsford-The last of the dissenters, 170 -- Ernest freedberg's world, 187 -- The bankers and the courtesan, 213 -- The indian summer of innocence. Henry Luce and time-life-fortune, 223 -- The prophets: Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, 244 -- The professional: Alfred Sloan -- the indian summer of innocence, 294 -- Index, 337

Regarded as the most influential and widely read thinker on modern organizations and their management, Peter Drucker has also established himself as an unorthodox and independent analyst of politics, the economy, and society. A man of impressive scope and expertise, he has paved significant inroads in a number of key areas, sharing his knowledge and keen insight on everything from the plight of the employee and the effects of technology to the vicissitudes of the markets and the future of the new world order. Adventures of a Bystander is Drucker's rich collection of autobiographical stories and vignettes, in which this legendary figure paints a portrait of his remarkable life, and of the larger historical realities of his time. In a style that is both unique and engaging, Drucker conveys his life story -from his early teen years in Vienna through the interwar years in Europe, the New Deal era, World War II, and the postwar period in America-through intimate profiles of a host of fascinating people he's known through the years. Their personal histories are, as Drucker tells us, the beads for which his own life serves as the string. A colorful group, these diverse, often unpredictable, always multidimensional individuals were chosen because each of them, in his or her own highly personal way, reflects and refracts the thirty crucial years from the end of World War I to the first post-World War II decade-the thirty years that largely formed the world in which we now live. An amazing pageant of characters, both famous and otherwise, springs from these pages, illuminating and defining one of the most tumultuous periods in world history. Along with bankers and courtesans, artists, aristocrats, prophets, and empire-builders, we meet members of Drucker s own family and close circle of friends, among them such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John Lewis, and Buckminster Fuller. Playing to perfection their roles as those who reflect and refract the customs, beliefs, and attitudes of the times, these singular personalities lend Adventures of a Bystander a striking you-are-there feel.