THE MONEY MOTIVE

An often fascinating if sometimes superficial look into contemporary attitudes towards the thing people are more reticent about than their sexual habits. A characterization of ""money types"" (the romantic, the company man, the collector, the hustler, the double-dealer, the criminal, the gambler, the loser, the non-player) often overlaps categories the author rather capriciously sets up, with a little help from Freud's money-excrement and Melanie Klein's ""primal greed"" (a desire to return to -- the perhaps idealized -- womb) theories. Wiseman also explores the relation of moolah to sex, both legitimized and non, and provides telling and amusing incidents (such as John D. Rockefeller reconstructing a chicken from its bones to make sure he had not been overcharged), as well as case histories of everyone from Getty to Cornfeld. Despite occasional careless repetitions and glib explanations, this psychosociology hits home more often than the reader may care to acknowledge.