John Bogle on Investing

September 4, 2000
The author of two classic books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (1993) and Common Sense on Mutual Funds (1999), Bogle has been a strong voice for sensible, efficient, honest financial management throughout his career. In 1951, for his undergraduate economics thesis at Princeton, he wrote the first comprehensive analysis of the modern mutual fund. He then spent 25 years working in the fund industry before founding Vanguard, and another 25 years running that company. This omnibus begins with the 1951 thesis and includes articles and speeches over the next half-century. Unfortunately, 17 of the 26 chapters are speeches from the two years leading up to publication, which are really the same recycled speech with a few introductory paragraphs tailored to the audience. The older material, especially the thesis and a 1975 speech about the founding of Vanguard, will be extremely interesting only to Bogle's biographer and to Ph.D. students writing about the history of the mutual fund industry. General readers will be impressed with Bogle's consistency, though that is hardly adequate reward for 480 pages of mostly dull reading.

October 1, 2000
Bogle, founder of the enormous Vanguard family of no-load mutual funds, has long been one of the strongest voices for low-cost mutual funds and shareholder rights. Here, he gathers some of the speeches he has delivered over the past three decades (but most within the last few years). His themes are the failure of the mutual-fund industry to provide adequate returns, the value of index funds, the proper role of funds in corporate governance, the origins of Vanguard, and his own career. He also includes his 1951 Princeton undergraduate thesis on the economic role of mutual funds. Because so many of the speeches are recent, they hold timely information, though there is some repetition of ideas from one to another. This is an important collection by one of the major figures in mutual funds, and it belongs in every library with more than cursory holdings on investing. However, Bogle's other books, Bogle on Mutual Funds (LJ 10/15/93) or Common Sense on Mutual Funds (Wiley, 1999), would be more appropriate for the casual reader.--Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2000
Bogle made news last year when he unsuccessfully challenged the mandatory retirement policy at Vanguard Group, the mutual funds investment company that he founded in 1974 and that he continued to serve as senior chairman. Bogle has always been well regarded by the press and by Vanguard's 14 million shareholders. He pioneered both no-load and index investment funds and he constantly criticized other companies for their high fees and service charges. The inaugural title in McGraw-Hill's Great Ideas in Finance series, this collection is a fitting tribute to Bogle. It consists of 25 speeches that he made throughout his career. These cover investment strategy, the mutual fund industry, and Bogle's view of human values and the philosophy of investing. Five of the speeches were made before general audiences; one is a high-school commencement address; another discusses organ donation (Bogle is the recipient of a heart transplant). The book concludes with the text of the dissertation Bogle submitted for graduation from Princeton University in 1951; it sets out the ideas that led to the formation of Vanguard nearly a quarter century later.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)