NONFICTION - Nov. 24, 1991

GOING FOR BROKE: How Robert Campeau Bankrupted the Retail Industry by John Rothchild (Simon and Schuster: $21; 244 pp.). While cloaked in the homespun cloth of traditional family values, the Reagan Revolution was actually one of this nation’s most radical and progressive political movements. Rather than conserving the familiar, it invited strangers into our country home and then gave them the run of the place. “Going for Broke” is the story of how Robert Campeau, a real-estate developer from Quebec with only $200 million in capital, was allowed to borrow nearly $11 billion of American money--of what may end up being taxpayer money--to acquire companies that six months earlier he’d never heard of and to run industries he knew nothing about. Not surprisingly, in a few months, he managed to run these companies, which had a 50-year record of paying their bills, into the ground.

With two wives, two sets of children and nervous breakdowns nearly as frequent as his sheep-brain injections for longevity, Campeau was one of the strangest men who could possibly ride into town. But to his credit, Rothchild doesn’t demonize the man. Painting him instead as but another victim of the “mystical accounting” of the 1980s, he adopts an absurdist, Swiftian tone entirely appropriate for the era when “Chapter 11” became as familiar a part of the American lexicon as “Catch 22” or “Route 66.”