The news was bad, even heartbreaking, but the writing about those events was good to great.

In The Best Business Writing 2013, a compilation of stories about the impact of business practices and financial-world workings on the American public, 29 articles shock, educate and dismay, never comforting the reader.

Previously published in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Wired, ProPublica, The New Yorker,  Mother Jones and elsewhere, this collection largely reflects  the persistent damage of the financial collapse of 2008.

“The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class,’’ from Rolling Stone, profiles men, women and children living in cars and vans in a Santa Barbara church parking lot. Author Jeff Tietz doesn’t mince words about their predicament:

“There is no moral or substantive difference between a hundred-year flood and the near destruction of the global financial system by speculators immune from consequence. But if you and your spouse both lose your jobs and assets because of an unprecedented economic cataclysm having nothing to do with you, you quickly discover that your society expects you and your children to live malnourished on the streets indefinitely.

“That kind of truth really screws with people’s heads,’’ says social worker Nancy Kapp to Tietz.

“The Great American Foreclosure Story: The Struggle for Justice and a Place to Call Home’’ visits a Florida grandmother with custody of three children who runs a lawn business and pays her bills until a fraudulent subprime mortgage and medical bills send her into a financial tailspin, in 2007. Bureaucratic snafus arising from outsourcing and downsizing of office personnel  prevent her from modifying her loan to stay solvent. She loses her home.

On the other side of the spectrum, Max Abelson’s Bloomberg story, ”Wall Street Bonus Withdrawal Means Trading Aspen for Coupons,’’ tells us that Wall Street’s cash bonus pool “fell by 14 percent last year (2011) to $19.7 billion, the lowest since 2008.’’ That shrunken pool compels the head of an executive search firm to eliminate ski trips to Aspen and to shop around, with coupons, for the best price on a box of Wheat Chex.  A real-estate investor, who spends $17,000 yearly on the maintenance of two dogs, must sell his two motorcycles and settle for a lesser car -- a 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet, “the Volkswagen of supercars.’’

The stories are cyclical in theme: Bethany McLean’s “Case Against Bear and JP Morgan Provides Little Cheer,’’ published by Reuters, details the case against Bear Sterns, charged with widespread wrongdoing, specifically for pocketing refunds owed to customers who were sold bad mortgages. JP Morgan Chase acquired Bear in 2008.

As Reuters reported recently, JPMorganChase and “the government entered a preliminary $13 billion settlement to end investigations into whether the bank misled investors when it bundled subprime mortgages into bonds before the financial crisis. The largest U.S. bank (Chase) said earlier this month it has set aside $23 billion over time to pay for legal issues.’’

Goldman Sachs, a chief investment bank rival to JPMorgan Chase, takes a beating in the first-person op-ed piece, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,’’ by equity derivatives banker Greg Smith,  published by The New York Times  in March 2012.

“I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,’’ writes Smith, a 12-year employee with clients having a “total asset base of more than a trillion dollars.’’

If this collection is any indication, venality is rampant: in corporate America (“Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top Level Struggle’); at giant pharmaceuticals, hospitals, pharmacy chains and doctors’ offices (“Anemia Drugs Made Billions, but at What Cost’’ “Bad to the Bone: A Medical Horror Story,’’ “Prescription for Addiction’’), and at technology’s leading companies (“In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad’’).

Is there anything upbeat in  this book about fraud, greed and malfeasance? Yes.

In “Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future,’’ writer  Bryan Gardiner reminds us that Old School values still count:

“Even though it’s a big company -- 29,000 employees and revenue  of $7.9 billion in 2011 -- Corning still thinks and acts like a small one.’’ Its annual attrition rate is 1 percent and it has, Gardiner writes, a “vast institutional memory.

“We’re all lifers here,’’ says its CEO Wendell Weeks, who sees all   Corning hands as equally important in the company’s fate.

But even Corning does not go unscathed.

In 2007, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, asks Corning to create vast amounts of a 1.3mm, chemically strengthened glass for his company’s groundbreaking device,  the  iPhone.

Gardiner reports that sheets of Corning’s newly dubbed Gorilla Glass are shipped to finishing facilities in China, “where they get their molten potassium baths and are cut into touchable rectangles.’’

As we learn in an earlier New York Times’ story, Chinese workers are injured working in iPhone screen factories, and endure “onerous work environments and serious --  sometimes deadly -- safety problems.’’

Bigger profits for Apple account for the bad working conditions, conclude writers Charles Duhigg and David Barboza.

“If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety,’’ says a former Apple executive.

“Right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China,’’ says another former Apple executive.
 
 “The Best Business Writing 2013, edited by Dean Starkman, Martha M. Hamilton, Ryan Chittum and Felix Salmon.  539 pages. Columbia University Press.$18.95.

Eleanor O'Sullivan is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written for USA Today and Gannett newspapers. She has covered alternative and green investing, estate planning and family offices for Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines, and reviews new business books of interest to financial advisors. She can be reached at [email protected].