The survivors and victims inhabiting the pages of Capital Tales dash forever the romantic myth that our peerless captains of industry are guiding us through the mists of progress to a shining land of prosperity. Tough, uncompromising portraits of people discovering the illusions they live by, the stories culminate in a confrontation between the narrator and a nineteenth-century British philosopher-a meeting of minds which leaves no meaning of the word "capital" unexamined.