Biography & History Books

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Alice Schroeder

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Editorial Review:

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”

Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the term “simple.”

When Alice Schroeder met Warren Buffett she was an insurance industry analyst and a gifted writer known for her keen perception and business acumen. Her writings on finance impressed him, and as she came to know him she realized that while much had been written on the subject of his investing style, no one had moved beyond that to explore his larger philosophy, which is bound up in a complex personality and the details of his life. Out of this came his decision to cooperate with her on the book about himself that he would never write.

Never before has Buffett spent countless hours responding to a writer’s questions, talking, giving complete access to his wife, children, friends, and business associates—opening his files, recalling his childhood. It was an act of courage, as The Snowball makes immensely clear. Being human, his own life, like most lives, has been a mix of strengths and frailties. Yet notable though his wealth may be, Buffett’s legacy will not be his ranking on the scorecard of wealth; it will be his principles and ideas that have enriched people’s lives. This book tells you why Warren Buffett is the most fascinating American success story of our time.

Fast Food Nation

Eric Schlosser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1402 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed

The Millionaire Next Door

Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko

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Total reviews: 785 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

How can you join the ranks of America's wealthy (defined as people whose net worth is over one million dollars)? It's easy, say doctors Stanley and Danko, who have spent the last 20 years interviewing members of this elite club: you just have to follow seven simple rules. The first rule is, always live well below your means. The last rule is, choose your occupation wisely. You'll have to buy the book to find out the other five. It's only fair. The authors' conclusions are commonsensical. But, as they point out, their prescription often flies in the face of what we think wealthy people should do. There are no pop stars or athletes in this book, but plenty of wall-board manufacturers--particularly ones who take cheap, infrequent vacations! Stanley and Danko mercilessly show how wealth takes sacrifice, discipline, and hard work, qualities that are positively discouraged by our high-consumption society. "You aren't what you drive," admonish the authors. Somewhere, Benjamin Franklin is smiling.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

John Perkins

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Total reviews: 626 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

John Perkins started and stopped writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man four times over 20 years. He says he was threatened and bribed in an effort to kill the project, but after 9/11 he finally decided to go through with this expose of his former professional life. Perkins, a former chief economist at Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, says he was an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business. "Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars," Perkins writes. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an extraordinary and gripping tale of intrigue and dark machinations. Think John Le Carré, except it's a true story.

Perkins writes that his economic projections cooked the books Enron-style to convince foreign governments to accept billions of dollars of loans from the World Bank and other institutions to build dams, airports, electric grids, and other infrastructure he knew they couldn't afford. The loans were given on condition that construction and engineering contracts went to U.S. companies. Often, the money would simply be transferred from one bank account in Washington, D.C., to another one in New York or San Francisco. The deals were smoothed over with bribes for foreign officials, but it was the taxpayers in the foreign countries who had to pay back the loans. When their governments couldn't do so, as was often the case, the U.S. or its henchmen at the World Bank or International Monetary Fund would step in and essentially place the country in trusteeship, dictating everything from its spending budget to security agreements and even its United Nations votes. It was, Perkins writes, a clever way for the U.S. to expand its "empire" at the expense of Third World citizens. While at times he seems a little overly focused on conspiracies, perhaps that's not surprising considering the life he's led. --Alex Roslin

The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future

T. Boone Pickens

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Editorial Review:

With a Plan for Reducing U.S. Oil Dependency

It’s never too late to top your personal best.

Now eighty years old, T. Boone Pickens is a legendary figure in the business world. Known as the “Oracle of Oil” because of his uncanny ability to predict the direction of fuel prices, he built Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States, from a $2,500 investment. In the 1980s, Pickens became a household name when he executed a series of unsolicited buyout bids for undervalued oil companies, in the process reinventing the notion of shareholders’ rights. Even his failures were successful in that they forced risk-averse managers to reconsider the way they did business.

When Pickens left Mesa at age sixty-eight after a spectacular downward spiral in the company’s profits, many counted him out. Indeed, what followed for him was a painful divorce, clinical depression, a temporary inability to predict the movement of energy prices, and the loss of 90 percent of his investing capital. But Pickens was far from out.

From that personal and professional nadir, Pickens staged one of the most impressive comebacks in the industry, turning his investment fund’s remaining $3 million into $8 billion in profit in just a few years. That made him, at age seventy-seven, the world’s second-highest-paid hedge fund manager. But he wasn’t done yet. Today, Pickens is making some of the world’s most colossal energy bets. If he has his way, most of America’s cars will eventually run on natural gas, and vast swaths of the nation’s prairie land will become places where wind can be harnessed for power generation. Currently no less bold than he was decades ago when he single-handedly transformed America’s oil industry, Pickens is staking billions on the conviction that he knows what’s coming. In this book, he spells out that future in detail, not only presenting a comprehensive plan for American energy independence but also providing a fascinating glimpse into key resources such as water—yet another area where he is putting billions on the line.

From a businessman who is extraordinarily humble yet is considered one of the world’s most visionary, The First Billion Is the Hardest is both a riveting account of a life spent pulling off improbable triumphs and a report back from the front of the global energy and natural-resource wars—of vital interest to anyone who has a stake in America’s future.

Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

Michael Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 217 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Wonderful, how could you not like it? 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 24 people found this review helpful.

This is a great book. I mean, everyone else says so, so they can't be wrong. Yes, I want a job on wall street.

JH 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

OUTSTANDING!! This is the single best book I've ever read for learning the basics of life in a Wall St. investment bank. Very accessible and humorous, yet informative as well.

a classic 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

this book is a must read if you are getting into the financial industry along with "when genius failed" and others.

Eccentricities of Wall Street... 5 out of 5 stars.
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An entertaining look into the life of a Salomon Brothers bond trader in the 1980s. The book offers a cursive overview of the financial innovations during that period, but the real contribution is in examination of the culture and the personalities of the Wall Street traders. Not without some embellishment, Michael Lewis does a great job of communicating the eccentricities and absurdities of the traders - 'the big swinging dicks'. At the very least, 'Liar's Poker' is an entertaining read, at best, an insightful look at what (and who) turns the wheels of our financial institutions.

Liar's Mortgage 5 out of 5 stars.
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Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker is a must read for anyone trying to understand the 2008 crisis in mortgage lending and home ownership. In fact, a new edition of the book should be published with a forward by Ben Bernake or Hank Paulson. The autobiography describes a mid-1980's newbie to Wall Street and his induction into the fraternity of mortgage traders at Salomon Brothers and junk bond traders at Drexel. This book rises above a rite of passage story because of the financial chaos which happened during the next three decades.

The 41st trading floor of Salomon Brothers is where millions of dollars exchange hands in minutes. There is a blue collar culture of practical jokes, profanity, Mexican food and pizza. The characters might have come right out of Damon Runyon or Animal House. The main difference between the interns, the traders and the clerks is neither their demeanor nor education but their wealth. In contrast to other books which tell us about the best and the brightest, this book describes ordinary people with excess body fat, perspiration, greed and wealth.

As more homeowners face foreclosure and the US dollar loses value, it is not clear what message to derive from this book. Were it not for these failures of economic policy the book would join other interesting stories about the rich and privileged of Wall Street. But because of this failure of oversight, the book takes us from humor to cynicism and from a sense of national pride to a feeling of national shame.

Is there a ratio of capitalistic reward to risk which is unconscionable in a democratic society? Can this behavior be limited or controlled by financial transparency, tax code, money supply and credit leverage? How do we avoid these consequences of the creation and destruction of capital without moving down the path of socialism? Can we ever put to rest the saying that behind every great fortune is a great crime?

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

Alan Greenspan

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Total reviews: 226 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn't experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was...nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.

After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we're living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan's incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world - how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life's journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.

Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.

A Timeline of a Remarkable Career Mar. 6, 1926 Born in New York City 1936 At 10 sees Roosevelt campaigning; becomes expert on the 1936 Yankees 1938 Takes up clarinet at 12 1943-44 Studies clarinet at Julliard Mid 1944 Joins Henry Jerome Band 1948 Graduates (summa cum laude) from New York University. (He later earns a master's in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1977, also from NYU.) Hired as economic analyst at the Conference Board. 1954-74 Co-founds Townsend-Greenspan & Co. Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City. (He returns in 1977.) 1974 Nominated by President Ford as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. 1983 Chair of bipartisan National Commission on Social Security Reform. June 1, 1987 Nominated by President Reagan for Fed Chair. Confirmed by Senate August 3. Oct. 19, 1987 Only 69 days into Greenspan's term, the Dow drops 508 points and 22%. July 10, 1991 Nominated by President George H.W. Bush to a second term as Fed Chairman. Later nominated to a third (February 22, 1996) and fourth term (January 4, 2000) by President Clinton. Apr. 6, 1997 Marries Andrea Mitchell May 18, 2004 Nominated by President George W. Bush for a fifth term as Fed chairman Jan. 31, 2006 Completes 18 ½ years at the Fed Feb. 1, 2006 Forms Greenspan Associates LLC, an economic consulting firm

Alan Greenspan's Top 10 Classical and Jazz Favorites Before Alan Greenspan embarked on his legendary financial career, he studied the clarinet at Julliard and played as a professional jazz musician (while doing tax returns for his bandmates). He chose 10 favorites for us from a lifetime of listening, including: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 Vivaldi, Complete Cello Concertos Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul"

Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park

Jeff Kurtti

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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Fifty years ago, Walt Disney utterly transformed the concept of outdoor entertainment venues from tawdry carnivals and seedy amusement piers called "amusement parks," to an entirely new destination that would come into common vernacular as the "theme park."

Although Disneyland was the inspiration of one man, Walt did not achieve this history-altering concept on his own. Using his innate talent for combining disparate skills and personalities, he assembled a creative team that blended imagination with engineering. Walt called this group his "Imagineers."

Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park introduces a core group of the originators of Disneyland and the other Disney parks. It explores their individual relationships with Walt and each other, their creative breakthroughs and failures, and their rivalries and professional politics. This candid narrative of their lives and contributions to a very special form of entertainment illustrates why, half a century later, their work continues to be vital and important to millions of people every day, and all over the world.

Lavishly illustrated throughout with rare and never-before-seen artwork and photographs, Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park will further enrich the reader's appreciation of the exceptional talent behind Disneyland's creation and ongoing evolution.

Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

Muhammad Yunus

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Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It began with a simple $27 loan. After witnessing the cycle of poverty that kept many poor women enslaved to high-interest loan sharks in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus lent money to 42 women so they could purchase bamboo to make and sell stools. In a short time, the women were able to repay the loans while continuing to support themselves and their families. With that initial eye-opening success, the seeds of the Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit, were planted.

After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus returned to Bangladesh to settle into a life as a professor. But a famine in 1974 ravaged the country, leading Dr. Yunus to alter his thinking and his life profoundly: "What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?.... Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me." Armed with little more than a lofty dream to end the suffering around him, he started an experimental microcredit enterprise in 1977; by 1983 the Grameen Bank was officially formed.

The idea behind the Grameen Bank is ingeniously simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. This concept strikes at the root of poverty by specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, providing small loans (usually less than $300) to those unable to obtain credit from traditional banks. At Grameen, loans are administered to groups of five people, with only two receiving their money up front. As soon as these two make a few regular payments, loans are gradually extended to the rest of the group. In this way, the program builds a sense of community as well as individual self-reliance. Most of the Grameen Bank's loans are to women, and since its inception, there has been an astonishing loan repayment rate of over 98 percent.

Banker to the Poor is an inspiring memoir of the birth of microcredit, written in a conversational tone that makes it both moving and enjoyable to read. The Grameen Bank is now a $2.5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal. Ever optimistic, Yunus travels the globe spreading the belief that poverty can be eliminated: "...the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem; end illiteracy; and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster that we do today." Dr. Yunus's efforts prove that hope is a global currency. --Shawn Carkonen

The Mary Kay Way: Timeless Principles from America's Greatest Woman Entrepreneur

Mary Kay Ash

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wow.Just Wow.Must read.Be succesful.Do it with care and kindness. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This woman was a success and her company lives on in legacy for a reason.She knew what she was doing and her succesors would be wise not to doubt for a moment the things she put in motion.I am wildly inspired and equaly moved by this book.Practicing trating people with respect is common sense but so often forgoten in todays society that the proven power of it with the forfront leadership of the company is motivation enough for me to keep that the #1 in my futur direct sales.
Thumbs up for this one!

Editorial Review:

The Mary Kay Way: Timeless Principles from America's Greatest Woman Entrepreneur is back in print and updated to reflect developments in today’s business environment for the modern entrepreneur. You will find inspiration and real, proven success principles that represents the forty-five year old success story of Mary Kay Ash, founder Mary Kay, Inc., the cosmetics company that provides women with unlimited opportunities for success. A foreword by Mary Kay’s grandson, also a company executive, introduces her timeless guide to entrepreneurial success.