In its 133rd year of publication, Library Journal is the oldest and most respected publication covering the library field, with review sections evaluating nearly 7000 books annually, along with hundreds of audiobooks, videos, databases, web sites, and systems that libraries buy. Recently, Library Journal released its list of the 32 best business books of 2009, dividing the books into nine categories. Here are the first three categories.
Autobiography/Biography
The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals
by Frank Partnoy. Ivar Kreuger parlayed his success with the Swedish Match Corp. into a capital-raising journey to 1920s America, where enthusiastic investors got caught up in his financial schemes, the complexity (and instability) of which rival many of today’s.
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
by T.J. Stiles. This historical biography of the shipping and financial magnate may be too much of a good thing for some readers, but its insights into the social and business worlds of antebellum America and Vanderbilt’s indomitable influence on America’s financial system make it a rich read.
Business/Corporate History
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
by Ken Auletta. Journalist Auletta provides a perceptive and determined look inside Google, the fast-growing company with the corporate motto “don’t be evil” and which is simultaneously proud of its open internal culture and its resistance to outsider scrutiny.
The Towering World of Jimmy Choo: A Glamorous Story of Power, Profits, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Shoe
by Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira de Rosen. This slim history highlights the creation and marketing of a major luxury brand while detailing the relationship between shoe designer Jimmy Choo and society girl Tamara Mellon, which first produced massive success but later soured.
Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives
by Emily Yellin. Although it focuses primarily on customer service provided (or not) over the phone, this is a unique look at service workers’ points of view and the future, advantages, and drawbacks of automated customer service.
Economics/U.S. Economy
The Capitalist’s Bible: The Essential Guide to Free Markets–and Why They Matter to You
by Gretchen Morgenson. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Morgenson’s primer on the history, jargon, successes, and disasters of the capitalist system is essential for anyone who lives within one.
The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox. Time economics columnist Fox provides a scholarly but readable history of the efficient market theory that drove much of 20th-century economics practice, contrasting its focus on rationality with recent behavioral economics findings.
This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. Only hard-core business and history readers may get all the way through this title, but anyone who thinks our current economic crisis is the first or worst of its kind would do well to read this history of debt, inflation, currency, and banking crises.
Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature is at Odds with Economics–and Why it Matters
by Peter A. Ubel. Examines the many ways in which individuals make irrational decisions and argues the free market cannot be entirely trusted to regulate itself in the face of that irrationality.
