Testosterone Fuels Boom, Swindler Sows Panic: Top Business Books

By James Pressley - 2012-06-01T23:00:01Z

Testosterone drives traders to take excessive risk, while a Wall Street swindler dupes a U.S. president and triggers a market panic in two of the best business books so far this year. Heres a list of recommended titles.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google (GOOG)? by William Poundstone (Little, Brown). A guide to brain-bending interview questions asked at Google and other innovative companies. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender, one begins. What do you do in the 60 seconds before the blades begin whirring?

The Art of the Sale by Philip Delves Broughton (Penguin Press/Portfolio). The journalist who brought us Ahead of the Curve, a chronicle of how he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, uncovers the dark arts of sales -- a discipline absent from the HBS curriculum.

Demystifying the Chinese Economy by Justin Yifu Lin (Cambridge). A patriotic yet pragmatic look at how China notched up average annual growth of 9.9 percent for three decades.

A Disposition to Be Rich by Geoffrey C. Ward (Knopf). Ferdinand Ward, the Bernie Madoff of the Gilded Age, comes to life in this elegant and perversely fascinating biography of the swindler who ruined Ulysses S. Grant.

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman (Norton). The Princeton economist makes his case for more government spending and less austerity. You can almost hear his teeth gnash as he takes on the Austerians.

Engines of Change by Paul Ingrassia (Simon & Schuster). Ingrassia, who shared a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for writing on management turmoil at General Motors Corp., presents a quirky history of American culture as seen through 15 cars.

Exile on Wall Street by Mike Mayo (Wiley). Mayo, an old-school bank analyst, chronicles his battle to change the status quo on Wall Street.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller (Princeton). The influential Yale University economist argues that finance, for all its manifest failings of late, remains a force for good in society. Its wrong to assume, he says, that Goldman executives -- whatever their misbehavior may have been - - have an incentive to attack and subjugate people.

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Testosterone Fuels Boom, Swindler Sows Panic: Top Business Books

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