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Why read yet another book on the financial crisis? A Huffington Post columnist has declared the latest in a long line of them, All the Devils Are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, the “Best Business Book of the Year” (he does, however, admit to being a friend of one of the authors). Time magazine says, “When the financial crisis of this decade is being taught in business schools in the next, All the Devils Are Here could be the textbook.”
The authors convinced Jon Stewart’s viewers on The Daily Show last night (Stewart used the magic words, “you have to get this [book]“); it rose to #13 on Amazon sales rankings after their appearance.
Coming tomorrow to The Daily Show, Jay-Z, Decoded (Spiegel and Grau) and on Thursday, Philip K. Howard,Life Without Lawyers (Norton).
The amazing self-promoter with the daunting last name, Gary Vaynerchuk has a new book coming in March, The Thank You Economy that is already moving up Amazon’s sales rankings (currently at #182).
Vaynerchuk became an internet hit with his fast-talking, no-nonsense videos about wine, (described as “frenetic” by the NYT) created to promote his family’s wine shop and his 2009 book about internet marketing, Crush It!The new book is about giving great customer service.
Buzz is building for Where Good Ideas Come From by science writer Steven Johnson. The New York Times ran an early review in the Business section, praising Johnson’s storytelling ability in this exploration of innovative environments like the city and the Internet, and how a “series of shared properties and patterns… recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.”
At libraries we checked, current orders are in line with reserves, but this looks like one to watch, since Johnson was also a featured speaker at TED, the elite technology, entertainment and design conference, this summer. And his cool video trailer for the book appears to be going viral.
Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow gets a respectful review from critic Janet Maslin in the New York Times, who finds that this biography is justified by new material unearthed from Washington’s papers at the University of Virginia.
At 900-odd densely packed pages, Washington can be arid at times. But it’s also deeply rewarding as a whole…. [and] offers a fresh sense of what a groundbreaking role Washington played, not only in physically embodying his new nation’s leadership but also in interpreting how its newly articulated constitutional principles would be applied.
…makes excellent use of Washington’s own voice — the man’s angry letters are like thunderbolts — and turns constitutional debates and bureaucratic infighting into riveting reading.
A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (Random House) is “a wonderfully meandering journey through history, sociology, science, and more. The thread that connects it all is Bryson’s. . . home, a charming former church rectory in a small English village,” according to bookseller Christopher Rose in the October Indie Next Pick citation. NPR’s Morning Edition will feature the book on October 5, followed by the New York Times Book Review on October 10. It is also the Amazon Spotlight Selection for the month of Oct.
Is It Just Me or Is It Nuts Out There? by Whoopi Goldberg (Hyperion) finds the actress and co-host of ABC’s The View sharing stories from her own life, when she’s been forced to deal with tough situations in family, marriage, friendship, and business.
Cesar’s Rules by Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier (Crown) is the bestselling dog trainer’s primer on establishing the rules of the house.
The Dog Who Couldn’t Stop Loving by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Harper) considers the far-reaching consequences of the co-evolution of dogs and humans, drawing from recent scientific research.
You: Raising Your Child by Michael F. Roizen & Mehmet C. Oz (Free Press) explores the biology and psychology of raising a child from birth to school age.
Trickle Up Poverty by Michael Savage (Morrow) is the author and conservative talk show host’s attack on President Obama’s agenda and his political tactics.
I’m Not High: (But I’ve Got a Lot of Crazy Stories about Life as a Goat Boy, a Dad, and a Spiritual Warrior) by Jim Breuer (Gotham/Penguin) is a memoir by the comedian and Sirius radio show host best known as “Goat Boy” on Saturday Night Live. He was also featured on the ALTAFF Humor Panel at ALA Annual.
Weeks ahead of its release next Tuesday, The Facebook Effect by Fortune magazine’s David Kirkpatrick has received hundreds of mentions across the web in virtually every news article about Facebook’s latest adjustments to its privacy policy as it nears the milestone of 500 million worldwide members. The book is already at #409 on Amazon, and libraries are showing growing holds on light orders.
As CNET mentions, veteran tech journalist Kirkpatrick was granted unprecedented access to the company’s top executives:
This is the Facebook that Facebook wants you to see — both the glamorous and the ugly sides of one of the most successful, fastest-growing companies in recent memory… It’s fascinating. It’s well-written and masterfully reported. Still, one is left wondering if anything more sordid was missed.
There’s also an excerpt on DailyFinance.com. And on June 8, Kirkpatrick will make the rounds on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and on an ABC Radio Satellite Tour.
Excerpts from a new book about Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in the new issue of Fortune magazine have caused the business press to go all Page Six (yes, we enjoy the weirdness of that concept, too), and the book, due out next month, to rise on Amazon. The gossip focuses on the story of Zuckerberg crying in a restaurant’s bathroom floor during negotiations to buy the company and the Animal House atmosphere of Facebook’s early days.
The timing of the book is good; an IPO is expected some time this year.
An earlier, unauthorized book about the founding of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich (Doubleday, 2009) has been made into a movie, The Social Network, and is scheduled for release on Oct. 15.
This book’s title will have many managers and their staffs cheering, Get Rid of the Performance Review. Say the authors, “It’s time to put the performance review out of its misery…it’s pretentious, it’s bogus, and it produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.”
The Associated Press released an article about it, which appears in the Huffington Post, among other news outlets.
For a little catharsis, try the “How much do you hate performance reviews?” quiz.
A book that takes a contrarian approach to business, Rework, arrives on the new USA Today best seller list at #49.
It has been rising on Amazon as well, reaching as high as #4 last week. The authors, miffed that Karl Rove’s book shot above theirs, retaliated with this video (via Gawker):
After dozens of high-profile best selling titles about various aspects of the financial crisis, the most anticipated title, and the one the may be the most accessible to the broadest audience is…
It arrives with much fanfare; an excerpt in Vanity Fair, appearances on Sixty Minutes (Sunday), the Today Show, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Jon Stewart, among others on Monday, followed by Fresh Air and Charlie Rose on Tuesday.
Holds in libraries are surprisingly light; all the publicity could change that.
It’s amazing to realize that there was a time before consulting firms and endless talk about business strategy. The former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review writes about how we got here in Lords of Strategy. It’s currently rising on Amazon (now at #308), even though the listing indicates it won’t be published for three more weeks (the publisher listing, however, shows a 3/3/10 pub date).
…a clear, deft and cogent portrait of what the author calls the most powerful business idea of the past half-century: the realization that corporate leaders needed to abandon their go-it-alone focus on their company’s fortunes and instead pursue policies based on a detailed study of the competitive environment and of broader business trends.
Harry Markopolos, a Boston deratives analyst, was asked by his boss to look into a very successful hedge fund and try to figure out why it was doing so well. He instantly realized that it was a fraud and tried many times to blow the whistle on it. He wasn’t subtle; in 2000, he sent a memo to the SEC titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud.” Fittingly, his book about the experience is titled No One Would Listen.
That fund was, of course, Bernie Madoff’s. In an interview with Jon Stewart on Monday night, Markopolos was clear about his distain for the SEC, causing Stewart to burst out, “You are an angry dude; you’re just rippin‘ these guys.”
The book rose to #18 on Amazon (it’s now at #21) and has heavy holds in libraries.
Next week’s most-anticipated nonfiction book is bestselling business guru Seth Godin‘s guide to mastering the new economy, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Three of the four libraries we checked had it, with holds of close to 2:1 on orders of 8-15 copies
Though the reserves aren’t huge, they appear to be a positive effect of Godin’s gamble on Internet-only publicity campaign, in which he bypassed the traditional media, giving away books at his own expense to the first 3,000 readers who agreed to make a minium $30 donation to the Acumen Fund.
Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging by Greg Critser (Harmony) is a journalist’s irreverent look at the anti-aging industry. Kirkus found it ”a delightful, politically incorrect view of the life-extension movement, accompanied by the disappointing news that aging is reversible but not in the near future.”
I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne (Grand Central) is the legendary rocker and reality show star’s memoir, which Kirkus deemed “as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.”
Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour by Gayle Haggard (Tyndale) is a memoir by the wife of evangelical Christian leader Tim Haggard who had liaisons with a male prostitute.
Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies Table, Our Journey Through the Middle East by Ted Dekker and Middle East expert Carl Medearis (Doubleday Religion) is an account of the Christian novelist’s effort to love his enemies.
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner is at it again - writing a review that immediately compels you to pick up a book you might not have given a second glance, based on his confident comparisons to similar titles, his sensitivity to good writing, and his own seductive storytelling flair.
This time it is I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, a look at the roots of the global financial crisis by English novelist John Lancaster (The Debt to Pleasure), who began by researching a novel but found the facts so compelling he chose to write a work of nonfiction. It’s already up to #94 on Amazon.
Forty-six libraries have this book, according to World Cat. Those we checked show reserve ratios of five to one on modest orders.
Here are a few of Garner’s most compelling endorsements of the book:
“Few if any [similar] books will be as pleasurable — and by that I mean as literate or as wickedly funny — as John Lanchester’s.”
“If you don’t know how derivatives or credit default swaps work, or what securitization is, or why futures are riskier than options, this is a book for you.”
“Mr. Lanchester’s history lesson is peppered with dead-on references to everything, including ‘Annie Hall,’ ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘The Wire,’ Hemingway and Jacques Derrida. He is effortlessly epigrammatical.”
More useful from a library standpoint is 1-800-CEO-READ’s Best Business Book Awards of 2009, because it includes books on practical subjects people are looking for these days, like how to run a small business, management and salesmanship (here’s a title that speaks to our times – How to Sell When Nobody’s Buying).
800-CEO-READ was founded as the corporate sales division of the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee. The retail stores were closed March 31, but CEO-READ continues to operate. They run a monthly list of their top sellers and published The 100 Best Business Book of All Time this year.
Andy Sorkin’s book about Lehman Brothers has been on the NYT Nonfiction Best Seller list for six weeks. Some libraries are showing holds ratios as high as 20:1. Holds are also heavy on the audio, where it is owned.
Expect them to rise even higher after Sorkin appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Wednesday.
Explaining the moves, Adrian Zackheim, publisher of the Penguin business imprint Portfolio, said,
Nobody wants to be second, third or fourth…You are either first or you get lost in the pack, or you have to come after all the other titles and have a different take.
However, two Madoff books have already been published,
Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World by Gerald Strober and Deborah Strober (Paperback – Mar 2, 2009)
Madoff: Corruption, Deceit, and the Making of the World’s Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme (Paperback)
by Peter Sander (Author) The Lyons Press; First Paperback Edition edition (March 24, 2009)
Catastrophe: The Story of Bernard L. Madoff, The Man Who Swindled the World by Gerald Strober and Deborah Strober (Phoenix Books, Paperback – Mar 2, 2009)
Madoff: Corruption, Deceit, and the Making of the World’s Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme by Peter Sander (The Lyons Press; Paperback, March 24, 2009)
