Business Biography

Imagine accidentally discovering a pending environmental disaster where you live, and having only eight years to try to stop it. That is precisely the situation Cole Summers finds himself in. A planned and preventable fiasco looms in his part of the Great Basin Desert, and it appears to be up to him to use his unique education to spread awareness, rally support, and rectify the situation before it is too late.

The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Aristotle Onassis was a born orator, and Jackie Kennedy would sit and listen to him spin off tales and stories - often racy - by the hour. A speaker of seven languages, he could keep a dinner party of some of the world's most sophisticated conversationalists spellbound. Even Jackie couldn't help but drop her reserve and laugh with him. America's First Lady simply never knew anyone quite as free or exotic as Aristotle Onassis, a paradoxical blend of raconteur and ruffian.

She is a living icon of the family storytelling renaissance in America. And to hear her tell it, Kathryn Tucker Windham owes it all to her father, the small-town banker, school-board chairman, and Sunday school superintendent who always came home with a story. These stories celebrate the father he was and the stories that are his legacy.

In 2004 Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on the Harvard Business School's plush campus. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.

The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men". John Perkins wrote that economic hit men (EHM) "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder".

Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the listener the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more 20-hour workday and another lap dance away. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity - and, ultimately, this book.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford's outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism.

Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles.

The Power Broker tells the story of Robert Moses, the single most powerful man in New York for almost half a century and the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever once being elected to office, he created for himself a position of supreme and untouchable authority, allowing him to utterly reshape the city of New York, turning it into the city we know today, while at the same time blighting the lives of millions and remaining accountable to no one.

The team behind How Google Works returns with management lessons from legendary coach and business executive Bill Campbell, whose mentoring of some of our most successful modern entrepreneurs has helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value. Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt.

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford - the usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

In 1986, before Michael Lewis became the best-selling author of The Big Short, Moneyball, and Flash Boys, he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to New York- and London-based bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years - a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business.

Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture is universally recognized as the greatest, most outrageous, and most unforgettable show business memoir ever written. The basis of an award-winning documentary film, it remains the gold standard of Hollywood storytelling. An extraordinary raconteur, Evans spares no one, least of all himself. The Kid Stays in the Picture is sharp, witty, self-aggrandizing, and self-lacerating in equal measure.

Having spent over twenty years building her hugely successful beauty empire, Maria Hatzistefanis managed to achieve all her childhood dreams and goals. Whilst this life of glamour and success is exhilarating, Maria is shocked to find that the happiness it brings is fleeting. This leads her to realize that her life needs a new focus. In this easy-to-follow guide, Maria asks the fundamental question: "What is happiness?" Brimming with good sense, great advice and clear tips, How to Live Your Best Life will equip you with the tools you need to be in control of your own destiny.

The Fastest Tortoise is about not just weathering the unknown but embracing it and thriving. Structuring his story around “Ken-isms” that define his personal and professional philosophies—such as “yellow lights don’t turn green,” “be uncomfortable,” and “feed the ducks while they’re quacking”—Ken demonstrates how to approach a volatile world.

Already a BBC documentary miniseries and excerpted in the Guardian, We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an unforgettable family living in the most extraordinary circumstances. This touching memoir is set to be a major motion picture starring Scarlett Johansson and Matt Damon, in theaters December 23, 2011.

When Carol Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge-fund manager in a 1966 Fortune article, she didn’t dream that Warren Buffett would one day be considered the world’s greatest investor - nor that she and Buffett would become close personal friends. Now Loomis has collected and updated the best Buffett articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2012, including thirteen cover stories and a dozen pieces authored by Buffett himself. Loomis has provided commentary about each major arti­cle that supplies context and her own informed point of view.

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy, which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man.

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat.