Finance Biography

During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources - including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt - as he re-creates that extraordinary journey.

In today's ruthless world of organised crime, the best criminals aren't foolish enough to steal money out of banks. They wear tailored suits, carry briefcases, and discreetly slip money into banks. Bigwigs, oligarchs and crime syndicates running drugs, trafficking guns and people, arming terrorists and subverting government controls are desperate to put a legitimate face on their wealth. Washing dirty money, moving it around the globe, making it look legitimate is where the action is for both criminals and the authorities chasing them.

Growing up in the sleepy towns of Bhilai and Bokaro, Arundhati Bhattacharya never imagined that one day she would go on to chair India's largest bank. It was sheer chance that she came to know of the bank probationary officers' entrance examination through a friend. She applied, was selected and went on to have a glorious banking career spanning four decades.

In Ringside Stories, real estate guru Dick Corbett reveals the secrets to his success in business and in life, tracking the rough-and-ready life of a man who won't accept failure as an outcome. Setbacks large and small are taken as lessons for the future, and one small success leads to another, larger one until the dream achieved is grander than any restless youth could have imagined.

Although one of the most influential thinkers of the last millennium, Karl Marx was relatively unheralded during most of his lifetime. Famous for predicting the inevitable demise of capitalism, it was only after his death that his clarion call reached a wide audience: "Workers of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your chains." Andrew Collier breathes new life into the achievements of Karl Marx, arguing that his work is still of vital relevance in today’s global climate of inequality.

"This book is in part a detective story. After 9/11 I knew, if I needed further reinforcement, that we are living in a new world - the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-correcting, and fast-changing than it was even a quarter century earlier. It's a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is my attempt to understand the nature of this new world." (Alan Greenspan)

In 2008, when the Bitcoin Whitepaper was published online, the technology world changed forever. Hero / Villain: Satoshi: The Man Who Built Bitcoin tells the story of how an awkward Australian security specialist first created something revolutionary under the moniker “Satoshi Nakamoto” and how he spent every moment thereafter either in self-imposed hiding or in court trying to protect his invention.

FTSE is an account of how a small start-up created by the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange launched in the mid 1980s to provide financial information, became a world leader and one of the UK's most trusted and famous brands. It chronicles how the FTSE 100 was born and details the ferocious deal-making that followed over 35 years of market boom and bust. It provides a ringside seat on some of the biggest deals and biggest personalities in business and global politics.

Ever wonder how a startup comes together - the people, places, skills, failures, and hustle that make it a real business? This is the story of David and David, two entrepreneurs with lots of energy and less of a roadmap than you might think. In 1993, David Cohen and David Brown founded their first company, Pinpoint Technologies, which grew from a basement startup to a successful multinational company with $50 million in annual sales and over 250 employees.

Airline pilot Steven Rozenberg entered the world of real estate investing with jet fuel grit and a candid smile. Building an Empire: Failing Our Way to Millions tells how he met IT executive Pete Neubig, a chance encounter that led to a lifetime friendship and business partnership, and their journey together as struggling entrepreneurs learning the ropes one hard knock at a time. Their story is inspiring and enlightening.

A Wheelbarrow and a Shovel documents the truly remarkable story of one of America’s most unlikely business success stories. Starting with only a wheelbarrow and a shovel, as well as the same American dream that led his parents to leave their native Holland for the United States, John Boll built a real estate empire in the most unlikely of ways - by developing and improving manufactured home communities around the country. It’s a rags-to-riches tale that could only happen in America - and only with the hand of God leading the way.

When Ashton Kutcher first heard about 50 Cent's nine-figure Vitaminwater windfall in 2007, the actor realized he'd been missing out. He soon followed the rapper's formula - seeking equity instead of cash for endorsement deals - but with a twist: as the first person to top one million Twitter followers, Kutcher leveraged his social reach to accumulate stakes in a vast range of user-hungry tech startups. A decade later, Kutcher is perhaps the brightest in a firmament of star investors from Beyoncé and Jay-Z to Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.

Leland Faust unmasks Wall Street's unsavory tactics in powerful detail by giving listeners a high-level view of how the financial services industry misleads them, overcharges them, and exposes them to needless risk. He documents the financial industry's alluring come-ons, airbrushed risks, high-stakes gambling, half-truths, misleading statements, outlandish predictions, tricks to overcharge customers, bad deals, and outright fraud by the most prominent and renowned of Wall Street's players.

Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. It is a comprehensive account, animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.

Arianna Huffington is one of the world's most prominent business leaders in media. As cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, she built the first internet newspaper, which eclipsed the traffic of the New York Times and won the Pulitzer Prize. This concise but richly detailed biography provides an overview of Huffington's life and career, chronicling her journey from Athens to London, New York, Washington and California, across seven decades.

In December 2008, amidst a world gripped by financial crisis, Bernard Madoff, a respected fund manager, and former chairman of NASDAQ, was arrested by the FBI for reportedly bilking thousands of trusting investors out of $50 billion. In the first comprehensive account of this financial mastermind's epic Ponzi scheme, Catastrophe exposes the real story behind Madoff's upstanding façade-his family's involvement, and his unlikely rise and incredible crash.

Each year Americans lose billions of dollars to fraudulent activity. The Madoffs Among Us explains in graphic detail how and why people fall prey. Most importantly, it tells you how to easily identify the people who perpetrate these crimes and avoid their deceitful practices. Why do smart people fall for these cons? What are today’s most common scams? And how can you avoid becoming a victim?

Tetsuya Ishikawa's story reveals how a young Oxford graduate found himself in command of vast sums of other people's money. It also explalins how a novice to the mysteries of hedge funds and sub-prime mortgages fixed complex deals for billions of dollars in the exclusive bars, brothels, and trading floors of London, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo - and reaped the benefits in a colossal annual bonus and an international luxury lifestyle.

In this book, you will get a glimpse at Wall Street Bets, the subreddit that costs two of the largest hedge funds hundreds of millions of dollars. This will show you a David and Goliath story about a short squeezed that took the GameStop stock to the moon and made traditional Wall Street look and think about the little guys before thinking about squeezing a company backed by real-life trolls.

At just ten years old, Julie leaves her close-knit loving family in the city for a country boarding school in Swaziland to join her brother, Seth. Julie's adventures offer an insight into life at a harsh, food-rationed religious boarding school of the fifties. This school, set in glorious African countryside, includes all the sports, horse-riding, piano lessons, performing arts, and high level of education that are possible to prepare a child for entrance to a British university