Books on American business are high on the list of new fall book releases. Here are five of the most promising titles that will be hitting the shelves of your local bookstore or the screen of your e-reader soon.
Here are five new business books
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown and Company, Oct. 1.
Gladwell, the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point, uses the Biblical story of young David battling the giant Goliath as a starting point for a new look on how we think about obstacles in our lives and work. He examines everything from strife in Northern Ireland, to cancer research, to the American public school education, and draws upon psychology, history and current events to weave it all together.
Gladwell, who was born in England and grew up in Ontario, has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1996. Prior to joining The New Yorker staff, he was a reporter for the Washington Post. He also is the author of Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw.
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone, Little, Brown and Company, Oct. 15.
Compared with the other founders of big tech companies, Jeff Bezos is much less well-known. Stone, who writes for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, appears to have gotten wide access to Amazon employees past and present, as well as to Bezos family members and Bezos himself for this account. The book traces the growth of Amazon from a book delivery company to its status as an Internet company that has helped to transform the way we do business today.
Stone wrote for the New York Times and Newsweek before joining Bloomberg. He also is the author of the book Gearheads, a non-fiction book published in 2003.
The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature and the Future of Forecasting by Alan Greenspan, Penguin Press, Oct. 22.
In this book, the former Federal Reserve chairman uses lessons learned from our current economic crisis to question the ways we make financial predictions and decisions and to examine why those ways failed us in 2008.
In The Map and the Territory, Greenspan uses the history of economic prediction, the new work of behavioral economists, his own experience, and new technologies to create a new financial conceptual grid. He examines our nation’s current economic challenges: debt, reform of the welfare state, competition with China, natural disasters, and global warming.
Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them by Richard S. Grossman, Oxford, Oct. 24.
Grossman, a professor of economics at Wesleyan University, examines nine big economic crises of the past two centuries, such as Ireland in the 19th century and Japan in the 1990s, and makes the determination that they were caused by ideology replacing sound economic theory.
Grossman previously worked as an international economist at the United States Department of State and has worked and consulted on Wall Street. He also wrote Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800.
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton, Portfolio, Nov. 5.
This new book chronicles the story of Twitter, which in about six years has grown from a small group of Silicon Valley computer programmers to a business worth about $11.5 billion. Like all good stories, it is a story of friendships—some failed and some still standing—and power struggles. As a reporter, Bilton draws upon scores of sources, e-mails, and documents to write about the global influence of Twitter.
Author Nick Bilton is a columnist, reporter and blogger for The New York Times. His work also has appeared in Wired, Engadget, Scientific America, ABC, CNet, O’Reilly Radar and AlleyInsider. Bilton is an adjunct professor at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
