Business Adventures
1969 · 464 pages
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
★ 4.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Big Short
2010 · 291 pages
Michael Burry, a one-eyed doctor turned investor, read the mortgage documents no one else opened and bet against American housing. Lewis turns credit default swaps into a thriller about who saw it coming.
★ 4.7
American Psycho
1991 · 399 pages
Patrick Bateman works mergers and acquisitions, agonizes over the typeface on a colleague's business card, and narrates atrocities in the voice he uses for Huey Lewis albums. Reagan's Wall Street becomes horror comedy.
★ 5.4
Liar's Poker
1989 · 310 pages
Twenty-four and ignorant of bonds, Lewis was handed millions of other people's money by Salomon Brothers. He wrote the trading floor as farce, and a generation read it as a career guide.
★ 5.6
The Great Crash, 1929
1955 · 224 pages
Galbraith reconstructs how a country talked itself into buying stock with borrowed money, from the Florida land boom onward, and names the bezzle: the embezzlement a rising market hides and a crash exposes.
★ 6.4
Barbarians at the Gate
The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
1989 · 563 pages
In 1988 the chief executive of RJR Nabisco moved to buy his own company and set off a bidding war that closed at $25 billion. Burrough and Helyar put you inside every meeting.
★ 6.4