The Counterfeiters
1925 · 467 pages
Every life in Gide's novel is a forgery: boys passing false coins, adults faking passions they do not feel, and a novelist inside the book writing a novel called The Counterfeiters.
★ 6.6
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 Prize
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
1991 · 928 pages
Oil is the story of the modern world, Yergin argues, and he follows it from the first Pennsylvania derrick through two world wars that ran on it to Saddam Hussein's tanks in Kuwait.
★ 6.4
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
Money
A Suicide Note
1984 · 368 pages
John Self drinks and spends himself toward ruin between London and New York while his first film falls apart. Amis gave the decade's greed a voice English comic fiction spent years imitating.
★ 6.4
The House of Morgan
An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
1990 · 812 pages
Four generations of one bank, from Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Chernow's Pierpont Morgan locks New York's bankers in his library until they agree to end the Panic of 1907.
★ 5.3
The Beautiful and Damned
1922 · 364 pages
Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria decide to wait for his grandfather's millions rather than work. Fitzgerald follows the waiting year by year, as the parties thin out and the drinking never does.
★ 5.1
Devil Take the Hindmost
1999 · 400 pages
Bubbles are not aberrations but a permanent feature of markets. Chancellor follows the fever from tulip mania through the South Sea Bubble to Japan's 1980s, with borrowed money at the center every time.
★ 4.6
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