I read (and write) biography as much for history as for an individual life story. It’s a way of getting a personalized look at an historical period. When the book is a family biography, the history is amplified by different family members' perspectives, almost like a kaleidoscope, and it stretches over generations, allowing the historical story to blossom over time. The genre also opens a window into the ethos that animated this unique group of individuals who are bound together by blood. Whether it's a desire for wealth or power, the zeal for a cause, or the need to survive adversity, I found it in these family stories.
In 1866, Lazarus Morganthau emigrated from Germany, intent on rebuilding the fortune he had lost. He died destitute but, like the Biblical Lazarus, his descendants rose again.
Family members made a fortune in New York real estate before turning to public service, with Henry Sr. becoming an Ambassador, Henry Jr. a confidant of FDR and Secretary of the Treasury, and Robert the longest-serving District Attorney in Manhattan’s history. We get a detailed look at New York's interlocking spheres of society, finance, and politics, and at how the Morgenthaus, as Jews, found acceptance despite the antisemitism of the time.
An "epic and intimate" (David M. Kennedy) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century.
"A work of important and enduring history...from the making of New York, to the Greatest Generation, to surviving one of the toughest jobs in law and order: Manhattan DA. The Morgenthau name and the contributions of this historic family will endure forever." --Tom Brokaw
My first job after college was at The Wall Street Journal, working evenings as a copyreader. It was thrilling to enter a big-league newsroom, but torture to be confined to putting tiny headlines on even tinier stories. Then at age 23, after a whirlwind staff shuffle, I started writing the paper’s premier stock-market column, “Heard on the Street.” Daylight had arrived. For the next 11 years, I covered finance. I met billionaires and people en route to prison. It wasn’t always easy to tell them apart! My writing career has widened since then but sizing up markets – and the people who rule them – remains an endless fascination.
There have been newer books on Warren Buffett since this 1995 gem, but this one goes the deepest into the mechanisms that have brought Buffett a $124 billion fortune. Plus it’s the best on Buffett’s quirky personality. I’ve known Roger from our days at The Wall Street Journal together, and it was exciting seeing him research this project over a three-year span – even if Buffett never officially helped him. The finished book made me feel I “knew” Buffett as if he were a long-time neighbor.
Since its hardcover publication in August of 1995, Buffett has appeared on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Newsday and Business Week bestseller lists.
Starting from scratch, simply by picking stocks and companies for investment, Warren Buffett amassed one of the epochal fortunes of the twentieth century—an astounding net worth of $10 billion, and counting. His awesome investment record has made him a cult figure popularly known for his seeming contradictions: a billionaire who has a modest lifestyle, a phenomenally successful investor who eschews the revolving-door trading of modern Wall Street,…
When I used to be a thief, I hung out with people who justified why stealing was okay. Until I almost got caught and sent to jail, I was brutally reminded that there is no easy way out of doing bad things.
However, I couldn't be a thief amongst people striving toward bigger goals while helping others.
I was around people who reflected on how I felt about myself, and the results were always proportional to my efforts and interests.
Simply put, this book is about being around people who know better than I, and have good intentions. Learn and continue giving more than I take, and always stay grateful.
Pain, self-inflicted or not, is a great motivator. The difference is people helping or deserting me as a result of what kind of pain I am in.
#1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today Bestseller!
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind reveals the missing link between wanting success and achieving it!
Have you ever wondered why some people seem to get rich easily, while others are destined for a life of financial struggle? Is the difference found in their education, intelligence, skills, timing, work habits, contacts, luck, or their choice of jobs, businesses, or investments?
The shocking answer is: None of the above!
In his groundbreaking Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker states: "Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial…
There’s something clinical and yet human about big financial crises, especially those that involve some kind of trickery or fraud. I’ve always been fascinated by this dark side of the world of money, and have been fortunate enough in my career to have had ring-side seats at a few such events in rich and poor countries. Fraud is not at the heart of the “social contrivance of money” but the monetary system is built on an edifice of trust that can all too easily be abused by scammers. From these episodes, we can learn a lot about people, credit, and society’s ways of protecting itself.
I have always wondered whether John Law, the creator of the ill-fated Mississippi System that brought the financial system of France to its knees in 1720, a genius who understood money better than anyone before him, or a deluded fantasist who had learnt just enough to create a monetary weapon of mass destruction?
In his careful and well-researched account, Antoin Murphy leans towards the first interpretation, but he offers enough information to allow the reader to form their own conclusions.
John Law (1671-1729) left a remarkable legacy of economic concepts from a time when economic conceptualization was very much at an embryonic stage. Yet he is best known-and generally dismissed-today as a rake, duellist, and gambler. This intellectual biography offers a new approach to Law, one that shows him to have been a significant economic theorist with a vision that he attempted to implement as policy in early-eighteenth-century Europe.
Law's style, marked by a clarity and use of modern terminology, stands out starkly against the turgid prose of many of his contemporaries. His vision of a monetary and financial system…
From our very beginning, Americans have stood out from all other people on earth in one odd habit: We have a powerful reflex to fix problems ourselves—directly, locally, as individuals—instead of waiting for nobles or experts or government officials to save us. Between the volunteer hours and money we donate, our philanthropic efforts total close to a trillion dollars of organic problem-solving every year. It’s a wellspring of our national success. Struck by the effectiveness of our grassroots charitable action, I spent several years compiling the authoritative reference book that documents exactly how private giving bolsters U.S. prosperity, the Almanac of American Philanthropy. Then, I produced a historical novel portraying some great givers.
Many of us know that philanthropists have been central to eradicating disease, that charitable groups are powerful forces against hunger and poverty, and that philanthropy is behind many of our greatest educational successes. But did you know that private donors were largely responsible for making America the world leader in rocketry? That they willed the fields of aeronautics and biomedical engineering into existence.
During World War II, it was not a government agency but rather a philanthropist who jumpstarted the rollout of radar and then rescued the effort to create atomic weapons after it had bogged down in our defense bureaucracy. With this book, you can marvel at the WWII heroics accomplished by entrepreneur and generous giver Alfred Loomis.
In the fall of 1940, as German bombers flew over London and with America not yet at war, a small team of British scientists on orders from Winston Churchill carried out a daring transatlantic mission. The British unveiled their most valuable military secret in a clandestine meeting with American nuclear physicists at the Tuxedo Park mansion of a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis. Powerful, handsome, and enormously wealthy, Loomis had for years led a double life, spending his days brokering huge deals and his weekends working with the world's leading scientists in his deluxe private laboratory that was…
I am an investor who happens to love writing, music, and simply life in general. I was born in Murmansk, Russia, where I spent my first 18 years. My family moved to Denver in 1991, and I have lived there since. I’m CEO of IMA, a value investing firm where I have creative freedom to focus on things I love. I was so fortunate to stumble into writing; it has completely rewired my mind by providing a daily two-hour refuge for focused thinking. I am constantly on the lookout for new stories and fresh insights. Writing is what keeps me in student-of-life mode, and there is so much to learn!
This is an authorized biography of Warren Buffett. I am not sure this is the best book to read if you want to learn to invest like Mr. Buffett, but it gives a fascinating view of his life. There are many great lessons we can learn from Mr. Buffett that go far beyond investing, for example about honesty and treasuring one’s reputation. But I thought this book was important for a very different reason: it shows that Warren Buffett is not a perfect human being and that we can also learn from the maestro by not repeating his mistakes. He achieved his unparalleled success in his business life at the expense of his personal life.
I find myself wanting to work 24/7. I bring my laptop home, or start reading The Wall Street Journalon my iPad at the dinner table – and my work life starts pushing out my…
The personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha”—for fans of the HBO documentary Becoming Warren Buffett
Here is the book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom.
Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His…
Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
If American Psycho is too bloody an evocation of hyper-capitalism for your stomach, try this tragically under-appreciated door-stopper of a novel, in which an eleven-year-old becomes a millionaire by playing the stock market. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue! As with Pynchon, everything written by Gaddis deserves to be on this list; alas, alas.
A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis.
At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall…
As an investor and a professional business valuation specialist, I have a passion for understanding the true intrinsic value of both publicly-traded and closely-held (private) companies. There’s no denying that Warren Buffett, emulating the example of his mentor Benjamin Graham, applied a private company valuation approach to the selection of publicly-traded stocks and the results speak for themselves. Furthermore, given my somewhat technical educational and vocational background, I am more comfortable than most valuators with highly technical and IP-weighted businesses. That is why I consider IP valuation to be an integral element of business valuation.
While Graham is the pioneer of value investing, there’s no question that his student, employee, and, ultimately, close friend Warren Buffett is its most successful practitioner. Although the essence of their respective approaches is similar, there are some important differences to understand. As the best book about Buffett’s investing style that I’ve encountered thus far, Hagstrom’s TheWarren Buffett Way highlights some of Buffett’s most astonishing investment coups and the logic behind them. Upon reading both of those books, the reader will have gained a nuanced understanding of how Buffett took the Graham approach to business valuation/security selection and improved upon it.
Warren Buffett is the most famous investor of all time and one of today s most admired business leaders. He became a billionaire and investment sage by looking at companies as businesses rather than prices on a stock screen. The first two editions of The Warren Buffett Way gave investors their first in-depth look at the innovative investment and business strategies behind Buffett s spectacular success. The new edition updates readers on the latest investments by Buffett. And, more importantly, it draws on the new field of behavioral finance to explain how investors can overcome the common obstacles that prevent…
I’m an investor from three perspectives or dimensions. First, I manage money for individuals and institutions as Chief Investment Officer of Beacon Trust, a $4 billion registered investment advisor based in NY/NJ. Second, I teach MBA classes in investing at Rutgers Business School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, and Hong Kong University (HKU) Business School. Third, I write articles and books on investing, including The Art of Investing: Lesson’s from History’s Greatest Tradersand Buffett’s Tips: A Guide to Financial Literacy and Life. I’ve personally met Warren Buffett on four separate occasions and think he is an excellent role model from both investing and personal perspectives.
Carol Loomis has edited Buffett’s widely read Letter to Shareholders for many decades. She is also an outstanding journalist who was a writer and editor at Fortune for 60 years. Her book is a compilation of many of her interviews with Buffett over the years, with some additional commentary. As the book subtitle indicates, the book covers “practically everything” in a conversational format so it is sort of a quasi-biography of Buffett.
Tap Dancing to Work compiles six decades of writing on legendary investor Warren Buffett, from Carol Loomis, the reporter who knows him best.
Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway into something remarkable - and Fortune had a front-row seat
When Fortune writer Carole Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge fund manager in a 1966 article, she didn't dream that Warren Buffett would become the world's greatest investor. Nor did she imagine that she and Buffett would be close friends.
As Buffett's fortune and reputation grew, Loomis used her unique insight into his thinking to chronicle his work, writing scores of…
I'm an American writer who lives in Switzerland, in the vineyards outside Geneva, but I grew up in the 1960s riding night trains around the United States in the company of my father, who loved trains and rode them for his work. From the soaring columns of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, we took trains to Chicago, Wyoming, Denver, Albuquerque, New Orleans, and beyond. In my adult writing life, I've taken trains across Russia, China, India, Australia, the Middle East, Japan, and just about every corner of Europe. Once, I rode all the trains in East Africa between Nairobi and Johannesburg, during which excursion the Tazara Expresswas three days late into Kapiri Mposhi, Tanzania.
Loving was a business reporter for Fortunemagazine, and among his beats was American railroads. Here he tells the compelling story of not just the failed merger between Pennsylvania and the New York Central, but of how in the late 1970s and 80s a group of dedicated railroad executives managed to salvage the rail freight industry. I know it doesn’t sound like a page-turning book, but it is, as Loving has the gift of writing deft profiles, and he describes the steps that lead to the creation of Conrail (itself not a success story) but then the deregulation of the railway freight industry that allowed companies such as the Burlington Northern (later BNSF) and the Union Pacific to thrive, yet again. Too bad they didn’t manage to save parlor cats.
A saga about one of the oldest and most romantic enterprises in the land - America's railroads - "The Men Who Loved Trains" introduces some of the most dynamic businessmen in America. Here are the chieftains who have run the railroads, including those who set about grabbing power and big salaries for themselves, and others who truly loved the industry. As a journalist and associate editor of "Fortune" magazine who covered the demise of Penn Central and the creation of Conrail, Rush Loving often had a front row seat to the foibles and follies of this group of men. He…
