Biography & Autobiography : Business

Boy meets dot-com, boy falls for dot-com, boy flees dot-com in horror. So goes one of the most perversely hilarious love stories you will ever read, one that blends tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, venture capitalism, and free bagels into a surreal cocktail of delusion. 21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak, a wickedly funny anthem to an era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity. more...

Price: $16.95

In the century since its founding, Harvard Business. School has become the single most influential institution in. global business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500. companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest. entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons. (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage. houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to. groom them for future power. To these people and many others,. a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of. American business. In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post. as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join nine. hundred other would-be tycoons on HBS’s plush campus. Over. the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated. with the best—and the rest—of American business culture that. HBS epitomizes. The core of the school’s curriculum is the. “case”—an analysis of a real business situation from which the. students must, with a professor’s guidance, tease lessons. Delves. Broughton studied more than five hundred cases and recounts. the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising. pleasures of accounting, the allure of “beta,” the ingenious chicanery. of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings. of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity. reminiscent of Liar’s Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings. of b-school culture, from the “booze luge” to the pandemic. obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression that. stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often. uproarious candor, he assesses the school’s success at teaching. the traits it extols as most important in business—leadership,. decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance. Published during the one hundredth anniversary. of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly. detailed more...

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In this magnificent biography, celebrated historian David Nasaw brings to life the fascinating rags- to-riches story of one of our most iconic business legends—Andrew Carnegie, America’s first modern titan. From his first job as a bobbin boy at age thirteen to his status as the richest man in the world upon retirement, Carnegie was the embodiment of the American dream and the prototype of today’s billionaire. Drawing on a trove of new material, Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this fascinating and complex man, at last fixing him in his rightful place as one of the most compelling, elusive, and multifaceted personalities of the twentieth century. more...

Price: $20.00

The life of Steve Ballmer is an incredible story of tremendous ambition, genius, arrogance, and charisma, an up-by-the-bootstraps saga of how the child of immigrants growing up in suburban Michigan became the only American billionaire to acquire his wealth working for someone else. In the tradition of The New New Thing and The Silicon Boys , Bad Boy Ballmer will tell this story of a man so shamelessly arrogant that he told reporters 'to heck with Janet Reno', so intense and aggressive that he ripped his vocal cords by talking too loudly. more...

Price: $11.99

It was an inconceivable deception: over $65 billion stolen in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Including new and revealing interviews with those who worked closest to him and his family, Betrayal is an in-depth, penetrating look at the man who perpetrated history's most notorious financial crime. To the people who knew him, Bernie Madoff was a kind and honorable person; a loving father and husband; generous to his employees and charitable even to strangers. On Wall Street, he was known as a wise elder statesman, wildly successful in his investments but never too risky with people's money. He was so revered and trusted that thousands placed their life savings with him, and he in turn provided them with early retirements and affluent lifestyles. But on December 11, 2008, Madoff confessed that he'd lied to them all. The monthly financial statements he'd sent customers for decades were all works of fiction. Their money was gone. Despite the crush of media attention on Madoff's scam, little is known about Madoff himself. What could lead a seemingly good man to ruin the lives of everyone who ever cared about him? What caused Bernie Madoff to commit an unspeakable act of betrayal, bankrupting his family, his friends, his mentors, and thousands of investors who depended upon him for their livelihoods? Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff is about the man who realized that he could have everything he wanted if he simply lied to the people who trusted him the most. Author Andrew Kirtzman tracked down more than a hundred people from Madoff's past, from the first girl he ever kissed to family members who played in his house as children; from his secretaries to his drivers; from traders at his company to his inner circle of friends. He pored through thousands of pages of court records; private e-mails; phone-conversation transcripts; and census, military, and immigration records. The result is a fascinating story about the rise of a deeply im more...

Price: $19.99