Frommer's Guide to the top 25 Wall Street books is more than just entertainment, it's an education.
Written By
JEREMY FROMMER
CEO of JerrickMedia.com.
Harvard isn't worth the money. "The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." -Dr. Seuss. The corporate world, Wall Street, and the complex weave of today's global corporate culture require an education far beyond what the great business schools and universities presently offer. Perhaps the best way to prepare yourself for the future of industry and business is to study its past intrigue and sometime tragedy. The following 25 Wall Street books are hand-picked from Frommer's personal collection of favorites. Save the tuition, read the books.
25. Wolf Of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
DiCaprio's performance in The Wolf of Wall Street wasn't quite good enough to take home an Oscar. This film rendition of the novel was virtually shut out of the Academy Awards, earning 5 nominations, including Best Actor for Leo, and walking away with none. Matthew McConaughey, who also starred in the film, won Best Actor for his role in Dallas Buyers Club. Leo has been nominated twice before in the Best Actor category for The Aviator in 2005 and Blood Diamond in 2007. In those years he lost out to Jamie Foxx in Ray and Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland-two towering and career-defining performances, much like Tommy Lee Jones’ in The Fugitive which denied him earlier in his career when he was nominated for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. The 40-year old is not losing any sleep over the elusive award, however. After the Oscars he was spotted partying poolside. He's set to star as a rugged frontiersman on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling in The Revenant later this year.
BUY NOW
24. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins
James C. Collins' incredible narrative on going from Good to Great lays down the foundations for all companies to follow to become exceptional. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't is a management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition. The book was published on October 16, 2001 by William Collins. "Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence. The book was a massive bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books. Collins used a large team of researchers who studied "6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project." The book was "cited by several members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council as the best management book they've read." Publishers Weekly called it "worthwhile", although "many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense". Similarly Holt and Cameron state the book provides a "generic business recipe" that ignores "particular strategic opportunities and challenges." Steven D. Levitt notes that some of the companies selected as "great" have since got into serious trouble, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". He further states that investing in the portfolio of the 11 companies covered by the book, in the year of 2001, would actually result in underperforming the S&P 500 Levitt concludes that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future."
BUY NOW
23. Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas For Millions by Ben Mezrich
Get ready to bring down the house in Ben Mezrich's awesome book about the MIT Black Jack team. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions is a book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. Though the book is classified as non-fiction, the Boston Globe alleges that the book contains significant fictional elements, that many of the key events propelling the drama did not occur in real life, and that others were exaggerated greatly. The book was adapted into the movie 21. The book's main character is Kevin Lewis, an MIT graduate who was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team in 1993. Lewis was recruited by two of the team's top players, Jason Fisher and Andre Martinez. The team was financed by a colorful character named Micky Rosa, who had organized at least one other team to play the Vegas strip. This new team was the most profitable yet. Personality conflicts and card counting deterrent efforts at the casinos eventually ended this incarnation of the MIT Blackjack Team. A film adaptation of the book, titled 21 (so as not to cause confusion with the unrelated 2003 Queen Latifah vehicle Bringing Down the House), was released in theaters on March 28, 2008.
BUY NOW
22. Liar's Poker: Rising Through The Wreckage On Wall Street by Michael Lewis
Wall Street professionalss must add Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis to their list. Liar's Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street during the 1980s, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, and the fictional The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. The book captures an important period in the history of Wall Street. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers' mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm's CEO John Gutfreund. The book's name is taken from liar's poker, a high-stakes gambling game popular with the bond traders in the book. Liar's Poker follows two different story threads, though not necessarily in chronological order. The first thread is autobiographical, and follows Lewis through his college education and his hiring by Salomon Brothers in 1984. This part of the book gives a first-person account of how bond traders and salesmen truly work, their personalities, and their culture. The book captures well an important period in the history of Wall Street. Important figures in that history feature prominently in the text: John Meriwether, mortgage department head Lewis Ranieri, and firm CEO John Gutfreund. The second thread is a history of Salomon Brothers and an overview of Wall Street in general, especially how the firm single-handedly created a market for mortgage bonds that made the firm wealthy, only to be outdone by Michael Milken and his junk bonds. This thread is less dependent on Lewis' personal experience and features quotes apparently drawn from interviews with various relevant figures.
BUY NOW
21. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil discusses the future of technology and the inevitable technological singularity. Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is an American author, computer scientist, inventor, futurist, and is a director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements, as has been displayed in his vast collection of public talks, wherein he has shared his primarily optimistic outlooks on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first Charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
BUY NOW
20. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Inferno by Dante is a must-read for those seeking to venture through the hell of Wall Street. Inferno is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. It is followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted as nine circles of suffering located within the Earth. Allegorically, the Divine Comedy represents the journey of the soul toward God, with the Inferno describing the recognition and rejection of sin.
BUY NOW
19. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
All aspiring CEOs must read The Prince for some of the best lesson on managing corporate politics. The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise by the Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (About Principalities). However, the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of the Prince in manuscript, controversy had swirled about his writings". Although it was written as if it were a traditional work in the mirrors for princes style, it is generally agreed that it was especially innovative. This is only partly because it was written in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin, a practice which had become increasingly popular since the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy and other works of Renaissance literature. The Prince is sometimes claimed to be one of the first works of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy, in which the effective truth is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal. It was also in direct conflict with the dominant Catholic and scholastic doctrines of the time concerning how to consider politics and ethics. Although it is relatively short, the treatise is the most remembered of Machiavelli's works and the one most responsible for bringing the word "Machiavellian" into usage as a pejorative. It also helped make "Old Nick" an English term for the devil, and even contributed to the modern negative connotations of the words "politics" and "politician" in western countries. In terms of subject matter it overlaps with the much longer Discourses on Livy, which was written a few years later. In its use of near-contemporary Italians as examples of people who perpetrated criminal deeds for politics, another lesser-known work by Machiavelli which The Prince has been compared to is the Life of Castruccio Castracani. The descriptions within The Prince have the general theme of accepting that the aims of princes—such as glory and survival—can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.
BUY NOW
Continued below.
18. Aesop's Fables by Aesop
The greedy dog is only one of Aesop's many fables that is a relevant lesson that all executives should keep in mind. Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Of diverse origins, the stories associated with Aesop's name have descended to modern times through a number of sources. They continue to be reinterpreted in different verbal registers and in popular as well as artistic mediums. The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned in passing that "Aesop the fable writer" was a slave who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE. Among references in other writers, Aristophanes, in his comedy The Wasps, represented the protagonist Philocleon as having learnt the "absurdities" of Aesop from conversation at banquets; Plato wrote in Phaedo that Socrates whiled away his jail time turning some of Aesop's fables "which he knew" into verses. Nonetheless, for two main reasons – because numerous morals within Aesop's attributed fables contradict each other, and because ancient accounts of Aesop's life contradict each other – the modern view is that Aesop did not solely compose all those fables attributed to him, if he even existed at all. Instead, any fable tended to be ascribed to the name of Aesop if there was no known alternative literary source.
BUY NOW
17. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Wall Street professionals must read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. The Alchemist is a novel by Paulo Coelho first published in the year 1988. Originally written in Portuguese by its Brazilian-born author, it has been translated into at least 67 languages as of October 2009. An allegorical novel, The Alchemist follows a young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago in his journey to Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there. The book is an international bestseller. According to AFP, it has sold more than 65 million copies in 56 different languages, becoming one of the best-selling books in history and setting the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author. Coelho wrote The Alchemist in only two weeks in 1987. He explained he was able to write at this pace because the story was "already written in [his] soul." The basic story of The Alchemist appears in previous works. In 1935, the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, published a short story called Tale of Two Dreamers in which two men dream of the other's treasure. Another version appeared in E. W. Lane's translation of The Thousand and One Nights. The story also appeared in Rumi's story, "In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad". A similar parable can also be found in a Jewish Chassidic story. The book's main theme is about finding one's destiny. According to The New York Times, The Alchemist is "more self-help than literature". An old king tells Santiago, "when you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true". This is the core of the novel's philosophy and a motif that plays all throughout Coelho's writing in The Alchemist.
BUY NOW
16. Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Glengarry Glen Ross is a play by David Mamet that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The play shows parts of two days in the lives of four desperate Chicago real estate agents who are prepared to engage in any number of unethical, illegal acts—from lies and flattery to bribery, threats, intimidation and burglary—to sell undesirable real estate to unwitting prospective buyers. It is based on Mamet's experience having previously worked in a similar office. The title comes from two real estate properties mentioned in the play: Glengarry Highlands, which is currently the prime real estate everyone is attempting to sell, and Glen Ross Farms, which is mentioned by several characters as having been very lucrative for those selling it several years ago. The world premiere was at the National Theatre in London on September 21, 1983 where Bill Bryden's production in the Cottesloe Theatre was acclaimed as a triumph of ensemble acting.
BUY NOW
15. The Predator's Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham And The Rise Of The Junkbond Raiders by Connie Bruck
The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the Junk Bond Raiders, by Wall Street Journal writer Connie Bruck, largely recounts the rise of Michael Milken, his firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, and the leveraged buyout boom they helped to fuel in the 1980s. As the book was published at the apex of the leveraged buyout boom, it was subsequently updated to also address the impending collapse of Drexel Burnham and Michael Milken's conviction on various securities and reporting violations. The title of the book is a reference to an event that Drexel Burnham hosted annually. Among the participants in the Predator's Ball were an array of private equity investors, corporate raiders such as Ron Perelman and Carl Icahn as well as institutional investors in high-yield bonds and management teams from companies that either had been or would be the targets of leveraged buyouts.
BUY NOW
<div class="spb-asset-content" style="pa