Finance Biography

The author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the bloody steelworkers’ strike that transformed their fabled partnership into a furious rivalry. Set against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, Meet You in Hell captures the majesty and danger of steel manufacturing, the rough-and-tumble of the business world, and the fraught relationship between “the world’s richest man” and the ruthless coke magnate to whom he entrusted his companies. The result is an extraordinary work of popular history.

FTSE is an account of how a small start-up created by the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange launched in the mid 1980s to provide financial information, became a world leader and one of the UK's most trusted and famous brands. It chronicles how the FTSE 100 was born and details the ferocious deal-making that followed over 35 years of market boom and bust. It provides a ringside seat on some of the biggest deals and biggest personalities in business and global politics.

Here's a biographical profile of Henry J. Kaiser, a great industrialist and philanthropist who had a profound impact on America's ability to prevail in World War II. People tend to regard the great American titans of the past as robber barons, men who made their fortunes off the backs of the oppressed, flaunting laws and living like nabobs while others had to scratch for a living.

When Frank Ahrens, a middle-aged bachelor and 18-year veteran at the Washington Post, fell in love with a diplomat, his life changed dramatically. Following his new bride to her first appointment in Seoul, South Korea, Frank traded the newsroom for a corporate suite, becoming director of global communications at Hyundai Motors. In a land whose population is 97 percent Korean, he was one of fewer than 10 non-Koreans in a company of 5,000 employees.

Tracy Kidder, the “master of the nonfiction narrative” (The Baltimore Sun) and author of the bestselling classic The Soul of a New Machine, now tells the story of Paul English, a kinetic and unconventional inventor and entrepreneur, who as a boy rebelled against authority.

Despite Jack Ma's massive influence in China and in the global tech world, his inspirational rags-to-riches story is relatively unknown to the general American public. Never Give Up: Jack Ma in His Own Words is a comprehensive guide to the inner workings of arguably the most prominent figure in the global tech world in the past 20 years - comprised entirely of Ma's own thought-provoking and candid quotes.

Jake Halpern introduces us to a former banking executive and a former armed robber who become partners and go in quest of "paper" - the uncollected debts that are sold off by banks for pennies on the dollar. As Halpern shows, the world of consumer debt collection is a wild and unregulated shadow land, where operators may misrepresent a debtor's situation, make illegal threats, and even lay claim to debts that are not theirs to collect in the first place.

A rollicking journey through the wild world of real estate, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the story of "a very imperfect life lived among very imperfect houses" and one woman's obsession with the search for four walls (along with, preferably, a roof not in need of replacing) to call home. In the six houses and many states where Meghan Daum spent her suburban childhood, for the Daum family, "if there was anything that came close to a regular weekend activity it was attending open houses."

Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional. Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three 30-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. became one of the hottest enterprise software companies, rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined.

On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take advice from a gambler and felon. So, in exile in Paris, he convinced the bankrupt court of Louis XV of the value of his idea.

We have selected for you 100 best quotes by Marx. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Marx studied law and Hegelian philosophy. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet, "The Communist Manifesto", and the three-volume "Das Kapital". His political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history and his name has been used as an adjective, a noun and a school of social theory.

Detouring from the traditional timeline of marriage-kids-house, 26-year-old Vikki Warner skips straight to homeownership. She buys a run-down three-story house in Providence, Rhode Island, and suddenly finds herself responsible for a rotating cast of colorful tenants. Adulthood comes with unforeseen challenges: backed-up sewage, gentrification, global economic downturn. Tenemental is a candid portrait of how sharing space profoundly reshapes our lives, and forces us to grow into ourselves.

Mike Daisey worked at Amazon.com for nearly two years during the dot-com frenzy of the late nineties. Now that his nondisclosure agreement has expired, he can tell the real story - one that blends tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, and venture capitalism into a surreal cocktail of delusion.

At just 30 years old, Sam Polk was a senior trader for one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street, on the verge of making it to the very top. When he was offered an annual bonus of $3.75 million, he grew angry because it was not enough. In that moment he knew he had lost himself in his obsessive pursuit of money. And he had come to loathe the culture - the shallowness, the sexism, the crude machismo - and Wall Street's use of wealth as the sole measure of a person's worth. He decided to walk away from it all.

Hard Sell tells you things about the American pharmaceutical industry you'd rather not know and about practices you'd rather weren't happening. But once you pick it up, you won't want to put this book down.Jamie Reidy is to the pharmaceutical business what Jerry Maguire was to professional sports and Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can) was to bank fraud. He's the guy who's been there, done that, and walked away with the insider stories.

In 1966, two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: Debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics. Milton Friedman championed "monetarism" and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.

Revlon's C.E.O., financier Ronald O. Perelman is one of the richest men in America. Watched by the financial community with interest, Perelman has built a personal business empire worth an estimated $6 billion over the past 15 years. Linked to society's most dazzling beauties, Perelman owns palatial estates in Palm Beach, East Hampton, Manhattan, Sun Valley and Bel Air, as well as an impressive art collection, a fleet of automobiles and two G-4 jets.

To ArcelorMittal Steel, Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the listener inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place.

The first half of Chris Hughes's life played like a movie reel right out of the "American Dream". He grew up in a small town in North Carolina. His parents were people of modest means, but he was accepted into an elite boarding school and then Harvard, both on scholarship. There, he met Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and became one of the co-founders of Facebook. In telling his story, Hughes demonstrates the powerful role fortune and luck play in today's economy. Through the rocket ship rise of Facebook, Hughes came to understand how a select few can become ultra-wealthy nearly overnight.

Charlie Munger ist visionärer Vizepräsident von Berkshire Hathaway, einem der 20 größten Unternehmen der USA. Doch noch mehr ist er Warren Buffetts unersetzlicher Geschäftspartner, der über Jahrzehnte besser abgeschnitten hat als der Markt. Munger ist davon überzeugt, dass Sie als Investor dasselbe schaffen können. Seine Lebenserfahrung - ein Bündel interdisziplinärer Denkmodelle aus Wirtschaft, Psychologie und Philosophie - ermöglicht es ihm, Emotionen und Investitionen strikt zu trennen und so die üblichen Fallstricke beim Investieren zu meiden. Das können auch Sie.