World Finance

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is a success story of the business world. The executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, he became the first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index and one of the world's most recognizable names in modern history. This book explores his empire of achievement and how his vision and hands-on efforts have led him from a start-up in his garage to his legacy today.

How do we find hot stocks without getting burned? How do we fatten our portfolios and stay financially healthy? Former hedge-fund manager and longtime Wall Street commentator Jim Cramer explains how to invest wisely in chaotic times, and he does so in plain English, in a style that is as much fun as investing is, or should be, when it's done right.

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean, that vast expanse of international waters, begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.

A series of shifts are happening in our economy: Millennials are trading in conventional career paths to launch tech start-ups, start small businesses that are rooted in local communities, or freelance their expertise. We are sharing everything, from bikes and cars, to extra rooms in our homes. We now create, buy and sell handcrafted products in our local communities with ease. CEO of Imperative Aaron Hurst argues in his latest book that while these developments seem unrelated at first, taken together they reveal a powerful pattern that points to purpose as the new driver of the American economy.

In Life Inc., award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. Indeed, as Rushkoff shows, most Americans have so willingly adopted the values of corporations that they’re no longer even aware of it.

Undressing Bitcoin is the first of its kind, as Layah guides you through the technicalities of bitcoin while also providing a philosophical commentary. It is a chronological journey that starts by breaking down the problems with the traditional financial system, ultimately presenting the urgent case for bitcoin. Layah aims to add flavor and color to a complicated topic by showcasing the personal and humanitarian side to bitcoin.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Thomas Friedman, in The World Is Flat, declared globalization the new economic order. But the reign of globalization as we’ve known it is over, argues Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst Rana Foroohar, and the rise of local, regional, and homegrown business is now at hand.

We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skillfully distills in World on the Edge.

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit.

From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the 19th century to the early years of the 21st.

As one of the first titles in Atlantic Monthly Press' "Books That Changed the World" series, America's most provocative satirist, P.J. O'Rourke, reads from Adam Smith's revolutionary The Wealth of Nations - so you don't have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over 900 pages in two volumes.

Are you looking for the success that you've always dreamed of? Here are the habits and behaviors that have been used by real life business superstars to produce spectacular results in their lives. Financial success is a science, and since life is very much a product of our habits, learning the habits of financial success can transform everything we do and put us firmly on the pathway to riches and the lifestyles of our dreams.

In The Company, the largely unknown history of the joint-stock company is presented by the editors of Economist. One of history's greatest catalysts, the joint-stock company has dramatically changed the way human beings live, work, and conduct business. With companies now affecting the world on a global scale, it is more pressing than ever before to understand this driving force.

Napoleon Hill interviewed and studied the 500 greatest wealth-makers of his time. From their examples, he uncovered the universal laws of success - principles that will work for anyone willing to put them into practice. The result, first published in 1938, was Think and Grow Rich.

When you turn on the tap or twist the cap, you might not give a second thought to where your drinking water comes from. But how it gets from the ground to your glass is far more complex than you might think. Is it safe to drink tap water? Should you feel guilty buying bottled water? Is your water vulnerable to terrorist attacks? With springs running dry and reservoirs emptying, where is your water going to come from in the future? In Drinking Water, Duke professor James Salzman shows how drinking water highlights the most pressing issues of our time.

From a long-time Alibaba executive and former special assistant to Jack Ma, this is the first book to articulate how Alibaba's unique culture and “tai chi” management principles are providing a business and economic development model for the rest of the world.

What do most business owners have in common? A lack of freedom. Instead of working to own your business, it's time to work to own your freedom. When you own your freedom, you're tied to the business no more, able to choose why and how to spend your time and money. In Own Your Freedom, co-authors Dr. David Phelps and Dan S. Kennedy describe the freedom you can enjoy when you earn passive income through capital investments like real estate. By investing in your capital, the people in your life, and your skills, you can achieve freedom well before a fabled retirement date.

In 1989, the charismatic Joshua Boger left Merck, then America's most admired business, to found a drug company that would challenge industry giants and transform health care. Barry Werth described the company's tumultuous early days during the AIDS crisis in The Billion-Dollar Molecule, a celebrated classic of science and business journalism. Now he returns to tell a riveting story of Vertex's bold endurance and eventual success.