Bloomberg's List of Best Business Books, June 14, 2013 (Part 1)

Here’s a partial list of Bloomberg.com's recommended business book titles, as of June 14, 2013:


After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, theResponse and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder (Penguin Press). Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, proves adept at making accessible the complex events leading to the financial crisis and the ways in which policy makers responded.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House). The author of The Black Swan returns with a book about thriving amid disorder. He focuses on systems that aren’t resistant to stress but actually profit from it. The human body, for example, gets stronger with the stress of exercise, weaker with indolence. Also available as a dowloadable eBook or AudioBook,

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone (Little, Brown). A guide to brain-bending interview questions asked at Google and other innovative companies. “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender,” one begins. What do you do in the 60 seconds before the blades start whirring?

The Art of the Sale by Philip Delves Broughton (Penguin Press/Portfolio). The journalist who brought us
“Ahead of the Curve,” a chronicle of how he earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, uncovers the dark arts of sales -- a discipline absent from the HBS curriculum.

Bailout by Neil Barofsky (Free Press). The former special inspector general policing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program lifts the lid on the U.S. Treasury and settles scores in this angry yet illuminating memoir.

The Battle of Bretton Woods by Benn Steil (Princeton University Press). This masterful account dismantles the idyllic picture of the 1944 Bretton Woods international economic conference, situating it firmly in the tense atmosphere of the final months of World War II.

The Billionaire’s Apprentice by Anita Raghavan (Business Plus). The Galleon Group insider-trading scandal involving Raj Rajaratnam and Rajat Gupta featured arrogance, greed and, ultimately, prosecution. To Raghavan, that’s a sign that Indian-Americans have finally arrived.

The Buy Side by Turney Duff (Crown Business). A memoir by a former Galleon Group trader details his drug and alcohol-fueled implosion while providing a timely window into sleazy practices that have become the focus of federal prosecutors.

A Disposition to Be Rich by Geoffrey C. Ward (Knopf). Ferdinand Ward, the Bernie Madoff of the Gilded Age, comes to life in this elegant and perversely fascinating biography of the swindler who ruined Ulysses S. Grant.

Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in theGreat Recession by Barbara Garson (Doubleday). Garson writes less about the terrible things that have happened to Americans since the crash than about the resigned/resourceful ways they’re coping.