Amazon.com Summary: Twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author Barbara Tuchman now tackles the pervasive presence of folly in governments through the ages. Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interersts, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ persistent folly in Vietnam. THE MARCH OF FOLLY brings the people, places, and events of history magnificently alive for today’s reader.

http://www.amazon.com/March-Folly-Troy-Vietnam/dp/0345308239/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270429963&sr=1-1

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Amazon.com Summary: In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong. They neglect Taleb’s metaphor of “the black swan,” whose discovery invalidated the theory that all swans are white. Taleb rides this manifestation of the unpredicted event into a range of phenomena, such as why a book becomes a best-seller or how an entrepreneur becomes a billionaire, taking pit stops with philosophers who have addressed the meaning of the unexpected and confounding. Taleb projects a strong presence here that will tempt outside-the-box thinkers into giving him a look.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270429931&sr=1-1

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Amazon.com Summary: After the last few years of violence and terror, of ethnic and religious hatred, of tsunamis and hurricanes–and now of world financial meltdown–Strauss, like most of his generation, came to the sobering realization that, even in America, anything can happen. But rather than watch helplessly, he decided to do something about it. And so he spent three years traveling through a country that’s lost its sense of safety, equipping himself with the tools necessary to save himself and his loved ones from an uncertain future. With the same quick wit and eye for cultural trends that marked The Game, The Dirt, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Emergency traces Neil’s white-knuckled journey through today’s heart of darkness, as he sets out to move his life offshore, test his skills in the wild, and remake himself as a gun-toting, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. It’s a tale of paranoid fantasies and crippling doubts, of shady lawyers and dangerous cult leaders, of billionaire gun nuts and survivalist superheroes, of weirdos, heroes, and ordinary citizens going off the grid. It’s one man’s story of a dangerous world–and how to stay alive in it. Before the next disaster strikes, you’re going to want to read this book. And you’ll want to do everything it suggests. Because tomorrow doesn’t come with a guarantee…

http://www.amazon.com/Emergency/dp/1847675271/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270429885&sr=1-1

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Amazon.com Summary: In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros, the legendary financier and philanthropist, writes about the origins of the crisis and proposes a set of policies that should be adopted to confront it. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the crisis in the context of his decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. In a concise essay that combines practical insight with philosophical depth, Soros makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the great credit crisis and its implications for our nation and the world.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Paradigm-Financial-Markets-Credit/dp/B002DYJKH0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270429856&sr=1-1

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Amazon.com Summary: In this bold, well-reasoned book, financial consultants Sirkin, Hemerling and Bhattacharya introduce their concept of globality, the next stage of globalization. Following the hundreds of emerging-market companies that have benefited from the migration of production to their lower-cost shores, the authors assert that the flow of opportunity is now changing; it is developing into the equivalent of a corporate tsunami that could threaten the existence of some of the most established companies in the developed world. The emerging companies in India, China and Mexico have absorbed and applied lessons from their outsourcing experiences and are in a position to challenge the very companies they first partnered with. The authors explore the strategic changes companies in developed nations must make to meet this new reality. Vibrant case studies enliven this book, which will appeal to businesspeople and those simply trying to understand why the world of business is suddenly so different.

http://www.amazon.com/Globality-Competing-Everyone-Everywhere-Everything/dp/B00375LMN4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270429804&sr=1-1

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