【英文完整版75本】The Smartest Books We Know (FORTUNE Magazine)

评语：Machiavelli wasn't as Machiavellian as he is made out to be. Today we'd probably call him "pragmatic." But his treatise--penned after losing his political job in Florence--was shockingly frank. Power and idealism, he said, don't really mix.

评语：For all his fame as a wordsmith, too much of Keynes's work is dense and dated. The amazing Chapter 12 is something else: a timeless, witty, crystalline account of why financial markets confound and bewitch us.

评语：Smith is often caricatured as a laissez-faire zealot. He wasn't. The Wealth of Nations is an eloquent argument in favor of liberty, enlightened government, and the intrinsic worth of the individual. No one has ever made a better case for the morality of c

评语：It would take a callous reader to flip through these interviews of dozens of working Americans, from dentists to gravediggers to housewives, and not come away with the impression of how difficult many lives are--and how gracefully so many people cope. Ter

评语：We're starved for time. We want balance. So a sociologist interviews everyone at a FORTUNE 500 company--executive suite to factory floor--and guess what? We're not using "flextime," paternity leave, or even all the vacation time offered. Are we the proble

评语：If you haven't hit that wall, you will someday. At that point, you can head for Hawaii--or you can try to understand what burnout is. Written by a shrink who counsels entrepreneurs and executives, this book is a fine place to start.

评语：This journalist spent months toiling as a waitress, hotel maid, Wal-Mart clerk--and trying to live on what she earned. Her funny and wrenching account shows why it's so hard for the nation's working poor to get ahead.

评语：In this mordantly funny critique, a former stock trader reveals that most stock market pros are greedy fonts of self-serving nonsense and most customers are greedy fools. (No, not much has changed since 1940.)

评语：Lowenstein's book offers a rare look inside the secretive world of hedge funds. It is also a story of greed and power gone awry, and that makes it a modern classic.

评语：The fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, who might be considered the original day trader, gives a hugely entertaining insider's view of the market in its wild, unregulated days of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

评语：The man with the bulbous nose was not so much a robber baron himself as the man who gave the robbers their financial tools. J.P. Morgan's biographer sees his flaws but credits him with doing much to create the modern U.S. economy. It was on his watch that

评语：Life has always been chancy, but putting that truism into a mathematical model is a relatively recent achievement. The effects of that insight have been stunning: Probability theory has played a role in everything from bridge building to derivatives and h

评语：A new technology will connect everyone! It's making investors rich! It's the Internet boom--except Samuel Morse is there!

评语：Most great ideas really aren't that complicated, and Wal-Mart is a perfect example. To wit: Put discount stores in towns that the other retailers thought were too small to support them. Walton's words (written with the editorial director of Time Inc., FOR

评语：Evans takes us from the steam engine to the search engine, profiling 53 of the top innovators in U.S. history. The trait they share isn't greed or the lust for fame, but the drive to democratize--the often shocking desire to bring to the many products pre

评语：Who invented the shopping cart? What become of Coke-Ola, Co Kola, and Koke? When did consumers first appear on the American continent? An eminent business historian answers questions you wish you'd thought to ask.

评语：This is a cautionary tale of the brilliant visionary (Philo T. Farnsworth) up against Big, Determined Business. You can guess who wins.

评语：What do bestselling novels, crime waves, and yawning have in common? They're all examples of how ideas and group behaviors can "tip" from fad into epidemic. Gladwell's book is filled with examples of eclectic freethinkers using the phenomenon to their adv

评语：Think of this as a Special Forces handbook for corporate managers. Grove, a co-founder of Intel and its current chairman, shows you squarely how to thrive in the most feared of business environments: one where competition, technology, or the very rules of

评语：If most writing from the dot-com era reads like 17th-century medicine (give the patient mercury?), here's a book that that holds up. No, the laws of economics haven't changed. Shapiro and Varian show how they apply to the world of information.

评语：No one--not the Pentagon, not the spooks, and certainly not the soldiers rappelling from helicopters into the middle of Mogadishu--had any idea of the hell they were getting into. Bowden's history of the humiliating U.S. incursion into Somalia is an eloqu

评语：What may be the greatest book on war ever written contains such aphorisms as "All warfare is based on deception" and "When the army engages in protracted campaigns, the resources of the state will not suffice." It's time-tested poetry for the strategic mi

评语：Reaching far beyond Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, this hefty tome meticulously pieces together one of the most important and terrifying scientific projects in history.

评语：The West was not won by gunslingers and whores with hearts of gold. It was won by people who gave it water. This is the best book ever on how politics, business, ambition, and most of the seven deadly sins can work to literally shape the landscape of Amer

评语：No writer has ever gotten as deeply inside a company as Werth got inside biotech Vertex. He offers deep insight into the difficulties of drug discovery, the trials and tribulations of startups, and the conflict between great science and good business.