Biography and Memoir

Lives of the painters, sculptors and architects of the Italian Renaissance.

A printer's rise in colonial America and his chart for practising thirteen virtues.

How to win and keep agency clients and write advertising that sells.

How an unelected official amassed power and used it to rebuild New York.

How Sony grew from Tokyo's ruins, and how Japanese and American business differ.

Life on Salomon Brothers' bond trading floor in the 1980s mortgage-bond boom.

Interviews with traders such as Kovner, Dennis and Tudor Jones on their methods.

How Walmart grew from one Arkansas store by cutting costs and prices.

Two centuries of a Jewish banking family from Hamburg to London and New York.

Buffett's life from Omaha and Graham's class to building Berkshire Hathaway.

How one trader's hidden losses in Singapore brought down Barings Bank.

Running the Washington Post through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and a strike.

How Rockefeller built Standard Oil, faced its breakup and gave his fortune away.

J. Pierpont Morgan's life, drawn from family and business papers others had not used.

How Singapore's leaders chose policies, from courting multinationals onward.

A Jewish boy survives the war and Soviet rule in Hungary and escapes to America.

How Lyndon Johnson mastered the Senate's rules and became its majority leader.

How IBM was kept whole in 1993 and turned from hardware toward services.

Hamilton's life from the West Indies to the Treasury and his duel with Aaron Burr.

Howard Hughes as aviator, film producer and Las Vegas hotel owner, and his decline.

Carnegie's rise from a bobbin boy of thirteen to the richest man in the world.

Vanderbilt's rise through ferries, steamships and railroads.

Chanel's origins, her creative work and her private suffering, from new research.

How Bernie Madoff's fraud began, how it ran for decades, and how it collapsed.

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

From beating blackjack with maths to pricing warrants and running a hedge fund.

How Jim Simons's Renaissance used maths and data to earn the best returns on record.

Running Disney and buying Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox to add creative talent.

An industrial philosophy of mass production, written at the height of the Model T.

The hostile Depression-era life that Nevins was commissioned to answer.

How Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan and others built 19th-century fortunes.

The standard mid-century Franklin biography; Munger's model of a working life

J. P. Morgan from the Civil War to 1913: railroads, US Steel and rescues.

The dealer who sold Europe's Old Masters to rich Americans.

Shackleton's men survive after the ice crushes their ship Endurance in Antarctica.

The scholarly life of Carnegie, from Dunfermline and the railroad to steel.

Charles Schwab's rise from Carnegie's mill to head US Steel, then build Bethlehem.

Authorised by the family; affectionate and incomplete.

Sunday Times Insight team; the most rigorously reported of the lives.

A milkshake-machine salesman finds the McDonald brothers and builds the franchise.

Life inside General Motors, told by a top executive who quit it in 1973.

Theodore Roosevelt's life from his birth in 1858 to the presidency in 1901.

The methods of nine great investors, including Buffett, Graham, Fisher and Templeton.

The businessman who brought Chrysler back from the brink tells his story.

Howard Hughes's hidden empire, revealed through his own memos.

Aristotle Onassis's deals, his affairs and his feud with Stavros Niarchos.

Three generations of Fords, Henry, Edsel and Henry II, and their company.

Four generations of the family and the succession that nearly sank the company.

An early account of Buffett's investing method, from 1987.

Stories of a physicist's first marriage and his inquiry into the Challenger disaster.

The standard biography before Chaney and Vaughan.

IBM's founding under the father, its move into computers and the son's career.

A life across economics, psychology, organisations and artificial intelligence.

The authorised life of J. R. D. Tata, who ran the Tata group for fifty years.

A critical history of Bill Gates and the early Microsoft, from Lakeside School on.

Kissinger's life and years in power, where realism, secrecy and strategy met.

Harry Truman's life and presidency, from the atomic bomb to the Korean War.

How Nintendo conquered the American video game market.

Bill Gates from Harvard and Microsoft BASIC to the IBM deal that made Microsoft.

A fund manager of sixty years on investing, business and a long life.

How direct marketing was invented, from the Columbia Record Club to American Express.

How a bank clerk simplified photography and built Eastman Kodak.

Academic cultural history; Disney as the century's most effective ideologist.

A founding leader's account of his life and Singapore's politics and history.

Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, starts a third company in 1999.

Profiles of exceptional investors: their backgrounds, methods and records.

Running General Electric from 1981 to 2001, as told on retiring.

How Linux came to be developed, and how its creator thinks.

Life as John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s youngest son, from Harvard to wartime intelligence.

George Soros's life from wartime Europe to finance and philanthropy.

Six men and the mechanics of how post-Soviet wealth was assembled.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

How Lincoln brought his three rivals for the 1860 nomination into his cabinet.

Fischer Black's life and ideas, from option pricing on, that shaped modern finance.

Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor and the founding of Intel.

Henry Ford as a shaper of American culture as much as of its industry.

An economist's path from young communist in Hungary to analyst of socialism.

A telecom analyst on the conflicts of interest in research during the 1990s bubble.

Enlightened hospitality: put employees first, then guests, community and investors.

The monarchy and the Crown Property Bureau as an economic institution.

Berlusconi, media ownership and the capture of regulation.

Walt Disney's life from Missouri to Mickey Mouse, the 1941 strike and Disneyland.

Einstein's life and science, from the Bern patent office to relativity.

How WorldCom's internal audit chief uncovered its accounting fraud.

Animation historian's corrective, strongest on the studio craft.

Georges Doriot, who showed that investing in small, risky firms could pay.

How Mugabe's Zimbabwe used land seizures and money-printing to hold power.

Lehman Brothers' fall seen from its trading floor, and the warnings it ignored.

Jamie Dimon's career and how JPMorgan Chase came through the 2008 crisis.

How Ivar Kreuger built a 1920s match monopoly, and the forgeries found at his death.

Siegmund Warburg, who fled Germany and founded S.G. Warburg in London.

Blackstone from its 1985 founding through its 2007 public offering and the crisis.

A nine-year effort to convince the SEC that Bernard Madoff was a fraud.

A Microsoft co-founder's memoir of his ventures, successes and failures.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

Nigeria's reforms: cutting $30 billion of debt, fighting corruption, restructuring.

Fortune's articles by and about Buffett from 1966 to 2012, with commentary.

Samuel Zemurray rose from selling ripe bananas to taking over United Fruit.

Joseph P. Kennedy's life in banking, film, the stock market and politics.

Lee Kuan Yew's views on China, the United States and world strategy, by topic.

The 2008 crisis and its aftermath, from inside the New York Fed and the Treasury.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

How the NeXT and Pixar years changed Steve Jobs into the leader who rebuilt Apple.

Musk's life from South Africa and PayPal to running SpaceX and Tesla at once.

Marissa Mayer's arrival at Yahoo in 2012 and her struggle to turn it around.

An investor in Russia is expelled, his firms seized, and his lawyer Magnitsky dies.

From a Dayton bicycle shop to the first powered flights and the 1908 demonstrations.

Alibaba from Jack Ma's Hangzhou apartment to its 2014 New York listing.

Zimbabwe's history from Rhodesia's 1965 break to Mugabe, by a lawyer and MP.

Greece's 2015 debt talks with its creditors, by its finance minister at the time.

From student apartments in Ann Arbor to selling Equity Office to Blackstone in 2007.

John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary in the 1960s, and his policies.

Microsoft's chief executive on moving the company toward cloud and AI.

Leonardo's life read through his notebooks, where art and science were one pursuit.

A daughter's memoir of a California childhood between her mother and Steve Jobs.

Building Creative Artists Agency into Hollywood's top agency, then failing at Disney.

Thomas Edison's life, told in reverse chronological order.

How Bill Campbell coached the leaders of Google, Apple and Intuit.

Mohammed bin Salman's rise to power in Saudi Arabia and the decisions that followed.

A trader in his parents' London house, and his link to the 2010 flash crash.

Amazon's shareholder letters from 1997 to 2019, with speeches and interviews.

How Mohammed bin Salman consolidated power in Saudi Arabia.

Insider account of doing deals through Party patronage, and losing everything.

Bill Gross and how he built PIMCO into the largest bond manager, until 2014.

Two years shadowing Musk, across SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and the buying of Twitter.

Sam Bankman-Fried's rise through Jane Street, Alameda and FTX to its collapse.

An investigation of Bridgewater that contradicts the firm's public image.

Eskom's former chief executive on why South Africa's power supply can't be fixed.

A biography of Bill Gates covering his reinvention after Microsoft.

Masayoshi Son's rise from Kyushu to SoftBank, Yahoo Japan and the Vision Fund.

Jensen Huang and how Nvidia came to power the move to artificial intelligence.

A former Facebook policy director's memoir of the company from 2011 to 2017.

Sam Altman's life, including his November 2023 firing and return at OpenAI.

Alex Karp and Palantir's path from CIA funding to the surveillance state.

Six friends, including Acheson, Harriman and Kennan, who shaped US foreign policy.

The major revisionist defence written against Tarbell.

The life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, strongest on his steamboat years.

The man who invented the regulated-return utility bargain, and the holding company that killed him.

An early outside biography of the speculator Jesse Livermore.

The life of Aristotle Onassis, written while he lived and with his cooperation.

Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, reported as it unravelled.

The foundational biography; every later book argues with it.

The family and trusts that outlived the operating company.

The life of Aristotle Onassis, written the year after his death.

King Gillette, his safety razor and the disputed give-away-the-handle story.

Templeton's method: buying at the point of maximum pessimism worldwide

Unauthorised; Lauder rushed out her own memoir to pre-empt it.

Insider account of a New York developer's own deals.

How Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos built crony monopolies and hid their wealth abroad.

Three generations of Rockefellers and how the fortune passed down.

How the Vanderbilt heirs spent and scattered the family fortune.

The R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune and the scandals of the heirs who followed.

How Sam Walton built Wal-Mart and became America's richest man.

Prosecution-side polemic; the angriest book on the shelf.

Sympathetic; written with access to Milken's circle.

Memoir of the man who ran the Hughes empire day to day.

The takeover battles that assembled the group under Arnault.

Howard Hughes's public and private life, in a biography disputed on its sources.

The only full biography; Icahn cooperated then repudiated it.

The standard biography of the first four decades.

Contemporaneous account of the NeXT failure.

The case for sweeping reform from the finance minister who forced it through.

The FBI-informant thesis; contested on sourcing but the case for the prosecution.

Part life, part method; based on interviews with his circle.

Sprawling, repeatedly expanded compendium of Buffett material.

The only dedicated English biography; stops before the handover.

The revisionist defense case.

Profiles of the family houses that still dominate the index.

The life of Howard Hughes, drawn from archives.

The only biography; stops two decades before indexing won.

Journalistic and secondary; Soros declined to participate.

The scholarly treatment of Law as economic theorist and policymaker.

Sequel to Hard Drive, on the browser wars and the road to antitrust.

Insider account: Schultz on building the company to 1997.

Memoir of a hedged-equity pioneer's seven decades on Wall Street

Unauthorised; Ellison tried to block it.

Amway's co-founder's own account; read alongside the criticism.

The contemporaneous dissent, twenty years ahead of the consensus.

Biography of Roberto Goizueta and the 1980s-90s value creation.

First major critical history by a WSJ Walmart reporter.

Robert Friedland and the Voisey's Bay nickel discovery.

The next generation of Canada's business owners after the old Establishment.

Insider account: Eisner's own memoir of the turnaround years.

Insider account of build-to-order, negative working capital and cutting the channel.

Robert Wood Johnson, who put public trust before profit, and the origin of the Credo.

The only full biography; written with Munger's cooperation.

Boris Berezovsky and the businessmen who looted Russia after the Soviet collapse.

The love affair of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and the singer Maria Callas.

John Law, the Mississippi bubble and the invention of paper money in France.

Michael Eisner's revival of Disney, Katzenberg's exit and the failed succession.

Steve Jobs's years at NeXT and Pixar and his return to Apple.

Redstone's memoir and his own case for buying and then shedding Blockbuster.

How Henry Ford published The International Jew, a book the Nazis spread.

Howard Hughes's life told through his own diaries, memos and letters.

The life of the trader Jesse Livermore, drawn from family sources.

The financial engineering behind News Corp, traced by a forensic reporter.

A short seller's campaigns against companies he publicly accused of fraud.

Suharto's rise and the New Order patronage economy behind Indonesian business.

Three generations compounding a fortune through insurance stocks

An Enron employee's account of the fake partnerships and trades behind its collapse.

The MIT blackjack team; dramatised and disputed in places.

John Malone and TCI; the cable industry Comcast consolidated.

Harsher on the gap between Carnegie's preaching and his practice.

Richard Stallman, the free software movement and the GPL licence he wrote.

Southwest Airlines' first decade, told by its founding chief executive.

Slight management-lessons treatment; useful only for the Oracle chronology.

Hostile counterweight to Symonds's authorised Softwar, published the same year.

Henry Ford and his son Edsel, and how the father undermined his own successor.

Authorised; Ellison's rebuttals run in footnotes throughout.

Thomas Watson Sr. and how he built IBM and its sales culture.

Structural argument about how the papers trade coverage for political favour.

The life of Jamsetji Tata, founder of the Tata group, and the origins of its trusts.

Tiger Management, the firm that set the long-short template.

Physicist to Goldman; the making of the volatility-surface era.

Aristotle Onassis's feud with the Kennedys, resting on a disputed central claim.

Telecoms billionaire turned prime minister; the clearest study of business-politics fusion in Thailand.

Franklin's reinvention from imperial gentleman into American businessman

The life of William Lever, who built Sunlight soap and the branded-goods model.

Indonesia's 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto, reported on the ground.

How the Homestead strike turned Carnegie and Frick's partnership into a feud.

How the critic Robert Parker's palate came to set wine styles and prices worldwide.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built

Steve Jobs's success at Pixar and his revival of Apple with the iMac and iPod.

Full-scale biography by a Harvard business historian.

Bill Bowerman, Oregon track coach and Nike co-founder, told by one of his runners.

Pre-crisis; by a former AIG executive.

The life of Julius Rosenwald, the merchant who built a mail-order empire.

A UK ambassador's account of Uzbekistan's cotton trade and its abuses.

John Boyd's strategic theory, traced through the science that shaped it.

Revisionist Japanese history of Soichiro Honda and his successors.

Modern rival to Stiles, two years earlier

Edison as the first manufactured celebrity.

Management-lessons treatment of Jobs's second tenure.

Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, and the collision between the two.

As-told-to: Morand's record of her 1946 conversations, published posthumously.

Fifty hours of interviews plus the family; the closest to authorised.

Insider account from a serial restructuring CEO.

Brownie Wise and the home-party sales network that made Tupperware.

Wynn, Adelson, Kerkorian and the megaresort capex race.

Fast first draft, published months after the arrest.

House-access biography; good on the business, softer on the war.

Whistleblower's account of the Anglo Leasing procurement scandals; essential country risk reading.

Salazar and the corporatist Estado Novo economy he ran in Portugal.

The rise and fall of the Texas oil fortunes, the Hunts among them.

From a Nebraska diner to Lehman, Washington and co-founding Blackstone.

Marc Rich, the founder of modern commodity trading.

By the reporter who publicly questioned the returns in 2001.

Henry Clay Frick: Carnegie's partner, the Homestead Strike and his philanthropy.

Memoir by the firm's longtime chairman 'Ace' Greenberg.

Memoir by the architect of the industrial policy and the capital controls.

A UK chancellor's memoir of the bank crisis, the guarantee and nationalisations.

Life inside early Google, told by its 59th employee and first brand manager.

Insider memoir by the CEO who ran the 2004 turnaround.

Insider account: Schultz's 2008 return and the store closures.

Declassified files on her Abwehr connection; contested by the house.

Insider memoir by a Lehman ETF trader.

Insider memoir by Mark Madoff's widow; the collapse from inside the family.

Anglo Irish Bank's chairman in his own words, from recorded interviews.

George Soros's Open Society foundations and what they funded.

Peter Cundill's deep-value practice, drawn from his own journals.

Family cooperation; Ruth and Andrew Madoff on the record.

Walt Disney's Kansas City years, 1919-1928, and how his first company went bust.

Gina Rinehart's iron ore fortune, its royalties and the family's control of it.

Rupert Murdoch's political power, arguing his politics drove his business.

The life of Sol Price, who invented the warehouse club and taught Costco.

Profiles of the hedge fund managers who ran their strategies at scale after 2008.

The only full biography; workmanlike rather than definitive.

Insider resignation memoir that began as an op-ed.

Reported from inside the Chávez government as expropriation accelerated.

Wiley edition confirmed elsewhere.

His America's Cup campaign; the only book covering the later Ellison.

Reads the brand as politics; the most intellectually serious account.

Spier on the psychology and habits behind durable value investing.

Insider account: an early Western executive on the eBay fight.

Synthesis of his mental-models framework, not a life.

Galliano and McQueen inside the LVMH and Kering machine.

The Fed chair's account of the financial crisis and what the Fed did and why.

Insider account of Facebook's ads business by a product manager.

The Greek debt crisis and first bailout, told by the finance minister who signed it.

Insider: the UBS banker whose disclosure ended cross-border Swiss secrecy.

The Krocs, the fortune, and the philanthropy it funded.

Miller reconstructs Buffett's partnership-era rules and results.

How Viktor Orbán won and holds power in Hungary through nationalism and patronage.

How Erdogan's consolidation reshaped who wins contracts.

The same author on what happened when the reforms were resisted.

SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.

Four women venture capitalists and the deals the industry forgot

Insider memoir by the architect of much of the reform programme.

Reporting on the construction-and-credit growth model and who benefited.

Insider account: later memoir on social responsibility and politics.

Biography of the man who named and institutionalised growth investing.

A history of the Tata family and the business group they built.

How Apple's operations chief became its leader and took it past a trillion dollars.

Subtitled Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence.

Insider memoir by her son, who scaled the company she founded.

Insider memoir by the engineer whose blog post triggered the reckoning.

Authorised, translated from Japanese; admiring in tone.

Founder's account of a private-label, limited-SKU, high-turn grocery model.

Insider account: Immelt's defence of his sixteen years as CEO.

Built on prison correspondence and interviews.

Insider account: Nooyi's memoir of twelve years as CEO.

Dell's founder on the buyout, the Icahn fight and VMware

Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.

NASA insider on the policy fight that funded commercial crew.

Bloomberg analyst on Vanguard's economics

Polemic treating Welch's GE as the template for shareholder primacy.

Crypto-trade reporter's mechanics-first account.

An investigative case against the power of the Gates Foundation.

How the struggle between Thomas Watson and his son shaped IBM's success.

A tech reporter's memoir, including Sam Altman and OpenAI's board crisis.

A neurosurgeon on how medical decisions and hospital incentives actually work

Insider memoir by SoftBank's former CFO

The Theranos whistleblower's account of what went on inside the company.

Media executive's memoir spanning Paramount, Fox and IAC

An abolitionist's life in slavery and his fight for the full freedom of Black people.

A general's own account of his career, from West Point cadet to head of Union armies.

A memoir of surviving Auschwitz and a psychologist's guide to healing from trauma.

Based on the career of broker John K. Wing.

Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade

An adman's anecdotes of his successes and failures, from inventing test campaigns on.

Confessions of an American writer who travelled widely and lived unconventionally.

Narrative of the American West's mining and railroad fortunes

A British volunteer's account of fighting for Franco's Nationalists in Spain.

A comic memoir of a boyhood on Corfu with an odd family and the island's wildlife.

The life and spiritual attainment of Ramakrishna in a temple near Calcutta.

A copywriter's memoir bound with his primer on advertising, Scientific Advertising.

Life in Nazi concentration camps, and logotherapy: finding meaning to survive.

Following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through the 1960s counterculture.

The research chief who backed xerography tells the story from inside Xerox.

Early Western biography, written while Soichiro Honda still ran the company.

Short monograph by a student and colleague.

A memoir told through portraits of the people the author knew, from Vienna on.

title listed on grantspub.com books page

A physicist's stories, from fixing radios as a boy to Los Alamos and beyond.

Biography of the journalist whose reporting broke the trust.

Tire-shop founder's memoir on profit sharing and dealer economics

Interviews with leading programmers on the forces and traits behind their work.

Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work

Illustrated family survey.

The French original of the above.

Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.

A naturalist's mother dies of cancer as the rising Great Salt Lake threatens birds.

Interviews in which successful traders explain the strategies behind their results.

Clarence Darrow's 1912 bribery trial in Los Angeles, and the lawyer's life around it.

Nelson Mandela's own story, from childhood to prison and the end of apartheid.

Inside Lockheed's secret projects unit, from the U-2 to the stealth fighter.

Family insider history of the studio's founding generation.

Turner Broadcasting, absorbed by Time Warner in 1996.

From Harlem to the top of the US military, through Vietnam, Panama and Desert Storm.