Post-Financial Crisis Spiritual Reading: the 2013 FT/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book Award

The readers of business books are a fragile lot. They’re uncertain of their talents and the scope of human possibility, confused as to direction (they’re largely not one-percenters). Their anxieties lead them to seek reassurance - from authors who project an understandable and manageable world. It is little surprise that business books resemble spiritual books - they are marked by a confident if not omniscient tone, they judge the unrighteous, they show us the way. The six finalists for the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award extend these comforts.

For more of this essay, see "Post-Financial Crisis Spiritual Reading" at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

On November 18, the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was awarded to Brad Stone for The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

See my Attraverso review of The Everything Store here.

And you can find below links to my reviews of the five other finalists:

• Neil Irwin, The Alchemists
• Iain Martin, Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy
• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data
• Anita Raghavan, The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund 
• Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead