Amongst the many reasons to prefer a book over a file on your e-reader: books have history. Sometimes, the history is obvious and evident. A book might have memories attached to it, or sentimental value. Sometimes, however, the history is weird, twisted, and hidden. There’s an air of mystery to certain books, a thrill of an enigma, a hint of something outside the realm of normality.

Here’s a list of such books, ones that have stumped scholars and titillated bibliophiles. And while there’s plenty to be excited about with ebooks, the mysterious origins of a book are never going to translate to the new format.

The Voynich Manuscript

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In the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, part of Yale University, there is a book that nobody can read. Called the Voynich Manuscript, after the book dealer Wilifrid Voynich, who acquired the book in 1912, has proven to be an unsolvable puzzle to scholars, cryptographers, and bibliophiles.

C14 dating on the manuscript’s pages has dated the book to sometime in the 15th century. The text is written in an alphabet that matches no known language, and if it’s a code, then it’s one that has stumped codebreakers and cryptographers for the last 100 years. The book appears to be part pharmacopeia, with illustrations of plants and herbs, part alchemy text, and part cosmological treatise. If it is, as some believe, a hoax, it is an incredibly complex one.

The Book of Soyga

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John Dee was a famed Elizabethan scholar, mathematician, astrologer, occultist, and alchemist. He was a consultant to the court of Queen Elizabeth, and — even more impressively at the time — owned the largest library in England, some 3000 volumes.

Dee believed the Book of Soyga, also called Aldaraia by the magician, to have been revealed to Adam in the garden of Eden by God’s angels. The book itself was a 16th century treatise on magic, and about as likely to be celestially derived as this article is (Hint: it’s not). The mystery of this book actually starts after Dee’s death. Dee’s fantastic library had been ransacked during his several years spent on the European continent, and he was forced to sell much of the remaining volumes to support himself at the end of his life. The Book Of Soyga was presumed to be lost until 1994, when the scholar Deborah Harkness discovered two copies, in embarrassingly obvious places: the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The Popol Vuh

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In 1701, a Dominican priest named Francisco Ximénez came to a small town called Chichicastenango in Guatemala, which is deep in the territory of the former Quiché nation. There, a parishioner showed him a manuscript, a phonetic text copy of an oral recitation, that had first been created after the conquest of Latin America by Spanish forces. “Popol Vuh” translates to “Book of the People”, and its first lines attest to its creation after the violent colonization.

The book itself details the creation of the world, and explores several other myths. It lay in obscurity for years, until it was rediscovered by Adrián Recinos, and published. People have argued for years over how Ximénez came by the manuscript, if there ever was an original source, and how he was allowed to access it if it was such a closely guarded secret.

The Ripley Scroll

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The Ripley Scroll is actually a series of scrolls, so named for George Ripley, a 15th century Augustinian monk from Yorkshire who moonlighted as an alchemist. He spent nearly twenty years traveling through Europe, searching for the secrets of transmutation and immortality, and by the time he returned to England in 1477, some believed that he had found it. It was alleged that much of the money that he gave to the Knights of Malta and Rhodes, to fund their war against the Turks, came from gold he had transmuted from base metals.

The Ripley Scrolls show, in a cryptic series of pictures, how to create the fabled philosopher’s stone. For those not already learned in alchemy (or who haven’t read the Harry Potter books) this stone is the key ingredient in creating the elixir of life, and for making gold out lead. The pictures are accompanied by enigmatic texts, saying such things as “You must make Water of the Earth, and Earth of the Air, and Air of the Fire, and Fire of the Earth.”

The Rohonc Codex

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The recorded history of the Rohonc Codex can be traced to 1838, when the Count Gusztáv Batthyány donated it, as part of his library, to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The language it’s written in has a passing resemblance to Old Hungarian script, but has been proved to be a different language all together. Like the Voynich Manuscript, no one has successfully deciphered its text. It’s popularly believed to be a hoax perpetrated by the Hungarian forger and nationalist Sámuel Literáti Nemes, but it has never been proved definitively one way or another.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

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In 1947, two Bedouin goat-herders literally fell into a cave along the Dead Sea by the West Band in Palestine. There they made an astonishing discovery: fragments of scrolls from nearly 2000 years ago, along with a handful of pottery, cloth, and wood from an ancient settlement, called Qumran. The scrolls are generally believed to have belonged to a Jewish sect called the Essenes, though others argue that they might have belonged to other sects, such as the Sadducees, Pharisees, or Zealots. Nearby caves yielded other treasures, including more fragments of scrolls, parchments, and papyrus.

The scrolls had been hidden in clay jars during a time when the Roman military was actively trying to destroy both Jewish culture and the nascent Christian movement. The archaeological site of Qumran had been razed by Romans in 67 AD, and ash found at the site confirmed that amongst its ruins were other scrolls and books.

Prodigiorum Ac Ostentorum Chronicon

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The Prodigiorum by Konrad Lycosthenes, is a strange book, even for this list. It is a collection of omens and portents that spanned the known history of Europe, from Greek and Roman times up to contemporary prophecies. It also described and depicted various creatures, both real and fantastical. It contains accurate woodcuts of rhinoceroses, elephants, camels, and moose, as well as collections of sea monsters and strange human-like creatures, with no heads or faces on their chests. It was published at the same time that Nostradamus was writing his Prophecies, and was an obvious inspiration to his work.

The Red Book

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Carl Jung was a famous 20th century psychologist, the founder of the Analytical Psychology movement. He was a student of Freud’s, though he later diverged from Freud’s theories. It was during this time that he began work on what was formally titled Liber Novus, but was known informally amongst Jung’s followers and heirs — and eventually published — as The Red Book.

The book had its beginnings in what seemed to be a psychotic breakdown for Jung, starting in 1913. Jung himself referred to the period as a confrontation with his own unconscious. He worked on it for 16 years, while developing his own psychological theories. The contents in the book were produced by using a technique of Jung’s own development that he called “active imagination”, wherein he was visited by a male and female figure, whom he later identified as the prophet Elijah and Salome, who guided him through the process of delving into a collective unconscious.

Jung’s heirs kept the Red Book from being accessed for nearly eighty years, until 2001. It was finally published in 2009.

The Codex Seraphinianus

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The Codex Seraphinianus is a book that, according one review, “lies in the uneasy boundary between surrealism and fantasy.” Created by Italian artist Luigi Serafini, the book is supposed to be an encyclopedia of another world. It is written in a a language of Serafini’s own creation, and illustrated throughout by bizarre, color illustrations. There are fish that resemble human eyeballs, complete with eyelashes; bleeding fruit shot through with safety pins; cities cradled in giant oyster shells, suspended about a sea. The language has also proven to be indecipherable, though according to its page on Abe Books, cryptologists have managed to decipher the numbering system.

The Rongorongo

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Though stretching the definition of “books” rather far, the Rongorongo deserve a place on this list. These pieces of wood — some of which were shaped into staffs or statuettes — contain a system of glyphs which have not been able to be deciphered since their discovery in the 19th century.

The arrival of Chilean and Peruvian forces on the island had a devastating effect on the population: slave raiders struck a number of times, eventually abducting or killing about 1,500 people, roughly half the native population. Smallpox and tuberculosis epidemics, some of which were purposely introduced by traders. Others were forcibly emigrated to Tahiti as an enslaved work force. Within a decade, 97% of the population was lost, and there was no one left to translate the glyphs.

The Codex Mendoza

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The Codex Mendoza is an extraordinary document with a strange history. It was most likely commissioned by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in 1616, and was sent to Spain for the king’s perusal. On its way there, however, the fleet on which it traveled was attacked by French privateers, and the codex, along with other treasures that had been aboard, was taken to France. It lay in obscurity for a few hundred years, eventually making its way to the Bodeleian Library in Oxford.

What makes this book extraordinary is that it was a book about the Aztec people, written by Aztec scribes and informants. It is what some scholars call the first “autoethnography”, a biography of an entire people written by members of the group.

Prophecies of Nostradamus

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What list of mysterious and occult books would be complete without a mention of the famed Prophecies? This popular book of predictions and prophecies has been a bestseller for over 400 years, rarely going out of print since its initial publication in 1555. At the time, collections of omens and predictions were in high demand. Nostradamus — or Michel de Notredame, as he was known — began his career as an apothecary and plague doctor. Perhaps it was his work in the midst of bubonic plague outbreaks that gave him his particular interest in apocalyptic visions of the future.

The collected Prophecies lay out, in rhyming quatrains no less, predictions of various disasters. Various urban legends and myths about him abound. Claims that he predicted everything: 9/11, both World Wars, the death of Princess Di, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If an event made headlines for more than a few weeks, rest assured that someone, somewhere, is holding up a copy of Nostradamus’ 400 year old tome and claiming that he knew it would happen all along.

The Nag Hammadi Library

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The discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, a group of books that comprise the Gnostic Bible, sounds like the beginning of a Victorian adventure novel: in 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman, discovered a clay jar in the deserts of Upper Egypt, which contained 13 books that were bound in leather. He dumped the books at his family’s house while he and his brothers went out to enact a blood feud against another man. Some of the books were accidentally burned in a cooking fire, while the rest were eventually sold on the black market, until they attracted the attention of Egyptian officials, who confiscated several of the books, and housed them in the Coptic Museum of Cairo.

The codices were eventually discovered to be secret sacred Christian texts. The books were created over 1,500 years ago, during the first centuries of Christianity. Some of them had never been mentioned before, in any Christian literature; others had been declared heresy, and banned by the Church. They offer a counter-point to accepted ecclesiastical literature, and have been controversial ever since their discovery.

The Sangorski Edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

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Is it possible for a book to be as cursed as the Hope Diamond? If so, the Sangorski special edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is. This book is a work of art in and of itself: the cover is bound in leather, features a jewel-encrusted peacock on the front, and is emblazoned with gold leaf. Its designer, Francis Sangorski, spent months designing it, and two years to finish its creation. It’s a legendary book, both because of the elevated artistry of the book, and the tragedies that seemed to follow it.

Sangorski’s original copy sank with the Titanic. Before he could recreate it, Francis Sangorski drowned, six weeks after the ship — with the book — foundered in the Atlantic. Stanley Bray, Sangorski’s partner, spent six years recreating the second copy of the book from Sangorski’s original drawings. The book was then destroyed in the London Blitz. It took Bray another 40 years to finish the next copy, which was donated to the British Library after his death.

The Story of the Vivian Girls

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Henry Darger was a typical urban hermit: he worked as a janitor, he lived in a small apartment in Chicago for close to 40 years, never married, and kept to himself. After he died, however, in 1973, his former landlords discovered that Darger was a typical hermit with an atypical habit: he had been writing and illustrating a novel for years, and the tome was more than 15,000 pages long by the time he died.

Bearing the unwieldy title of The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, this epic fantasy was richly illustrated by accompanying watercolors. Girls with wings fly above the strange pastel landscapes, pursued by men with swords and bayonets. The book is rich and disturbing, a supreme example of outsider art.

One last question. Are you missing your life?

That’s what Joe Robinson is most concerned about. He claims most of us are stuck in a “performance identity.” We tie our self-worth to external factors, like how productive we are. As a result, we’re only motivated to do things when they have a measurable payoff, for example money, status, or recognition.

That’s no way to live, says Robinson. In his new book, Don’t Miss Your Life: Find More Joy and Fulfillment Now, he explores the costs of living in a performance-based mental trap. He shows readers the ingredients of a vital, passionate life. Then, step by step, he demonstrates how to leave the Calvinistic cubicle mentality and become a full participant in a life that you love.

In turn motivational, Zen, and instructional, Robinson’s unlikely self-help book teaches us how to cultivate “leisure skills” as a panacea to the digitally-collared life of an onlooker. He shows that play, rather than being the domain of slackers, has far-reaching benefits throughout our lives. If that sounds fun and relevant, read on.

What’s Inside

Each chapter of this well-written book launches with a story. Robinson describes an experience that makes someone, including himself, more alive. Each chapter covers research explaining why joy, fun or play are so essential to your health—and the costs of continuing to titrate your self-worth to external forces. You get exercises that help you launch your own pursuit of a better life, as well as a review of key concepts at the end of each chapter. Chapters are easy to read in bursts, which is helpful if you are short on time.

The introduction and first chapter introduce you to the physiological and psychological benefits of having fun. Joy comes from doing something fun for the sole reason that you like it or it challenges you. Such “direct experience” not only benefits your body, but increases your feelings of competence, independence, and social connectedness. While convincing you that you need more experience and play in your life, Robinson provides starting points on how to do it, beginning with re-owning your time.

Chapter 2 explores the habits that make so many of us stick to the overwork-errands-bills-TV-stress doldrums like flies on tape. We have an inner “performance identity” that tells us something is only worth doing when there’s an external payoff. Robinson explains why it’s important not to base your self-esteem on your productivity or external factors, and shares tips on getting unstuck by cultivating a “worth ethic.”

The next four chapters show you what you need to cultivate in order to build a life worth living. Your goal is to find something you feel passionate about. If you build that passion into a skill through time and effort, you will eventually reach an “optimal experience,” where you become completely engrossed in your activity of choice over longer and longer periods of time.

Robinson then explains how to reach that goal of optimal experience. When you find something that gives you a “glimmer” of passion (Robinson calls this foreplay), you want to make that passion last. To find something that, uh, arouses you in the first place, you need to try things now.

To want to take risks in the first place, you have to be motivated “without regard to payoff.” That’s what Robinson calls intrinsic motivation. If you’re risk-averse in general, Robinson shows you how to develop your “venture aptitude.” He tells you how to cultivate the right mindset and create the right kinds of goals to get you there.

Next, Robinson shares how to support yourself in the process of getting skilled at the thing you’re passionate about. He includes tips on motivating yourself and making steady, safe progress in your skill. He even illustrates the process in a Maslow-remniscent “fun pyramid” in Chapter 7.

You also learn how to stop being crippled by social comparisons. Robinson teaches you the value of eagerness, enthusiasm, positive self-talk, realistic self-appraisal, and intentional foolishness as tools to help you commit to practicing your passion. As your vitality and self-worth increase, you’ll get better at taking advantage of opportunities that augment your life.

The final chapter condenses the messages from previous chapters into an actionable 7-day plan to restructure your life.

Thoughts

Don’t Miss Your Life is a solid addition to the sheaf of books and blogs that have emerged on the topic of happiness in recent years. Robinson, a great writer with quips like “you can’t play hopscotch with a flow chart,” uses a practical, step-by-step template that anyone can follow to build a more fulfilling life. He demystifies the fulfilling life by breaking down what it looks like, why it (scientifically) matters, and how to build your own.

Robinson sold me on the case for leisure. (Disclaimer: In my case, he might have been preaching to the choir. I’ve valued the kind of experiential absorption he describes since I could walk, but haven’t ever been able to break it down the way he has.) Through exercises and suggestions, he made the techniques for attaining joy accessible. And, though I didn’t have time to test all of his concepts, I’m convinced they’re solid. Robinson clearly did his homework, as the many case studies, books, and individual stories sourced in the book show.

I did get a little lost towards the middle of the book, where I started to forget exactly what terms like “venture aptitude” and “intrinsic motivation” meant, and had to go back to refresh my memory. A glossary of these terms and their definitions would have been helpful. I also found the book a bit heavy on descriptions of samba, Robinson’s passion of choice. Towards the end, I caught myself thinking “not samba again!”

The concepts also took a while to crystallize in my mind. I’m still not sure I absorbed every one of Robinson’s many points. It’s the kind of book you keep around as a kind of reference/motivational tool and revisit as needed.

I think this book will benefit you most if you:

a) Feel like your life has become dull or bland, and need a way out of your rut
b) Are willing to make changes in order to improve your life
c) Aren’t in survival mode about job security or money

If that sounds like you, do pick up a copy of this relevant and timely read.

Disclosure: We received a free copy of this book.

For being at the top of the food chain, humans aren’t terribly evolved. Give us a complex situation like, say, a credit meltdown with a zero accountability, and we drape a TARP and hope it will just go away. Individual humans just aren’t good at making hard decisions in complicated situations.

That said, a smart, carefully tuned group of us could be. Ants, which aren’t too smart as individuals, do it. Bees do it. Even educated humans do it, given the right circumstances.

A smart swarm is “a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment in ways that give them power, as a group, to cope with uncertainty, complexity and change,” according to the National Geographic senior editor Peter Miller, whose book The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done dives into the dynamics of how large groups function in nature. Miller uses the relatively new science of understanding flocks, schools, and colonies to make his points about how smart swarms operate.

This “science of collaboration” is relevant to business, especially considering how much the Internet has boosted human collaboration. Ants in a colony assign just the right number of workers to each job every day—can you imagine the competitive advantages of having similar flexibility in your own company? Miller explains how businesses use the mechanics of the smart swarm to optimize manufacturing, routing trucks, networking phones, and more.

Content

Each of The Smart Swarm’s well-written chapters features an example from nature—insects, fish, birds—to illustrate principles, or defining features, of a smart swarm. Miller peppers in knowledge from a span of other fields, too, including economics, political science, government, computer science, mathematics, robotics, physics, and even The Lord of the Rings. Each chapter also includes a case study; subjects include Boeing, the Iraqi municipal government, and the CIA.

Between the introduction and conclusion, the book has five story- and example-rich chapters:

• Chapter 1 explores how ants optimize changing conditions, followed by a case study on how gas supplier American Air Liquide uses a computer system with an ant-based algorithm to save it an estimated $20 million per year.

• Chapter 2 demonstrates the necessity of diversity of knowledge and friendly competition in a smart swarm using honeybees, Best Buy, Boeing, and a small town in Vermont.

• Chapter 3 uses the electric grid, termites, national intelligence, and Hurricane Katrina to illustrate how smart, adaptable networks work.

• Chapter 4 uses flocks of sparrows, caribou and animation in Lord of the Rings to explore how individuals each play a subtle part in keeping their entire group on course.

• Chapter 5 explores what triggers peaceful swarms of locusts to go into mass destruction mode and create a plague; it applies examples to crowd disasters in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines as well as market bubbles.

What do you get out of all this research, case studies, and examples? A handful of principles that define a smart swarm, including:

• Individuals aren’t smart, but the colony is. A smart swarm self-organizes “from the bottom up, as the result of interactions among many parts.”

• A smart swarm distributes group problem solving through individual interactions. Miller uses the beach as a way to illustrate this. If you go to beach, you find a space for your towel that’s a comfortable distance from everyone else; if you look at crowded beach from aerial view, it’s a mosaic of evenly-spaced towels. Also, if a couple of people stand up and stare into the water, then a couple more do it, pretty soon everyone will be staring into the water in a collective state of alarm.

• The more choices a smart swarm has, the better it performs. A smart swarm made up of individuals with a diverse skill set leads to more choices. Assuming the group is structured right and given an appropriate task—necessary for it to be a smart, not dumb, group–friendly competition of ideas will let the best strategy percolate upwards. The smart swarm will then execute that strategy.

• Smart swarms are self-healing: “In an ant colony or a beehive, many individuals can fail to perform their jobs and the system still functions just fine, because many other individuals, sensing something different in their surroundings, adjust their behavior accordingly,” writes Miller.

Thoughts

Thanks to increased global interdependence and lightning-speed communication, business and government are itching for a model to replace the old hierarchical one. The Smart Swarm points us in the right direction.

This wasn’t clear to me at first, because each chapter in the book is so rich with examples and diverse stories that I had could only ruminate the book’s deeper implications after stepping away from it for a while. It’s a challenge to pick through and grasp everything. I can’t help but think there must be a better way to make each of Miller’s principles more accessible on the first read, eg. listing the principles in bold before the beginning of each chapter.

That said, The Smart Swarm was effective in that it introduced me to a whole new vocabulary and idea set around collaboration. I started reading the book with a preconceived notion that individual experts are the smartest problem solvers; the Smart Swarm cured me of that.

It’s also very well written. Miller includes reams of quotes, references to books, research, and case studies to make his points. He clearly did his homework; his writing integrates everything smoothly.

The Smart Swarm provides relevant, quality information that everyone in the Information Age should know about. For that reason, I recommend it to everyone, with a caveat—it helps if you’re a close reader.

Disclosure: We received a free copy of The Smart Swarm.

A lot of blood and sweat goes into maximizing a store’s consumer appeal. Designing a store that both attracts shoppers and makes them buy is practically an art form.

It’s a crucial art, at that. Shoppers actually choose most brands not as a result of advertising or brand awareness efforts, but at the point of purchase–the store display, studies show. If you master the point of purchase, you make the sale.

This is why spending on shopper marketing has doubled since 2004. Proctor & Gamble alone spends $500 million per year on it. Still, shopper marketing, which has taken the retail world by storm in recent years, defies easy description. It refers to the conglomeration of things that retailers need to consider in putting up a store, from design to packaging, layout to pricing, shopper behavior to creating the right sample counter.

Markus Stahlberg and Ville Maila have compiled the first book on the topic, aptly entitled Shopper Marketing: How to Increase Purchase Decisions at the Point of Sale. After 20 months of what Stahlberg calls “relentless correspondence and face-to-face meetings” with more than 300 experts around the world, the authors compiled the 35 shopper marketing essays that define the essence of the discipline.

Contents

Because Shopper Marketing is a collection of essays, it’s not a cover-to-cover read. There’s a lot in here, from shopper heat maps to case studies on corner displays. The most memorable essays revolve around:

• Where shoppers go once they’re in a store.
• How to cut through shoppers’ immunity to their surroundings.
• Incorporating the five senses into shopper experience.
• The patterns of customer behavior.
• How to offer shoppers more value with in-store media.
• What motivates customers to buy.
• How marketers sometimes make it hard for a customer to make a purchase, and how to override that.

Shopper marketing is complex and necessary—and doing it right isn’t easy. That’s why essays covered so many topics, with case studies, charts, research, tips, and analysis mixed in.

Thoughts

The whole book is rather heavy on the analysis and light on anecdotes. It is not light reading, but the in-depth essays are satisfying and educational. Shopper Marketing’s strongest asset was that it teaches a shopper-centric mindset, helping you understand how shoppers think and behave. This is crucial for attracting and retaining consumers in a hypercompetitive retail environment.

I would recommend Shopper Marketing to any retailer for a big-picture overview of how shoppers think. As a consumer, I also found it fascinating to learn just how much time, effort, and money goes into making people like me buy.

Disclosure: We received a free copy of Shopper Marketing.

The authors turn CDOs into something that makes sense, CEOs into the fallible humans they are, and even transform the government into a place readers can picture. The result is a book not only on the causes of the financial crisis, but commentary on corruption, systemic hubris, and human nature itself.

Content

All the Devils Are Here offers a chronological overview of the three decades that fomented the financial crisis. It starts in the late 1970s and ends with the Obama administration’s 2010 financial reform bill.

Rather than going into detail about one firm’s collapse, the way other books do, Devils covers several major players through time. Every creatively-titled chapter (“I Like Big Bucks and I Cannot Lie,” for example) tells the story of one or more major players, from Fannie Mae to Goldman Sachs. The authors add color and personality to these players using anecdotes, quotes, and email excerpts.

The authors’ extensive research, apparent throughout the book, resulted in an overview of the crisis that made me take a step back from my previous assumptions.

For example, none other than the government first securitized mortgages. When derivatives made it to the international stage, governments around the world, meeting in the “Basel I” conference on international banking regulation, agreed that mortgage products weren’t risky. They decided that banks’ capital requirements should be lower if they held more of those “safe” mortgage derivatives.

The Fed fed into this delusion by assuming that derivatives like credit default swaps would let banks offload the risk of holding capital to other entities. With that risk passed on, the logic went, banks were less likely to fail in the traditional way–by making bad loans. Policymakers also saw no need to regulate derivatives, which they too saw as risk-free.

This lack of regulation, in turn, gave banks incentive to get creative with derivatives. Besides agreeing that mortgage-backed derivatives were safe, the financial world also thought innovations in general reduced risk. In reality, say the authors, they dispersed risk so widely that everyone was affected. This perceived lack of risk also led ratings agencies to give derivatives–and derivatives of derivatives, like credit default swaps–AAA ratings.

The risk hallucination kept growing. Lenders that there was zero risk of default, so they stopped caring if creditors could pay them back. Securitization eventually became the main way of funding mortgages. A Clinton-era push for increased homeownership increased the Wall Street subprime feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, Countrywide Mortgage’s bulldog CEO, Angelo Mozilo, starting pushing refinances in the early 1990s. Refinances eventually made up a whopping 82% of subprime mortgages.

The authors cover how the government, its GSEs, Merrill Lynch, Ameriquest, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and AIG jumped on board and inflamed the economy. You learn about each company’s history, the personalities of its CEOs and top executives, and its relationship with the government. There’s also a skillful emphasis on how demagoguery, especially at AIG and Merrill, as well as a restrictive company culture induced disastrous results. Goldman Sachs, still the media villain du jour, actually had the most effective leadership and company culture of anyone in the book.

A Note on Fannie and Freddie

The stories that enlightened me most in the entire book had to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Our GSEs, it turns out, aren’t as quaint and innocent as they sound.

Since inception, Fannie has been at odds with Wall Street and the government, protecting profits while neutering the law, write the authors. It owned its massive, lucrative 30-year-fixed mortgage market share with the help of lobbying (FNM and FRE spent $170 million between 1996-2006) and the belief by investors that the government would never let Fannie default.

Its job was to “supply liquidity when the housing markets needed it,” but Fannie forgot that and focused instead on generating ever-increasing profits and trying to keep pace with the private market. After subprime became mainstream and ate into their market share, our sweet-sounding, greed-infused GSEs jumped onto the subprime bandwagon. They bought in during 2005-7, the worst possible years to join, according to the authors. When the cards collapsed, their losses were massive.

Despite all of the GSEs’ hubris and corruption, the government still hasn’t decided what to do with Fannie and Freddie, which today back about 95% of homeowner mortgages.

The Authors’ Outlook

McLean and Nocera wrap up the book with a critical look at the Obama administration’s 2010 financial reform bill, saying that regulation is only as good as the regulators who enforce it. They also point out that despite putting several key financial crisis players on trial, the government can’t punish something that, while corrupt, isn’t considered a crime. I closed the book feeling the same way many people probably do these days: dubious, with a twinge of optimism.

Thoughts

McLean and Nocera line the story with such thorough, fascinating detail that I can’t begin to chronicle all the new facts that jumped out at me. Suffice it to say that I was pleased to get to know some of the main players in the financial crisis more personally.

Devils covers media whipping boys like Goldman Sachs and AIG in a more nuanced light, making readers understand how leadership and company culture contributed to the firms’ post-crisis fates. One of the book’s most valuable contributions, besides its coverage of Fannie and Freddie, was Roland Arnall’s Ameriquest. This corrupt company, heavy on cheating and cocaine, was one of the dirtiest players in the financial game. Yet the media and government–which ended up giving Arnall a post as US ambassador–continue to overlook it.

It’s easy to say “systemic hubris,” but much harder to describe what that looks like in real life. McLean and Nocera do this well. After finishing the book, I ended up with a big picture view of the financial crisis, of the humans whose greed built the straw house that burned in ’08.

I followed the financial crisis while it was happening, and frankly always felt like pieces were missing. The books that I read after the financial crisis covered certain bits in detail, but I still had no bird’s-eye view. Finally, All the Devils Are Here provided it. I highly encourage anyone who wants not only a chronology of the financial crisis, but a valuable look at human nature, to pick up this book.

Disclosure: We received a free preview copy of All the Devils Are Here.

Who knows what author Philip R. Greaves II was thinking when he wrote “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct.” Whatever it was, he probably didn’t consider that when the book went up on Amazon, social media complaints would force the book retailer to yank it back off the shelves. From Reuters:

Amazon has pulled an electronic book about pedophilia from its online store after complaints and a boycott threat, according to media reports on Thursday. The book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct,” by Philip R. Greaves II, went on sale on October 28 and cost $4.79 to download, the reports said.

Amazon initially defended the book’s publication in a statement but later withdrew it from its online store after a campaign against it spread on Twitter, Facebook and other media. Some people said they planned to boycott the store in protest, the reports said.

Al Jazeera explains the author’s intent in publishing the book:

Phillip R Greaves, listed as the author of the book , writes that paedophiles are misunderstood, as the word literally means to love a child. He argues that it is only a crime to act on sexual impulses toward children, and offers advice that purportedly allows paedophiles to abide by the law.

But later on Thursday the company appeared to bow to pressure and pulled the page from its website.

The interesting thing here is that Amazon tried to defend its listing of the book with free speech and company policy reasons, but social media–the crowds–had the final word. Amazon’s opinion was rendered irrelevant by the threat of a social media fire. This just goes to show that more than ever, companies are beholden to the opinions of the crowds, even to the point of subduing their own internal policy.

SuperScholar recently listed their 50 Most Influential Books to have an impact on our culture over the last fifty years. Included among them were the following business related books noted for their effects on economic theories, government regulation and business culture:

- Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
- Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
- Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
- Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
- Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation
- Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development
- Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism
- Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan
- Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor

Which books would you add to this list?

Do you have a startup that needs money?

If the answer is yes, is it a software, biotech, energy, or medical devices company? Do you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, or New York? In addition, can you access a venture capitalist through someone in their network and pitch them?

If so, you have roughly a 1 in 300 chance of getting funded by a VC.

If you do manage to get funded, your startup has a roughly 2% chance of getting to an IPO.

Hey, nobody said it was easy.

Jeff Bussgang would know. The former entrepreneur one of less than 7,000 people working in the exclusive, 95% male club that provides $200 billion of capital to startups annually. Bussgang, in other words, is a VC. In his new book, Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms, Bussgang gives an insider view on how entrepreneurs can access, pitch, and successfully work with venture capitalists.

What’s Inside Mastering the VC Game

Bussgang kicks off the book with a look inside entrepreneurs’ minds. Supplementing his own entrepreneur-turned-VC story with other entrepreneurs’ profiles, Bussgang explains how entrepreneurs operate. He emphasize that they’re driven by passion and an urge to change their industries (or the world), rather than by money alone.

In Chapter 2, Bussgang gets you acquainted with the “notorious Blackberry addicts” who, “because of their hyperactive minds and love for rapid, varied stimulation, have the attention span of someone suffering from attention deficit disorder.” That is, the VC crowd. Bussgang shares how these geeky, charged souls operate in companies, what drives their success, where they’re concentrated, and what kinds of companies they tend to fund.

In the next two chapters, Bussgang shows you how to choose the right VC, pitch that VC (while avoiding common pitching mistakes), and negotiate the right kind of deal.

Chapter 5, one of the more amusing parts of the book, informs you of archetypical boardroom directors. Hint: They’re right in line with original American Idol judges Simon, Paula and Randy. Bussgang then goes into three classic business startup plot lines, and how they tend to play out. These plots involve either a charismatic CEO falling from grace, the CEO and founder losing trust in each other, or a VC mutinee/takeover of the company. Appropriately, Bussgang then shares tips on surviving in your company when you’re in over your head.

Chapters 6 covers routes to cashing out. These include selling your company, engaging in a rare, coveted IPO, and the even more exquisite scenario of doing an IPO, then selling your company.

Next, Bussgang sums up VC industries in various countries outside of the United States, then concludes the book with a look at the state of venture capital today. Like many people who work in or with startups, he emphasizes that today is an excellent time to be an entrepreneur.

Thoughts

“I wrote the book to demystify the VC world for entrepreneurs, having seen both sides as an insider, and to help entrepreneurs level the playing field when pursuing venture capital so they can secure the resources necessary to achieve their vision,” Bussgang writes in the beginning. His honest, practical, easy to read book lines up well with his intentions. He offers insider tips that might otherwise be hard to access, unless you follow one of the VC blogs listed at the back of the book (or Bussgang’s own blog, seeingbothsides.com).

As someone unfamiliar with the industry, I found Bussgang’s book to be an excellent oversight of how VC works. If I were to go and actually pursue a venture capitalist, I’d want more details, like a database of VC companies or a step-by-step plan on what exactly I need to put together in my pitch. But Mastering the VC Game was a most approachable starting point.

I recommend this book to anyone new to the workings of VC. If you’re just beginning your first startup, this book is an essential launching point to get you closer to your funding objective.

Disclosure: We received a free review copy of “Mastering the VC Game.”

First, most business books use stories to cover over their complete lack of insight. This week, I read a galley of a book that I hope will never come out. After some catchy anecdotes about hero CEOs, it advised, among other things, that leaders figure out what’s really important, then do those things. It went way out on a limb by saying that great leaders are remarkable at forming relationships. And (are you sitting down?) the best leaders are honest when a strategy isn’t working.

Third, most business books are air sandwiches: empty in the middle. One of my mentors told me to read the first and last chapters of a book, because everything in the middle is either stories or takeaways so simple that watching Mr. Rogers is a better use of your time. I’m too obsessive-compulsive to follow this advice, but in 95% of cases, it would be better if I had.

I would add that one reason so many business books suck is that the authors write them as marketing or self-promotion tools. Such books emphasize the author’s expertise over quality content, making for an irritating read.

Another aspect of the business book malaise is cultural. Many people buy business books in order to learn how to succeed. If the book promises success (especially quick, easy success), and the writing style is motivational, that’s enough for many readers. They want a vitamin, not wisdom. If you’ve ever seen the books FedEx Office sells on its bookshelf, you know what I mean.

Authors who do this gain a reputation as an expert. Readers gain temporary, if insubstantial, motivation. But publishers are concerned with sales. Thanks to our quick-fix culture, vitamins sell. In a sense, you can blame the market for the proliferation of half-cocked business books.

It takes sifting to find the gems in the business book pile. Here’s our take on the 25 best business books ever.

Pick your favorite scenario for what you think 2100 will look like:

A) Massive natural disasters will have annihilated most major cities. Pollution and toxic waste will have made much of the planet unlivable. Those humans who survived the Earth’s massive calamities will be living in small, sustainable communities, armed to protect themselves against outlaws.

B) We’ll be living miserable, overpopulated, filthy lives under global governmental tyranny. We’ll have to steal or eat squirrels to supplement our meager government rations. We’ll constantly be under surveillance, even in our private lives. We won’t be able to do anything with government permission. Global elites will have built cities apart from the world’s commoners.

C) The world will be more prosperous than ever before. We’ll have avoided massive global warming by uncovering new, sustainable energy sources. Most of us will live in megacities, but will still be able to visit forests, lakes, and other natural resources. We’ll be well-fed, clothed, and safe.

D) Zombies!

In his new book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley proves that we’re headed not for calamity or misery. Instead, we’re going to see something like option C. We’ll probably have more food, less disease, more income, a longer lifespan, and better lives in general.

What makes Ridley think that things are getting better? 100,000 years of human history, which he covers in his book. He uses patterns from that span of human existence to illustrate that our capacity to change and adapt will bring us successfully through whatever problems we face. These problems even include collective boogeymen like global warming, economic crashes, and deadly diseases.

Ridley’s Reality

Throughout the course of his 359-page book, Ridley tracks human evolution, from cavemen to the modern Homo Computus, to prove that the world has steadily improved over time for humans. There are two main reasons for this.

1) Trade is good.
Trade, which Ridley defines as the “market process of exchange and specialization,” is ancient. It’s inherently fair, in that it creates changes that benefit everyone.

Over the years, an increase in trade has led to an increase in innovation, improving the quality of life for everyone. Free trade inevitably creates mutual prosperity (protectionism does the opposite).

2) More specialization and exchange lead to prosperity.
Prosperity is “the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.” Increasing specialization and more exchange are the root cause of innovation.

When exchange, invention, and specialization proliferate, a society “creates” time. As a result of this proliferation, modern people have specialized occupations, but consume hundreds of diverse things. This is the definition of a higher standard of living.

Much of The Rational Optimist comes back to these two main points. Ridley makes a slew of other, smaller points in the process, always using research and historical examples as proof. The following caught me eye:

• Commerce has helped make the “is as good a place for the average human being to live as it ever has been.” Capitalist success, in other words, leads to social improvements. Moreover, Ridley finds that “people get happier as they get richer.” Money does buy “general well-being.”

• Self-sufficiency leads to poverty. This is because bigger, more connected populations innovate more, while smaller, less connected populations tend to regress. Human beings depend on numbers, connections, and trade to succeed. So our nostalgia for farming and sustainability is just that–nostalgia. It doesn’t represent progress.

• City dwellers are better for the ecosystem. Cities house half the world’s people while using less than 3% of global land area. Country dwellers take up more space, use more energy, and impact the environment less.

• Fossil fuels like gas and coal, as well as the machines you use every day, have replaced human labor (slaves) over time. So, in a sense, they are your slaves.

• When the world started relying on fossil fuels for energy, economic growth became sustainable for the first time in history.

The Rational Optimist’s 10 rich chapters include innumerable examples from diverse fields, including anthropology, history, biology, economics, and even Hollywood movies. These examples, as well as Ridley’s own skill as a writer—and occasional cheekiness—make for an entertaining, if highly detailed, read.

Thoughts

The Rational Optimist has all of the elements of my favorite kind of book:

• The author uses studies, research, surveys, and solid evidence to make his claims.

• It covers business and the economy, but with emphasis on human behavior.

• It takes the long view of humanity, covering around 100,000 years, rather than elaborating on a fad or short period of time.

• It’s entertaining.

Perhaps most importantly, The Rational Optimist challenged me to see things in a new way. For example, Ridley makes the case that although global warming is happening, it’s completely hyped. The net harm from expected global warming will not be as big as the harm being done today by hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke, and malaria, according to Ridley. If the globe indeed warms as much as we expect it will, “it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it.”

Indeed, Ridley makes a number of points that would be considered biased towards economic conservatism, from an American viewpoint. He supports free trade and thinks all governments (he calls them monopolies) eventually mess up innovation. Yet innovation and open trade are necessary for a country to prosper, so it’s odd that smart people put too much faith in government for no good reason. He is pro-fossil fuel, pro-city, pro-genetically modified foods, and optimistic about humanity in general.

Yet instead of using rhetoric, he employs evidence and centuries of human history to make his points. This is precisely what makes The Rational Optimist so valuable.

Recommended for Some

I welcome new, intelligent perspectives on human life, so I happily devoured The Rational Optimist. Yet I could see Ridley, who isn’t shy about bashing leading thinkers (and especially environmentalist Paul Ehrlich) irking other readers. If you happen to be an extreme environmentalist/liberal/fan of organics, this book might tee you off, depending on how staunch your views are. Ditto if you want something quick and to-the-point, rather than long and detailed.

If you like seeing things debunked, however, pay attention to The Rational Optimist–you might like it. Same if you like reading about human history for hours, if you like having your viewpoints challenged, and if you enjoy laughing out loud on occasion while reading. This has been one of the best economics-related books I’ve read this year, so I do recommend it overall.

Disclosure: We received a free promotion copy of this book.