Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built


Duncan Clark - 2016
    Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers.Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80% market share? As it forges ahead into finance and entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions?  How does the Chinese government view its rise?  Will Alibaba expand further overseas, including in the U.S.?Clark tells Alibaba’s tale in the context of China’s momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an unlikely corporate titan as never before.

Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams


Michael D'Antonio - 2006
    Hershey.The name Hershey evokes many things: chocolate bars, the company town in Pennsylvania, one of America’s most recognizable brands. But who was the man behind the name? In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D’Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day. Hershey, the son of a minister’s daughter and an irresponsible father who deserted the family, began his career inauspiciously when the two candy shops he opened both went bankrupt. Undeterred, he started the Lancaster Caramel Company, which brought him success at last. Eventually he sold his caramel operation and went on to perfect the production process of chocolate to create a stable, consistent bar with a long shelf life...and an American icon was born. Hershey was more than a successful businessman—he was a progressive thinker who believed in capitalism as a means to higher goals. He built the world’s largest chocolate factory and a utopian village for his workers on a large tract of land in rural Pennsylvania, and used his own fortune to keep his workers employed during the Great Depression. In addition, he secretly willed his fortune to a boys’ school and orphanage, both of which now control a vast endowment.

Miss Ella of Commander's Palace


Ella Brennan - 2016
    From childhood in the Great Depression to opening esteemed eateries, it’s quite a story to tell. When she and her family launched Commander’s Palace, it became the city’s most popular restaurant, where famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, and James Beard Award winner Troy McPhail got their start.Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans’ finest restaurant empire.

Loose Balls: Easy Money, Hard Fouls, Cheap Laughs, & True Love in the NBA


Jayson Williams - 2000
    From revelations about the meanest, softest, and smelliest players in the league, to Williams’s early days as a “young man with a lot of money and not a lot of sense,” to his strong and powerful views on race, privilege, and giving back, Loose Balls is a basketball book unlike any other.No inspirational pieties or chest-thumping boasting here—instead, Jayson Williams gives us the real insider tales of refs, groupies, coaches, entourages, and all the superstars, bench warmers, journeymen, clowns, and other performers in the rarefied circus that is professional basketball.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Trump: The Art of the Deal


Donald J. Trump - 1987
    I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”—Donald J. Trump  Here is Trump in action—how he runs his business and how he runs his life—as he meets the people he needs to meet, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies, and changes the face of the New York City skyline. But even a maverick plays by rules, and Trump has formulated eleven guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest deals; he shatters myths; he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker’s art. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it. Trump: The Art of the Deal is an unguarded look at the mind of a brilliant entrepreneur and an unprecedented education in the practice of deal-making. It’s the most streetwise business book there is—and the ultimate read for anyone interested in achieving money and success, and knowing the man behind the spotlight.

Doing what is right: THE CRISIL STORY


Hemanth Gorur - 2012
    Founded in the regulated and stagnant Indian economy of the late 1980s, offering a credit rating service that had no takers, and without any real assets or capital, CRISIL seemed destined to fail. Instead, it became one of India’s most respected companies, redefining its vision from being India-focused to playing a quiet but critical role in global markets. This is a story of razor-sharp analytics, unshakeable values and sheer grit. It is also a story of leaders with very different styles, who brought it all together over a quarter of a century. A narrative that, above all, shows that doing well can go hand in hand with doing what is right.

A Book About Innocent: Our story and some things we've learned


Dan Germain - 2009
    On that first day we sold twenty-four bottles, and now we sell over 2 million a week, so we've grown since then. This book is about the stuff we've learned since selling those first few smoothies. About having ideas and making drinks, about running a business and getting started, about nature and fruit, about company life and working with friends, about the stuff we've got right and the stuff we got wrong, and about squirrels . . . and camping . . . and doing the right thing. We thought we'd write it all down in a book so we don't forget any of it, and to maybe help other people too. We started innocent from scratch, so we've learnt a lot of things by getting stuff wrong. Some other lessons have come from listening carefully to people clever than us. And some stuff we just got lucky on. But all of it, the good the bad and the useful, is in here. Plus, perhaps our mums will finally believe us when we tell them we haven't rung home for a while because we've been a bit busy these past few years.

Whisper Mountain


Vivian Higginbotham Nichols - 2017
    Because it was extremely difficult to verbalize the events to her own children years later, her adult family knew very little of the details until 30 years after her passing in 1967. That is when her granddaughter discovered her writings and promised to tell the story of what she endured.

The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett And I Built Our Company


David Packard - 1995
    After graduation, Hewlett and Packard decided to throw their lots in together. They tossed a coin to decide whose name should go first on the notice of incorporation, then cast about in search of products to sell. Today, the one-car garage in Palo Alto that housed their first workshop is a California historic landmark: the birthplace of Silicon Valley. And Hewlett-Packard has produced thousands of innovative products for millions of customers throughout the world. Their little company employs 98,400 people and boasts constantly increasing sales that reached $25 billion in 1994.While there are many successful companies, there is only one Hewlett-Packard, because from the very beginning, Hewlett and Packard had a way of doing things that was contrary to the prevailing management strategies. In defining the objectives for their company, Packard and Hewlett wanted more than profits, revenue growth and a constant stream of new, happy customers.Hewlett-Packard' s success owes a great deal to many factors, including openness to change, an unrelenting will to win, the virtue of sustained hard work and a company-wide commitment to community involvement. As a result, HP now is universally acclaimed as the world' s most admired technology company; its wildly successful approach to business has been immortalized as "The HP Way."In this book, David Packard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his life' s work and of the truly exceptional company that he and Bill Hewlett started in a garage 55 years ago.

The Hiltons: A Family Dynasty


J. Randy Taraborrelli - 2014
    Randy Taraborrelli comes an engrossing and revealing portrait of the Hilton dynasty. THE HILTONS is a fascinating, no-holds-barred account of the American industrial giant who built the world's greatest hotel empire and his always larger-than-life family. Demanding and enigmatic, patriarch Conrad Hilton's visionary ideas and unyielding will established the model for the modern luxury hotel industry. But outside the boardroom, Conrad struggled with emotional detachment, failed marriages, and conflicted Catholicism. Then there are the Hilton children. Playboy Nicky's tragic alcoholism and passionate but abusive relationship with Elizabeth Taylor was the stuff of tabloid legend. Serious Barron, on the other hand, deftly handled his father's legacy, carrying the Hilton brand triumphantly into the new millennium. Eric, raised apart from his older brothers, accepted his supporting role in the Hilton dynasty with calm and quiet--a stark contrast to the boys' much younger half-sister Francesca, whose battle for recognition led her into courtrooms and conflict.The cast of supporting players includes the inimitable Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was married to Conrad briefly but remained a thorn in his side for decades; a young Donald Trump; and a host of other Hollywood and business luminaries with whom the Hiltons crossed paths and swords over the years. THE HILTONS is a sweeping saga of the success--and excess--of an iconic and only-in-America family dynasty.

The King of Content: Sumner Redstone's Battle for Viacom, CBS, and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire


Keach Hagey - 2018
    Today he controls 80% of the voting shares of both Viacom and CBS, meaning that on a whim he could replace the entire boards of two public companies with a combined value of $40 billion. He spent decades performing meticulous estate planning so that his control would extend beyond the grave (which he loved telling reporters he would never lie in), constructing trusts designed to make it impossible for his heirs to sell his companies after he died. “Unless they start doing terribly,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, “which they will not.”As readers will discover in The King of Content, Redstone’s confidence at the time was not misplaced. His life up to that point had been a story of exceeding expectations, climbing from the son of a linoleum peddler in the Jewish immigrant tenements of Boston’s West End to Harvard Law School, from the president of his father’s regional drive-in movie chain to the owner of Viacom, from a cerebral lawyer who shopped at Filene’s Basement to the owner of a coveted Hollywood studio, and ultimately, after the Viacom-CBS merger, to the controlling shareholder of the largest merged media entity in U.S. history. The credo that he coined and repeated for decades—“content is king”—turned out to be more true in the digital world than he could have ever guessed.Through exclusive interview and hundreds of pages of legal documents, Keach Hagey reveals the story behind the rise and fall of this remarkable figure, and the details of the family members fighting for control of his vast empire. At the heart of all the dueling lawsuits running through the Redstone family is Sumner Redstone’s tumultuous love life —particularly the fallout from his 2002 divorce from Phyllis, his wife of 52 years. More recently, Redstone’s life has become a tabloid soap opera thanks a lawsuit brought by one of his ex-girlfriends, Manuela Herzer. If the judge finds him incompetent, it will greatly increase the pressure on his trustees to begin the process of placing his controlling stakes in the hands of a seven-person trust who are expected to duke it out over what will become of the companies.Yet the appetite for Redstone’s assets is not what it would have been just a few years ago. While CBS—bolstered by its sports rights and the programming prowess of its former actor CEO, Les Moonves—has experienced modest declines in the age of cord-cutting, Viacom’s fall has been dizzying. Ratings at its biggest cable networks, which include MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, BET, and Vstrong, have been falling double-digit percentages for years. A few small cable companies, annoyed at Viacom’s demands for price hikes for their entire package of dozens of channels when ratings were so weak, dropped them altogether last year—a move widely viewed as a canary in the industry coal mine.There’s a corporate whodunnit here, as well as a series of mysteries that has captivated both the business and tabloid press. The answers lie in family feuds, corporate battles and alliances that go back decades, and will be laid bare in this ambitious book.

Display of Power: How Fubu Changed a World of Fashion, Branding and Lifestyle


Daymond John - 2007
    This brief glimpse into his life and mind is also a look at the new generation of CEOs. If you want to own your own business, or if you're a veteran executive who wants to know the mindset of this changing world, Daymond walks you through in Display of Power. A must read." -Russell Simmons, Media Mogul"Daymond John brings his signature style to the world of books, and Display of Power is a must-read for anyone wondering how a kid from Hollis, Queens could climb to the very top rungs of the fashion industry." -Montel Williams, TV Talk Show Host"This book details the amazing story of how FUBU inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs. The brand's success reaches across the globe to more then 60 countries. In Korea, FUBU is the #1 sports casual brand with over 70 stores. Daymond John's story is an inspiration to businessmen and women worldwide." -Soo Kee Lee Sr., Managing Director, Samsung Corporation"Display of Power is a remarkable read for all. Daymond John's story is more than how the fashion world was turned inside out by FUBU. It's a lesson on how to overcome obstacles in life and how to unleash your latent talents to make your dreams come true. It's also a very valuable tool for the business world-from start-up companies finding their way, to large companies where policies and politics can often smother the entrepreneurial spirit. And finally, it's a story of how the crucible of life experiences formed the pathway for John to create the exceptional lifestyle brand we know as FUBU!" -Don Franceschini, Vice Chairman [Ret.], Sara Lee Corporation

Finding Freedom in the Lost Kitchen


Erin French - 2021
    And of her son who became her guiding light as she slowly rebuilt her personal and culinary life around the solace she found in food--as a source of comfort, a sense of place, as a way of creating community and making something of herself, despite seemingly impossible odds.Set against the backdrop of rural Maine and its lushly intense, bountiful seasons, Erin French's rollercoaster memoir reveals struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and the passion and courage behind the fairytale success of The Lost Kitchen.

No Time for Fear: How a shark attack survivor beat the odds


Paul de Gelder - 2011
    Paul chased adventure wherever he could find it, from his wild ride as a hoodlum teen and his drug-and-alcohol fuelled stint working in a strip club to hauling his way up to the elite echelons of the defence forces.But trouble hunted him down in the form of a brutal shark in February 2009. Paul lost two limbs, and his career as a daredevil navy clearance diver was flung into jeopardy. Drawing on everything his eventful life had taught him, Paul left nothing to chance in his recovery. He fought through excruciating pain, smashing challenge after challenge, and amazing the medical staff with his will to succeed. His inspiring story takes ‘never say die’ to a whole new level.

Ari: The Life and Times of Aristotle Onassis


Peter Evans - 1986
    After months of exclusive conversations, years of extensive research, and in-depth interviews with Onassis's friends, lovers and rivals, Evans produced the only true, full account of the charismatic and ruthless Aristotle Onassis. To be a major ABC miniseries in February. 32 pages of photos.