Book picks similar to
Ambani & Sons by Hamish McDonald
business
biography
india
non-fiction
Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins
Tom Perkins - 2007
But his legacy took an unexpected new turn when he resigned from Hewlett-Packard’s board in 2006, protesting the “questionable ethics and dubious legality” of their chairman’s now infamous leak investigation. In this insightful memoir, Perkins recalls these and other fascinating episodes of his life, both personal and professional, including his involvement in the creation of American industries no one could have dreamed of a century ago. In 1957 Perkins started working for Hewlett-Packard, and his career with the company spanned, becoming the administrative head of the research laboratories and the first general manager of its skyrocketing computer businesses. He was a pioneer in laser technology, starting the company that he later merged into Spectra-Physics. As chairman of Genentech for fourteen years, founder of the Silicon Valley venture-capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and director of Applied Materials at Compaq, Corning Glass, and Philips Electronics, Perkins never shies away from the cutting edge. He also discusses his marriage to Danielle Steel, his notorious vintage car collection, his yacht (the largest privately owned sailboat), his race across the ocean, his being tried for manslaughter in a backwater French town, and the toughest assignment he’s ever had: as a trustee emeritus at the San Francisco ballet.
Vikram Sarabhai
Amrita Shah - 2007
Born into a wealthy and politically conscious business family, he had an understanding of the power of money and the problems of a newly independent nation, to which he married a love for physics. This work is the story of this visionary.
The Accidental Prime Minister (The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh)
Sanjaya Baru - 2014
Singh and Baru had been close and Baru, a great admirer of the technocrat who had ushered in the 1991 reforms, saw this as an opportunity to help a man he admired lead India down a new path. As Singh’s ‘eyes and ears’ and self-appointed ‘conscience-keeper’, Baru saw the transformation of Manmohan Singh from technocrat to politician. In his account, he tells his story of what it was like to ‘manage’ public opinion for Singh and how their relationship unraveled, while giving us a riveting look at Indian politics as it happened behind the scenes. Capturing the heady early days of UPA-1 to the high noon of the nuclear deal, The Accidental Prime Minister is one of the most important and intimate accounts of the prime minister and UPA-1.
Grand Pursuit: A History of Economic Genius
Sylvia Nasar - 2011
It’s the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate. Nasar’s account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new pursuit. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the American Irving Fisher to put those insights into action—with revolutionary consequences for the world. From the great John Maynard Keynes to Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes’s disciple Joan Robinson, the influential American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Freedman, and India’s Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, she shows how the insights of these activist thinkers transformed the world—from one city, London, to the developed nations in Europe and America, and now to the entire planet. In Nasar’s dramatic narrative of these discoverers we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals, and each other’s ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the dismal science into a triumph over mankind’s hitherto age-old destiny of misery and early death. This idea, unimaginable less than 200 years ago, is a story of trial and error, but ultimately transcendent, as it is rendered here in a stunning and moving narrative.
The Tyrants
Clive Foss - 2006
It presents a chronology of the moments in history when the principles of government and law were corrupted by the vanity of the ambitious and unscrupulous.
Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
Pamela Rotner Sakamoto - 2016
An epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption, Pamela Rotner Sakamoto’s history is a riveting chronicle of U.S.-Japan relations and of the Japanese experience in America.After their father’s death, the Fukuhara children—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved with their mother to Hiroshima, their parents’ ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry and his sister, Mary, returned there in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry and Mary were sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators, and Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, their brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army.As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy—and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face one another in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of the Fukuhara family.Alternating between American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight captures the uncertainty and intensity of those charged with the fighting, as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—never depicted before in English—and provides a fresh look at the events surrounding the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, here is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.
Capone: The Man and the Era
Laurence Bergreen - 1994
Delving beyond the Capone mythology. Bergreen finds a paradox: a coldblooded killer, thief, pimp, and racketeer who was also a devoted son and father; a self-styled Robin Hood who rose to the top of organized crime. Capone is a masterful portrait of an extraordinary time and of the one man who reigned supreme over it all, Al Capone.
TO THE BRINK AND BACK: India's 1991 Story
Jairam Ramesh - 2015
The book, The Brink and Back, is an account of the events leading to the path-breaking economic liberalisation unveiled by Rao’s government with Manmohan Singh as the Union finance minister
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.
Writing Home
Alan Bennett - 1994
This revised and updated edition includes new material from the author, including more recent diaries and his introduction to his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Madness of King George. A chronicle of one of the most important literary careers of the twentieth century, Writing Home is a classic history of a life in letters.
Bloomberg by Bloomberg
Michael R. Bloomberg - 1997
Lots of entrepreneurs who make money write books. Few of those books make you glad they did. This one does."
--The New York Times Book Review
"A classic tale of a nimble, customer-focused, entrepreneurial David outsmarting bureaucratic, ossified, corporate Goliaths."
--Business Week
"Entertaining, engaging, and informative, Bloomberg by Bloomberg is packed with great advice about how to start a lean, hungry company-and how to keep it that way." --Bryan Burrough, coauthor, Barbarians at the GateBrash, aggressive, and supremely self-confident, Michael Bloomberg, the visionary leader of the world's fastest-growing media empire, has been hailed as the new standard for what it takes to win in the Information Age. Dismissed from Salomon Brothers in 1981, Bloomberg immediately took his money and acerbic personality and started Bloomberg L.P. Bolstered by a $30 million investment from Merrill Lynch, the company and the man have been sprinting ahead of the pack ever since. Only twenty years after founding, he's at the top of his industry. And on June 5, 2001, he added mayoral candidate for New York City to his list of accomplishments and aspirations. If elected, powerhouse Michael Bloomberg will bring his own brand of leadership-and personal style-to the city that never sleeps.
Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America
Leslie Knope - 2011
The book chronicles the city's colorful citizens and hopping nightlife, and also explores some of the most hilarious events from its crazy history—like the time the whole town was on fire, its ongoing raccoon infestation, and the cult that took over in the 1970s. Packed with laugh-out-loud-funny photographs, illustrations, and commentary by the other inhabitants of Pawnee, it's a must-read that will make you enjoy every moment of your stay in the Greatest Town in America. Praise for Pawnee: "Carrying this book around is a good way of picking up girls with glasses." —Tom Haverford "I have read over four books, and this is by far the one that has me in it the most." —Andy Dwyer "Literally the greatest endeavor of human creativity in the history of mankind." —Chris Traeger
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Bryan Burrough - 1989
An enduring masterpiece of investigative journalism by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, it includes a new afterword by the authors that brings this remarkable story of greed and double-dealings up to date twenty years after the famed deal. The Los Angeles Times calls Barbarians at the Gate, “Superlative.” The Chicago Tribune raves, “It’s hard to imagine a better story...and it’s hard to imagine a better account.” And in an era of spectacular business crashes and federal bailouts, it still stands as a valuable cautionary tale that must be heeded.
JEH' A Life Of J.R.D.Tata
Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy - 2005
Also useful on the evolution of Indian business and the modern economy.
Churchill
Paul Johnson - 2009
Soldier, parliamentarian, Prime Minister, orator, painter, writer, husband, and leader all of these facets combine to make Churchill one of the most complex and fascinating personalities in history. In Churchill, Johnson applies a wide lens and an unconventional approach to illuminate the various phases of Churchill s career. From his adventures as a young cavalry officer in the service of the Empire to his role as an elder statesman prophesying the advent of the Cold War, Johnson shows how Churchill s immense adaptability combined with his natural pugnacity to make him a formidable leader for the better part of a century. Johnson s narration of Churchill s many triumphs and setbacks, rich with anecdote and quotation, illustrates the man s humor, resilience, courage, and eccentricity as no other biography before. Winston Churchill s hold on contemporary readers has never slackened, and Paul Johnson s lively, concise biography will appeal to historians and general nonfiction readers alike."