Ford Library

Lewis, Michael. The big short : inside the doomsday machine. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell calls Michael Lewis the finest storyteller of our generation. Moneyball and Liar’s Poker made him one of the best business journalists today. Among his recent successes is The Blind Side.

The Big Short is called the definitive book on the current recession. Having worked at Saloman Brothers in the 1980s, he provides an insider’s view of a perfect storm brewing. Lewis’ story revolves around several obscure Wall Street players who understood the housing market was built on a house of cards.

Although most people are left with the impact of the recession; Steve Eisman, an analyst at Oppenheimer and Co.; Greg Lippman a bond trader for Deutsche Bank; and Michael Burry, who left Stanford Medical School to manage his own hedge fund, acted upon an opportunity to make tremendous profits. (more…)

We have a long list of new titles this month:

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mad Men. Season 3
The Men who Stare at Goats
Princess and the Frog
Red Cliff. Part I and Part II
Sherlock Holmes
An Education
Fighter
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
What Doesn’t Kill You

Here’s the April installment of Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner’s selections of five recent business books recommended to Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. W. W. Norton, 2010.

  Entertaining portrayal of market skeptics who profited from the financial meltdown.

• Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right by Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books, 2009.

  Simple checklists can improve the practice of medicine and other complex situations.

• Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation by Grant McCracken. Basic Books, 2009.

  Reading cultural trends is profitable for business, and the skill can be taught.

• On the Brink: Inside the race to stop the collapse of the global financial system by Henry M. Paulson, Jr. Business Plus, 2010.

  Day-by-day account of how Paulson etc worked to save the financial system during the meltdown.

• Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

  Change is complicated by the disjunction between our rational and emotional minds.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Ford Library tips its top hat to Duke graduate student, and one of our extraordinary circulation clerks, Julia Gaffield!

While doing research at the British National Archives earlier this year for her doctoral dissertation on 19th century Haiti, Julia discovered the only known printed copy of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence.

We like to think that her duties searching out lost books here at Ford helped hone her skills at scholarly investigation; but Julia probably came to us already adept.

You can read more about Julia’s discovery, and its truly significant impacts on Haiti and its neighbors in these articles at The Duke Chronicle, and Durham Herald-Sun.

UPDATE: You can also watch a video interview with Julia on her “moment of discovery” on the Duke News & Communications site.

Well done, Julia!