REVIEW --- Books -- Holiday Gift Guide: What to Give: Business
Reading up on the financial crisis and its aftermath is unavoidable homework for anyone in business. Fortunately, Princeton economist Alan Blinder has composed the perfect crib sheet (starting with three pages of acronyms and abbreviations) in "After the Music Stopped" (Penguin Press, 476 pages, $29.95). Here is everything you need to know to silence any dinner-party rantings on topics ranging from Lehman's collapse to quantitative easing to Simpson-Bowles, with short primers on technicalities such as the yield curve, nominal versus real interest rates, and moral hazard. Mr. Blinder writes with an Olympian cool, waspish, never rabid. Barack Obama is "the eloquent young president," Larry Summers, his former chief economic adviser, "acerbic, domineering and argumentative." Grimly, Mr. Blinder concludes, "the forgetting has already begun. Unrepentant financiers, eager to return to the status quo ante, are whining about excessive regulation.</br></br>Recalcitrant politicians are bemoaning big government and itching to return to laissez-faire. The public has turned its attention elsewhere."</br></br>Before reading Neil Barofsky's "Bailout" (Free Press, 270 pages, $26), it never occurred to me that Tim Geithner might be a screamer. He always seemed so mild-mannered. But according to Mr. Barofsky, the prosecutor hired as special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the former Treasury secretary was a borderline head case. The two men fought constantly over the government's bailout of Wall Street. In one episode, Mr. Barofsky writes, "Geithner repeatedly reached a pitch of anger, regaling me with detailed, expletive-filled explanations that established my apparent idiocy. He would then calm himself down and give me a forced, almost demonic smile." As a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Mr. Barofsky had once pursued Colombian drug cartels. His time in Washington made the pursuit of drug barons seem easy. As TARP opened the spigots for Wall Street, Mr. Barofsky accused the Obama administration of siding with the banks and hindering his efforts to make it a more transparent program. The author isn't always a sympathetic character, often coming across as betrayed and resentful. But his book is a raw, sincere account of the priorities and power-plays of modern Washington, which leaves you queasy about what financial disasters lie in store.</br></br>I thought I knew too much about Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" (Knopf, 228 pages, $24.95) to want to read it. I had seen the gruesome Time magazine cover of Ms. Sandberg with the headline, "Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful." I had read the endless newspaper coverage, the rehashing of the old "having it all" debates. But enough smart friends, both men and women, urged me to pick it up. The worst thing about it is what it assumes about men -- that we're all just full of it, barreling around, oblivious to luck and the biases that favor us, regarding personal and professional fulfillment as our right. Maybe it seems like this if the men you work for are Larry Summers, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg. These aren't your average beleaguered 21st-century males. But the best thing about the book is its wit. Ms. Sandberg keeps it punchy, provocative and involving. Agree with it or not, "Lean In" is irresistibly modern and thoughtful. Ignore it and you'll be in an ever-shrinking minority.</br></br>If you like your Wall Street scandals noisy and splashy, then Anita Raghavan's "The Billionaire's Apprentice" (Business Plus, 493 pages, $29) isn't for you. Ms. Raghavan's tale is quiet, creepy and stuffed with riveting detail. The apprentice in the title is Rajat Gupta, an Indian immigrant who rose to be the managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He comes over as pompous and persnickety, obsessed with things like leadership conferences and the size of his office. He retired with a gold-plated set of corporate directorships. But his post-McKinsey fortune of tens of millions wasn't enough. He yearned to compete with the hedge-fund and private-equity billionaires who surrounded him in New York. The piratical Raj Rajaratnam, the now-jailed founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, promised Gupta such riches; the price was inside information. As the judge in his insider-trading case put it, Gupta may have been a good man, but "the history of this country and the history of this world, I'm afraid, is full of examples of good men who do bad things." Business is also full of clever consultants who can't bear that their clients are so much richer than they are. Gupta remains free while he appeals his conviction and sentence of two years in prison and a $5 million fine. One certainly feels bad for his wife and four daughters, but the real and deserving victim seems to have been his monstrous ego. Ms. Raghavan sets her tale within the broader context of the rise of Indian-Americans in business, but it's her characters that hold the attention.