Finalists for Business Book of the Year named

Andrew Hill of the Financial Times writes about the finalists for the Business Book of the Year competition, which include tomes written by two prominent business journalists.

Hill writes, “Entries for the prize, sponsored by Goldman Sachs, included the Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, which ought to mark some sort of end-point.

“But debate still rages among business authors about the causes and consequences of the last crisis even as the new turmoil is upsetting world markets.

“So the book award longlist includes Satyajit Das’s Extreme Money, his forthcoming attack on ‘the masters of the universe and the cult of risk’, Margaret Heffernan’s Wilful Blindness, which explains why we ignore obvious error and abuse, and two investigations of signature scandals of the crisis: AIG (Fatal Risk by Roddy Boyd) and the Madoff pyramid scheme (The Wizard of Lies by Diana Henriques).

“Richard Rumelt examines the broader failure of companies to set the right path in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, while Thomas Friedman, who won the inaugural FT/Goldman award in 2005 with The World is Flat, pairs up with academic Michael Mandelbaum for That Used to Be Us (out next month), an attempt to work out why America seems unable to rise to the global economic and political challenge. Barry Eichengreen’s Exorbitant Privilege offers a partial antidote to such self-criticism, with its balanced examination of the fate of the US dollar.”

Read more here.