The Best Books of 2012, Amazon Edition
November 28, 2012
Amazon's editors have come up with another fine list of books this year. Their choices in the Business and Investing category are: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, Random House Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Random House The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick Lencioni, Jossey-Bass Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll, The Penguin Press Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld, John Wiley & Sons How Much is Enough? : Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere by Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble and Indra K.
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg, Random House
- Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Random House
- The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business by Patrick Lencioni, Jossey-Bass
- Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll, The Penguin Press
- Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld, John Wiley & Sons
- How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
- Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere by Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble and Indra K. Nooyi, Harvard Business Review Press
- The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross, Portfolio
- The Strategy Book (Financial Times Series) by Max McKeown
- The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman
But, as always, the books that would interest a business book reader aren't confined to the Business and Investing list. Private Empire is also listed in the History category, as is one of Jack's favorite books of the year, Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder, published by HarperBusiness. In the general Nonfiction category, The Signal and the Noise and The Power of Habit both made the list along with Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain (published by Crown).
The Signal and the Noise also made the Politics and Social Science list—along with Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and also published by Crown— and the Science list (it's been a very good year for Nate Silver). One final Science title that may interest some business readers is Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are by Sebastian Seung, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
