A Treasury of Boxing Reportage

A FEW years back I asked Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s trainer, for some advice on breaking into the scribbling side of boxing. As though he were offering a fighter instruction, the legendary cornerman placed his hands on my shoulders and began his counsel with “Son, boxing writers are a dying breed.”

In the early to mid-20th century, when boxing was second only to baseball in popularity, magazines and newspapers hired writers for the primary purpose of covering the fights. No more. Though well known as the author of “What Makes Sammy Run?” and the screenwriter for “On the Waterfront,” Budd Schulberg must certainly be reckoned a card-carrying member of that old guild of boxing scribes.

The son of a Hollywood mogul with a passion for pugilism, Schulberg has been ringside for fights that stretch the timeline from the Benny Leonard era to the Lennox Lewis years. This collection of previously published reports and commentaries for magazines like Sports Illustrated (where he was the first boxing editor), Collier’s and Esquire brims with such fascinating stories as the time Rocky Marciano confided to Schulberg alone that he was going to retire after his fight with Archie Moore. Or again, Schulberg recalls witnessing a side of Ali that very few have ever glimpsed. He was riding shotgun with the champ on the way to Madison Square Garden for the first encounter with Joe Frazier. An uncharacteristically diffident Ali was peppering Dundee with rhetorical questions intended to give a bounce to his confidence. Then Ali turned silent and put his head back. When they arrived at the Garden, “Ali went through a night-and-day personality change. ‘I am the greatest!’ he shouted. ‘The Greatest!’ Whatever back-seat doubts he had had in the limo were gone now as he went on shouting, strutting in for his ‘High Noon’ shootout with his most dangerous opponent.”

In the 1950s, Schulberg entered into the world that he spent most of his life describing. He turned the barn of his New Hope, Pa., farm into a boxing stable. Archie McBride, a potential Golden Gloves candidate from nearby Trenton, came through the door, and the next thing you knew, the rookie boxing manager had a heavyweight contender on his hands. Listening to Schulberg juggle his mother-hen-like worries about McBride with his efforts to bring “On the Waterfront” to the screen will entertain readers, as will the essay that concludes the collection — a monograph-length memoir of Mike Jacobs, the promoter who began by buying tickets for a scalper at Madison Square Garden and ended up controlling that boxing mecca. Schulberg leaves no doubt that Jacobs could have given Don King lessons in chicanery.

The British writer Hugh McIlvanney, who contributes an introduction to this book, once aptly described boxing as “the hardest game.” With the terrible risks and scant prospects for payoffs, professional pugilists live on the edge. The sport requires enormous courage, and Schulberg’s offerings resonate with a profound respect and affection for the bruising artists that is rare among reporters who have never bent through the ropes to a chorus of howls from a bloodthirsty throng.

The prose of boxing writers who worked before the dominance of television was punchier than the more subdued and wry tones of today’s sports sophisticates. Schulberg’s brash style and sometimes comedic choice of adjectives are refreshingly revenant . A few of the columns that make up the middle rounds of this work will seem outdated to ardent boxing fans. Nevertheless, the essays that take a toehold in the ’40s and ’50s will prove essential reading for all serious students of the sweet science.

Gordon Marino, a professor in the College of Health and Human Performance at the University of Florida, is at work on a boxing book.

'Mothers and Sons: Stories'

Colm Toibin’s first book of stories begins with a man on an upper balcony, looking out on a city that is a “great emptiness.” The image is a haunting one, if only because Toibin’s last, much acclaimed novel, “The Master,” was preoccupied with a man watching the world from an upstairs window, a secret sharer, relishing the power of being an observer while terrified, deep down, of being observed himself. That man was Henry James. In “The Use of Reason,” the opening story in Toibin’s beautiful and echoing collection, the man in question is a high-end thief in contemporary Ireland who, when not doing violence to others with calm ferocity, is picking off a Gainsborough and Rembrandt’s “Portrait of an Old Woman,” only to bury his treasure in the hills.

The thief is, of course, a master of his craft. He has a shrewd gift for assessing people and a solitary, meditative nature; he doesn’t mind being in jail because he likes being alone with his routine, his secrets, his talent for giving nothing away and for remaking everything within. He is also a supple reader of the world; emerging from incarceration, he had the feeling “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that a person was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else.”

He would find nothing to contradict that impression in the half-lit, stealthy, lamenting stories that follow. Toibin establishes his command over his materials early on, and the clenched, sepulchral tone never lets up. As “The Use of Reason” moves toward its conclusion, we meet the criminal’s mother and suddenly see another reason why he might feel guilty and alone. More than that, we see from whom he may have inherited his gifts for secrecy and treachery. The atmosphere of furtiveness and unease that the thief has set seeps like a stain across the world.

You pick up a book called “Mothers and Sons” and expect something reassuring and warm, domestic; but it is part of Toibin’s pitiless and often brilliant vision to show that mothers and sons are suspicious even of one another, less pietàs than emblems of missed connections. All nine stories include a mother and son in some figuration, but seldom are they seen together; their encounters are usually glancing, and have to do with embarrassment, and things not said. In some fundamental way, these are stories of people who are not there. “It was hard anyway since Jordi was absent from the other bed; it was the no sound coming from there kept him awake, the no snoring or rhythm of breathing, the no turning over which seemed to disturb him more than the wind, which appeared to have changed direction, blowing fiercely from the north in the few hours before the dawn, rattling the window.”

One story — “A Summer Job” — consists of almost nothing but a mother watching her son and trying to unlock the secret of his self-containment: is it a sign of strength, or only of the crippling weakness he fears and tries to keep at bay? Is he too full of feeling or, more terrifyingly, too empty of it? What is he pushing down with his sullen efficiency? Another, equally transfixing, and no more than a vignette, really, gives us a woman driving her depressed son back from a hospital to their home where his father — her husband — is half-paralyzed by a stroke. Throughout the long drive in the dark — many of these stories have the spooked air of a lonely Springsteen song — the boy refuses to sit in the front seat beside his mother. This is not, in other words, a collection to share with your loved ones on the second Sunday in May.

It is, however, a book to be offered to anyone who savors some of the most accomplished and nuanced soundings contemporary fiction has to offer; the opening portrait of the robber and his mother sets the tone for what is really a stunning series of variations on a theme. Toibin is obsessed with people in hiding, often from themselves, and from their acts and feelings, and what his book conveys is how much all of us are fugitives, terrified of being found out, even in the day-to-day context of an ordinary life. A dutiful woman loses her husband in a car crash and has to hide from her children and neighbors how desperate her finances have become; a widow, almost 80, hears that her son has been accused of terrible crimes, and goes on playing bridge and entertaining her grandsons as if to keep the truth remote. Pride keeps faces and lives intact in this writer’s world, but just underneath the surface everything is collapsing.

Toibin’s real interest is in the constant, silent dialogue of watcher and watched; the light is fading in most of these stories, and someone is looking out a window, to see if he’s being seen. “Watchful” is the word for both the author and his people, who are always keenly observant and yet on guard, as if about to be exposed at any moment. There are headlines hovering around the pieces — Thief Makes Off With £5 Million Rembrandt, Priest Is Charged With Abuse of Boys, Woman Who Walked Out on Husband and Son Is Presumed Dead Under Snowfall. Yet none of these dramas are shown; Toibin’s interest is in consciousness, how drama plays out inside the mind of an observer. Each narrative spins out like the compulsive story of someone inside a confessional, with no one to talk to but himself.

Really, then, these are less stories than studies of inwardness, a series of interiors. (As one character walks around a house, “he was acutely alert to the shadowy places, becoming darker in the twilight, the places where you could hide and then appear.”) One begins with a woman hiding out, in effect, inside the “dark and concentrated” space of her darkroom, and we later read that she “kept a large camera close to her in case she would need to cover her face.” But all the protagonists here seem most comfortable in small shut-in spaces and betray no eagerness for bright lights or company, or for the world outside (except as it’s seen through a window). It’s easy to imagine Toibin himself as a photographer, steadily, patiently developing his portraits of characters and their predicaments. Were dead bodies and funerals not such a recurrent figure in the work, the collection could be called “Nine Lives.”

Yet the title he has chosen is a perfect one, not least because — refreshingly — he is clearly as much at home with his mothers as his sons; story after story centers on a woman, old, middle-aged or young, whom the male author inhabits as fully as himself. The way he lets his characters disclose themselves is always calm and level. Yet just beneath the clear and measured prose, there is always a tremor of something more bestial and crude: two Catholic Brothers are suddenly seen pleasuring themselves in a back room; a capable young widow starts to trace obscene words on her skirt while being lectured to by a bank manager; a recently bereaved young man suddenly gives in to his covert desire for another man. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that what these characters seem to crave is privacy, the chance not to be known.

This longing to be anonymous is at odds, however, with a very close-knit Irish world where everyone is watching everyone else, and everything is everybody’s business. The stories here are set in modern Ireland, although the final one in fact takes place in a Spanish village so cold and dark and full of whispers that it might as well be Toibin’s Ireland: “There were still 10 or 12 houses inhabited in the village; nothing happened that was not noticed, the old people sat by windows watching.” Toibin is not a typical Irish writer if you associate such with musical rhapsodies, loquaciousness or blarney; but he has a deep and elegiac sense of his homeland that comes out in his cadences and dialogue.

The backdrop of these pieces is, in fact, a knelling sense of an old world coming to an end, the light beginning to darken. It is not just family that is a dying species here, but community. How thoroughly he has taken in his setting is evident just in the listing, for example, of the regular customers that a supermarket owner has to visit while hand-delivering groceries: “Paddy Duggan, who lived on his own in a tithe cottage which had not been cleaned since his mother died; Annie Parle and her soft sister from near the Bloody Bridge with five gates to open and close before you reached their old farmhouse; the twins Patsy and Mogue Byrne, who ate potatoes and butter for their dinner every day with boiled rice and stewed prunes for their sweet. Neither of them ... ever took off his cap.”

If you free yourself from the spell of the sentences, you may ask whether it is really so easy to filch an old master, or whether having a child, as one mother finds, “did not really make the great change in their lives that she expected.” You may wonder if a mother could ever keep her early recording career from her growing son, or how many thieves outside the movies really are so ruminative and quietly withdrawn. The unrelenting darkness and suppression in this book may be too much for some — even a road here is a “hidden, almost guilty thing” and a dawn “looked more like fading light than the break of day.” When one character flies to California, what she finds is “an enclosed city of the dead, the houses like small tombs.”

Yet the very continuity of tone and theme — even of lighting — that Toibin sustains across many worlds is part of what makes this book less a collection of pieces than an organic whole. We meet a woman with a drinking problem and then, when we meet another with the same problem, eight stories later, each makes the other richer. The sudden explosion of gay desire that comes out in one piece haunts the simmering of the same impulse two stories later. When Toibin introduces us to a “great emptiness” in the first, six-word sentence of the book, the word “emptiness” tolls with mounting force as it recurs throughout the story. And then we feel something like epiphany when it comes back with new resonance in the second half of the final piece.

The short story is a craftsman’s form, and Toibin’s craft is immaculate. Not many writers in Britain and Ireland are working at this level of intensity and seriousness, with not a slack sentence in 270 pages and nothing shoddy or easily sardonic throughout. The short story also seems an ideal form for a writer much more interested in emotion, and the slow exposing of a character, than in action or community. “The Master” presented us with one exquisite scene after another, taking us deep into the tremblings of a man so anxious to be in control of everything that he flinched from life itself. But as it progressed, this reader at least felt that its maker did not know how to conclude it — or did not want to come to any resolution — and the sense of things not known began to seem a liability.

At the same time as “The Master” came out, moreover, Alan Hollinghurst brought out his elegantly unbuttoned “Line of Beauty,” which appeared to go Toibin one better by at once evoking the ghost of Henry James and pitching it into a fully fleshed modern London that seemed to mock all the delicacy and understatement James stood for. In “Mothers and Sons,” however, Toibin shows how he can get the figure at the window, and the modern city down below, the fastidious novelist and the heroin dealer, into the same frame. Most books so full of artful sentences run the danger of being stage-managed perfections. Toibin, however, never stints on feeling. Behind his impeccable sentences — and silences — something is always raging to get out.

NATURAL CAUSES

Death, Lies, and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry

The Good An angry expose of the $21 billion supplements industry.The Bad The book's irate tone, however justified, grows tiresome.The Bottom Line A well-written and well-reported account.

It's easy to hate the pharmaceutical industry. Prescription drugs are expensive, sometimes dangerous, and often overhyped. So why not turn to so-called natural remedies, the kinds of herbs and minerals that have been used for thousands of years by indigenous peoples?

That's what Sue Gilliatt, a 49-year-old nurse in Indianapolis, figured when she decided to treat a benign tumor on her nose with a product made by a Bahamas company, Alpha Omega Labs. On its Web site, Alpha Omega blasts the "Cancer Industry" for preventing "safe, inexpensive, and often more effective treatments from reaching the mainstream." That sentiment resonates with the demographic most likely to buy alternative medicine: college-educated people between the ages of 36 and 49 who have annual incomes over $50,000.

So Gilliatt called Alpha Omega and bought a salve called Cansema, priced at $49.95 a jar. She added in a paste based on the herb bloodroot. After two weeks of a burning sensation and oozing pus—all signs, according to Alpha Omega, that the ointment was working—she removed the bandage, looked in the mirror, and discovered that her nose was, well, gone. "I was had by con men," she now admits.

Gilliatt's horrifying story opens Natural Causes: Death, Lies, and Politics in America's Vitamin and Herbal Supplement Industry, an angry and detailed exposé of the largely unregulated field. Medical writer Dan Hurley has gathered considerable data on the steady flow of deaths, disfigurements, and injuries linked to this $21 billion-a-year business. More than 60% of Americans use herbal and dietary supplements, yet the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has virtually no authority over these so-called safe and natural wares.

The book is a sometimes strident wake-up call. After all, how many people do you know who take vitamin C and echinacea to prevent colds, melatonin for insomnia, or St. John's wort for depression? Reputable study after study has failed to show that these are effective.

Questionable supplements have a long history in America. In 1630, a Massachusetts merchant was fined for selling a would-be scurvy cure that was merely water. And in the late 1800s there really were snake-oil salesmen, led by Clark Stanley, the self-described "Rattlesnake King." Stanley made a fortune selling his pain liniment, reputedly made from oil extracted from snakes, until 1915, when the U.S. government shut him down for making false claims (and no, there was no snake oil in the product).

Stanley would have an easier time of it today. In 1976, Congress barred the FDA from regulating the contents of vitamin and mineral supplements, saying they were natural products and should be treated like food, not drugs. The FDA was further defanged by the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act (DSHEA) of 1991. The FDA had been trying to gain more control over supplements in the wake of the L-tryptophan scandal of the late 1980s, when hundreds suffered life-threatening illnesses after taking the supplement for insomnia. But the herbal industry fought back, spending millions on lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Then-FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler testified that supplements should be treated much the same as drugs. But his rational arguments carried little weight with senators. The supplements industry ended up with the right to make all kinds of claims about their products without proof, and sales took off. The only supplements with unqualified support are calcium and vitamin D for women at risk of osteoporosis, folate for pregnant women, and fish oil, containing omega-3 fatty acids, for lowering cholesterol and blood pressure. Multivitamins, taken by more than half of all adult Americans, have been largely dismissed by the National Institutes of Health.

Hurley offers a thorough, well-written account of the fallout from the DSHEA. He describes case after case, from ephedra, the weight-loss product that contributed to the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, to teenagers dying from supplements meant to get them high "naturally." But his irate tone, however justified, gets wearing. And while properly attacking hucksters' claims, he lets another key player pretty much off the hook.

That would be us, the customers. Only at the very end of his book does Hurley point out that "in an age of post-modern cynicism toward experts, doctors, politicians, and reporters of every stripe, we have made a special exception for the claims of supplement manufacturers—precisely because they prey upon our skepticism toward all other sources." In other words, we're still buying that snake oil.

THE NEW CAPITALISTS

How Citizen Investors Are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda

The Good A thorough examination of shareholders' rising clout within corporations. The Bad The authors' enthusiasm for change causes them to understate obstacles. The Bottom Line A rich if flawed account of our imperfect shareholder democracy.

It wasn't too long ago that a handful of men controlled the purse strings of U.S. capitalism. Wealthier than entire nations, crusty oligarchs like John Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller exerted all-but-complete influence over the financial landscape, unabashedly looking out for Number One.

A century later, in the age of the 401(k), that clout has been dispersed into the accounts of hundreds of millions of everyday shareholders. This is a shift that Stephen Davis, Jon Lukomnik, and David Pitt-Watson chronicle and applaud in The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors Are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda. "The power to sway whole nations' economic fortunes," write the authors, "is now held by those institutional investors representing policemen, auto workers, and computer programmers saving for retirement. The premise of this book is that this change has been revolutionary."

True. The corporate boardroom is, more than ever, in the employ of a company's majority owners: financial institutions such as Vanguard and American Funds (AMUSX ) that invest trillions on behalf of the little guy. The book's authors—corporate-governance gurus with significant asset-management experience—detail what they observe as a contagious spirit of accountability. Readers might be inspired to grab the mike at an annual meeting and scream: "I am shareholder. Hear me roar!" The book is thorough and loyal to doing the right thing—for which it should be commended. But for all their thoughtfulness and careful research, the authors get too caught up in cheerleading for an ideal "civil economy." As a result, they understate frustrating realities.

The writers demonstrate how shareholder accountability can matter. Citing a target list of governance laggards, they show how activists helped create returns of 11.6% above the market—$40 billion in found money' [that] would have stayed hidden had owners remained quiescent." When the $172 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) stated that the Philippines was neither transparent nor accountable enough for its pension-investing standards, the Manila Stock Index plunged 3.3% in a single day. Many more examples and attendant lessons for "new capitalist" shareholders and managers follow.

Problem is, the authors believe it's almost a fait accompli that investors are ready to build a shining city from today's Potemkin shareholder democracy. In fact, companies routinely undermine shareholder power by staggering board elections. They shower executives with repriced or backdated options and supersize pay even as general shareholders suffer poor returns. And executives still hide behind dual share classes. The authors say this is all changing: "The abrogation of accountability between directors and owners has been a cancer at the center of corporate legitimacy. Fortunately, it is a cancer that is beginning to yield to treatment."

That is an overly hopeful prognosis. Yes, companies are more attuned to the priorities of their shareholders. But the authors fail to underscore a parallel shift: A soaring number of companies are simply opting out—by going private and largely removing themselves from the scrutiny of analysts, governance referees, and the financial press. Other companies are listing their shares overseas, where regulations aren't as onerous. Get a few drinks into your average 2006 CEO, and he will tell you that running a U.S.-listed public company is increasingly not worth the hassle.

The New Capitalists would have benefited from more appreciation of the fact that chief executives and boards are not gluttons for punishment. They don't enjoy having every footnote of their compensation packages scrutinized. Ditto fund managers, most of whom earn a good living by cranking out market-average returns. (The writers concede the fund industry's conflicts and short-term mindset.) Few in either camp are driven by civic obligation. They want prestige, money, and influence—and to be left alone. And the individual investor is not looking for more homework (as the authors also admit).

Yet the writers nevertheless prescribe more heavy lifting: They urge companies to have separate chairmen and CEOs and to flesh out financials. They implore fund managers to be more active, analysts to be unconflicted, and investors to scrutinize fees. Each of us, it seems, should drink more milk and do extra push-ups.

The New Capitalists is a fine, richly reported account of how things do and should work in a very imperfect shareholder democracy. But the authors' idealism gets in the way. "Our money, our companies, our choice" is the book's closing line. Chase it down with a spoonful of salt.

Best Business Books of 2006

Power players, Wall Street workings, and the Internet's impact

Wal-Mart would be nowhere without the metal box. When experts look for the factors behind the recent vast increase in world trade, they tend to point to such things as new communications technology and the advance of Third World capitalism. But, says author Marc Levinson, there's another, often-overlooked cause: the shipping container. In the early 1960s, before the now-ubiquitous can was much employed, moving goods from one country to another was often prohibitively expensive. Today freight costs are all but negligible. In The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University), Levinson delivers an engrossing account of how this came to be. Of particular note is his chronicle of Malcom P. McLean, a North Carolina truck driver who built a freight empire and then, 50 years ago, gambled everything to create the first company with containerized ships.You say you would rather think out of the box? Well, Levinson's work is only one of the top 10 business books of the year as selected by BusinessWeek reviewers.

2006 produced a bumper crop of memoirs and biographies. A pioneer of capitalist creativity is described in Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams by Michael D'Antonio (Simon & Schuster). This is a richly detailed look at the chocolate man and an absorbing history of his company. By the late 1890s, Hershey had figured out that the future lay not in caramels, which he first made, but in chocolate, which had already claimed a mass market in Europe. D'Antonio describes how Hershey perfected a distinctive version of the stuff and had sales approaching $8 million by 1913. The author also devotes considerable ink to the Pennsylvania town Hershey designed according to his utopian principles. By the early 1900s, the manicured burg featured electrified, centrally heated homes owned by well-paid company workers, a state-of-the-art chocolate factory, a medical clinic, and, as its centerpiece, a model school for orphan boys supported by a foundation that held the majority of company stock.

A much better known capitalist and philanthropist is the subject of David Nasaw's absorbing Andrew Carnegie (Penguin Press). By the time of his death, in 1919, Carnegie had bequeathed a total of $350 million, or at least $8 billion in today's dollars. "My business is to do as much good in the world as I can," he announced. But as Nasaw shows, Carnegie's roles as philanthropist and rapacious businessman were closely linked. He pushed his partners and his employees relentlessly, so that he could give away even more money. He did his best to monopolize steel production, fix prices, and restrict foreign steel with tariffs. He extolled leisure for all, yet he fought bitterly against steelworkers' attempts to cut their 12-hour days to 8 hours. The book is a meticulous account of a paradoxical American original.

You can read about a mogul who turned his fortune to very different ends in The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi by veteran journalist Alexander Stille (Penguin Press). As Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006, Berlusconi owned or controlled all six of Italy's national television networks, or 90% of the country's airwaves. But here, Berlusconi comes across not as a talented CEO but as an unscrupulous salesman who ruthlessly deploys cronyism for maximum financial gain, exploits media power to attack rivals, and changes laws to derail criminal lawsuits against himself. At the same time, readers come to understand Berlusconi's showman-like appeal. Said reviewer Gail Edmondson: "The Sack of Rome is a frightening case study and one that has plenty of bearing on our own media-driven politics."

One other biography focuses on a living legend: Andrew S. Grove, the former Intel CEO. In Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American (Portfolio), Harvard Business School historian Richard S. Tedlow takes a comprehensive look at the tech titan's life and work, providing greater entrée than ever before into Grove's mind. Tedlow tracks the passage of young András István Gróf from communist Hungary to the U.S., his schooling, and his early years at Intel Corp., (INTC ) where he became operations director under co-founders Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore. Later chapters describe the company's growth pains, various crises, and struggles to adapt to rapid technological change. The author draws on Grove's personal journals to show the evolution of his thinking—and to chronicle his doubt and satisfaction. One shortcoming: Grove's personal life remains relatively unexplored.

Why are some companies able to crank out one breakthrough after another, while others search in vain for a single great idea? To Curtis R. Carlson of research and development contract firm SRI International, true innovation is less the result of individual eureka moments than of taking a methodical, disciplined approach. In Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want (Crown Business), Carlson and co-author William W. Wilmot say: "The best source of information...is your prospective customers and partners." Other recommendations include building innovation teams, brainstorming frequently with participants from different departments, empowering "champions" to keep initiatives on track, and aligning the entire enterprise around creating value for customers. Carlson knows whereof he speaks. His company, renowned since the 1970s, pioneered everything from the computer mouse to robotic surgery.

The most disruptive innovation faced by a majority of companies continues to be the Internet. And in the analysis of Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, the far-reaching effects are still being absorbed. In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion), Anderson asserts that the mass market is giving way to "a mass of niches." As the Net relentlessly cuts the cost of finding and distributing products, it's accelerating the arrival of entirely new markets for obscure books, movies, games, foodstuffs, and more. Now, niche products can be stocked efficiently in warehouses, ordered by anyone with a computer and a credit card, and shipped cheaply around in the world. Does that spell the end of the Hollywood blockbuster? Some of Anderson's claims are exaggerated, but The Long Tail is one of this season's most thought-provoking books.

Also stimulating is The Poker Face of Wall Street (Wiley), which reviewer Peter Coy called "a sprawling, idiosyncratic, and sometimes poker-obsessed book filled with nuggets about American history and finance." Author Aaron Brown, a respected Morgan Stanley (MS ) risk manager with degrees from Harvard University and the University of Chicago, offers a novel thesis: Gambling has been a basic engine of U.S. capitalism. For example, he says, betting became a key means of capital formation on the Western frontier, providing winners with stakes big enough to fund major projects. The same wagering instinct, says Brown, lay behind the creation of the agricultural futures exchanges. The book's arguments, such as a perceived mathematical link between bookmaking on the World Series and the pricing of stock options, aren't always easy to follow. But it's the quirkiness that makes this work special.

Another surprising volume is Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction & Economics (Pantheon) by economist Paul Ormerod. Failure, says the author, is endemic: The world is simply too complex for anyone to make predictions about anything but the near future. What you can't predict, you can't avoid. As a consequence, mass extinction—whether of species or businesses—is more common than we might imagine. What can be done? Ormerod provides a few suggestions. For government, he counsels restraint, since most interventions in market workings will just make matters worse. For business, he offers two bits of advice. Keep trying to predict the future, because "even a tiny bit of genuine knowledge goes a very long way." And keep experimenting, because eventually something will pan out.

Finally, a fun read that draws insights from a wide range of scholarly disciplines is Michael J. Mauboussin's More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Columbia University). The intellectually omnivorous author is chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. In 30 brief chapters, he tackles investment philosophy, the psychology of investing, competitive strategy, and complexity theory. Abstract concepts, from the difference between risk and uncertainty to the distinction between individual and collective decisions, are described with the help of a diverse set of characters, from gambling legend Puggy Pearson to golfer Tiger Woods. "You will be a better investor, executive, parent, friend—person—if you approach problems from a multidisciplinary perspective," he writes. With prospects like that, you'll be more than ready to face the New Year.