One woman’s crisis is another woman’s publishing opportunity — Time Magazine predicts the next wave of finance books is about to come in.

If you are choosing from those already published:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
  ‘Knowing Buffett, I’m sure he sees this calamity as being caused by “flapdoodle, folly and flimflam” and the knaves who wanted to pile up their fortunes in record time. They were not patient value investors, and they have now put the nation at a precipice, from which no single investor can stop everyone and all the banks from diving.’ — CBC




• The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
  ‘Perhaps the book was bound to be flawed, given the pace with which today’s crisis has torn through the markets. As the debacle has unfolded, from a housing crisis, to a credit bust, a bank run and what now looks ominously like a global recession, each episode has posed different questions. Finishing his manuscript in May this year, Mr Ferguson must have been dizzy with the unravelling of certainties. And yet, he is at his strongest in his reading of the news. His story of what is happening today shows prescience, even if it is necessarily incomplete.’ — The Economist




• Payback: Debt as Metaphor and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
  ‘…if you’re expecting tips from Suze Orman, kindly head for another shelf. “Payback” is a hop-and-skip journey through Atwood’s teeming brain, and anyone familiar with the Canadian writer knows this is a lively place to be. Over the course of a couple hundred pages, we jostle against sin eaters and the Code of Hammurabi and Genghis Khan and goddesses of justice and the Antinomian heresy and the spiritual twinship of debtors and lenders.’ — salon.com

• The World is Curved by David Smick
  ‘He provides a feel for how quickly vast pools of capital move in this globalized high-tech world of ours, whether from hedge funds or yield-starved housewives in Japan.  And if you wonder at your own incapacity to understand it all, you’ll be reassured that you’re not alone. In the chapter “A Dangerous Ocean of Money” Smeck admits how he discovered “how confusing financial globalization was making the world, even for the most financially astute.’ — National Post