Book reviews for 2018

Looking for a gift this festive season that will help give a special person extra insight into money and investing? Why not try a good ‘old-fashioned’ book? Here’s a summary of the four finance or investment-related books Prudential Investment Managers reviewed in 2018.

How We Got to Now
By Steven Johnson

How We Got to Now is a fast-paced, wide-ranging exploration of the history of six pivotal technologies that have shaped the modern age. In broad strokes, Steven Johnson picks out the causal chains of incremental invention and innovation that brought us glass (exemplified by lenses), cold (air conditioning), sound (recordings), clean (treated tap water), time (a wristwatch), and light (flash photography)...
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The Man Who Knew
By Sebastian Mallaby

Winner of the 2016 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, this biography of Allan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, gives readers an exceptionally well-researched picture of the “maestro” of US monetary policy and the fascinating politics and dilemmas he faced in becoming one of the world’s most important policymakers of his time...
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Weapons of Math Destruction
By Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil is a former Wall Street quant turned data scientist and activist in the Occupy movement. In Weapons of Math Destruction, she examines widely-used mathematical models that crunch big data. Her book is topical in light of the recently exposed weaponisation of Facebook’s algorithms and data by bad actors to influence the results of elections in the US and Europe...
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What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School
By Mark McCormack

Looking at the title, one could be forgiven for thinking that the purpose of What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business Schoolis to denigrate business schools. But that is not Mark McCormack’s intention at all. The aim of his game is gaining that imperceptible edge in business by developing a humility regarding one’s ability to read other people and oneself. Business school, he believes, should be seen as a foundation or ancillary to the development of managerial and interpersonal skills – and not as a panacea to personal and corporate development...
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Each quarter Prudential Investment Managers publishes a book review as well as a range of other interesting articles in our flagship publication, Consider this. To find out more, please contact our client services team on 0860 105 775 or email us at query@prudential.co.za.