In 1988, billionaire investor-speculator George Soros wrote a book called The Alchemy of Finance. The book was well-received as a book about the ups and downs of life as a trader, but Soros's theory of reflexivity -- which he believes should replace conventional economic thinking -- was largely ignored.

For the past 20 years, Soros has continued to bang the drum on reflexivity, and most people have continued to ignore him, with some economists expressing tremendous disdain for his ideas.

A USA Today profile of this brilliant investor and philanthropist manages to make him look pretty pathetic: " [...] George Soros, now in his eighth decade and enjoying a personal fortune estimated at $9 billion, yearns to be seen as something other than a financial oracle or Democratic Party sugar daddy. The Hungarian émigré, who built a worldwide reputation by out-thinking markets, desperately wants to be acknowledged as a philosopher."

With a new book out, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means, Soros is ever-hopeful that this time he will finally gain the recognition he deserves for the theory he believes to be his "life's work."

Having read a few of Mr. Soros's books, I doubt that his propensity for pontification will appeal to most readers. But the USA Today interview is definitely worth reading to get his thoughts on the current state of the market. He might be heckled as crazy and irrelevant, but I'm always interested in the market predictions of someone who made $9 billion making market predictions.

Of the 50+ business-related books I read each year, maybe 15 were worth reading, in retrospect. Then another five of those are memorable -- in a good year. Hedge fund manager David Einhorn's book Fooling Some of the People All of the Time leapfrogs both of those categories, and establishes itself as a classic of business writing.

The story behind the book is intriguing. It's actually amazing that it ever got published, and tremendous credit should be given to Wiley for taking a chance with such an unconventional tale. Here's the deal: In a 2002 speech at a charity event, Greenlight Capital hedge fund manager David Einhorn gave a speech at a charity event. Asked to talk about his favorite investment idea, he spent 15 minutes explaining why he believe that Allied Capital (NASDAQ: ALD) was a financial crime in progress, ripping off investors and taxpayers as a Small Business Administration lender. Einhorn presented compelling evidence of aggressive accounting and indeed fraud, and disclosed that he was short the stock.

The speech made headlines and the stock tanked. Over the past six years, Einhorn has continued to beat the drum against Allied Capital, presenting information to regulators, reporters, and investors.

Sir John Templeton is regarded as one of the greatest value investors of all time. His well-timed moves into Japanese stocks when no one else would touch them and then back into US stock when no one went near those have earned him a reputation as a savvy bargain hunter.

His niece -- Lauren C. Templeton -- and her husband Scott Phillips have written a book devoted to his investment methods: Investing the Templeton Way: The Market-Beating Strategies of Value Investing's Legendary Bargain Hunter.

Unfortunately, there's nothing that's new here, and there are several infinitely better tomes devoted to the same principles of value investing. The tone is also annoying, written with a reverence for "Uncle John" as he is always referred to. This gets annoying. After about the 23rd reference, I somehow got the idea that he is her uncle.

The book has some bright spots: the chapter on shorting bubbles is interesting as very few investment books -- especially those focused on a value-based approach -- delve into short-selling.

Other than that, this book is surprisingly trite. Die hard value investors won't be able to pass this up, but everyone else probably should.

Gene Marcial has been writing the legendary column "Inside Wall Street" for Businessweek for the past 26 years. Gene has taken the collective wisdom and knowledge he has accumulated over the decades and written a brilliant book titled Gene Marcial's 7 Commandments of Stock Investing.

Gene brings the same sense of calm and logic to his book as he does to his weekly column. Having known Gene for a few years, the one characteristic that has always impressed me is his ability to separate the news from the noise. Gene doesn't go with the flow, in fact, as he aptly states in his book, it's when an investor goes contrary to the flow is when the best buying opportunities present themselves.

Gene has spoken with thousands of Wall Street insiders over the decades and has taken the very best of the many he respects. Gene's book is an easy read and full of real world experiences and examples. Investors can relate to real stories versus "theoretical "concepts that begin with company ABC.

It was a thrilling -- and badly needed -- reminder that it's possible to be unsuccessful in business by underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

While wandering through the clearance section at Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), I stumbled on a stack of copies of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, Donald Trump's newest book published in October of last year. The price? $4.99, a steep discount from the $26.95 listed on the jacket. A look inside shows that this book is a first edition, first printing -- meaning that the publisher -- Collins -- badly overestimated demand.

I opened to a random page and -- no joke -- this is the first line I read: "With Rosie O'Donnell it got a lot worse. Rosie O'Donnell is a total degenerate." We then get to read five pages about how horrible Rosie is and also, of course, how great Donald Trump is.

Confession: I bought the book. It was only five bucks and I just couldn't help myself. I am thrilled that the Donald seems to be on a heck of a losing streak. Celebrity Apprentice was a flop and his cologne has sold poorly, and yet he's continued to receive big pay for his failing casino company.

But wait! In a sign that Trump may actually have some sense of taste, Celebrity Apprentice has turned down O.J. Simpson's request to appear on the next season.

Steve Miller's book The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America's Most Troubled Companies has generated considerable controversy. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) discusses the brouhaha in some detail. I don't know enough about the situation at Delphi to have an opinion, so I'm reviewing this as a book, controversy aside.

Miller has built his reputation as a "firefighter" brought in to fix serious problems at deeply troubled companies. He got his start as the CFO at Chrysler where he signed ten thousand documents in one sitting for the loan guarantees that brought the company back from the brink. His career later took him to Olympia & York Developments Ltd., Bethlehem Steel, Morrison-Knudson, Federal-Mogul, Waste Management, and Delphi, where he currently serves as chairman.

His accounts of these struggles are interesting, but the most compelling reading comes when Miller talks about the more prominent people his career has brought him into contact with. This description of Carl Icahn alone is worth the price of admission:

Icahn was uniquely creative in his demands. He was impatient with the board's decision and would bully us to do things his way ... In face to face meetings he gave everyone whiplash. One moment he'd bellow, "That's the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard heard," and the next he'd put his arm around you. He's effective, I think, because people become so traumatized that they wind up suffering from Stockholm syndrome and will do anything to please him.

His description of Lee Iacocca's decline caused by ego also serves as an interesting cautionary tale.

If you enjoy reading about business history, you'll like this book. And here's the best part: it's a book about management that's generally devoid of cliches and trite platitudes.

If you asked me to come up with a list of ways to destroy your credibility as an entrepreneur, here are two of the best ways I would come up with: associate with Mannatech (NASDAQ: MTEX), an embattled multi-level marketer, and associate with Robert Kiyosaki, the motivational author who has been exposed as a charlatan, exaggerator, and all-around bozo.

So it was with great amusement that I stumbled upon this press release:

Mannatech, Incorporated, a leading developer and provider of dietary supplements and skin care solutions, announced today its speaker line-up and events for MannaFest 2008. Keynote speakers include Bob Burg, co-author of The Go-Giver, and Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

I've devoted a fair amount of bandwidth to trashing both of these. I first got interested in Mannatech when the Texas Attorney General sued the company for illegal sales and marketing practices. Then the company announced that its CEO was stepping down to -- get this -- devote more time to the company. Then, just when you thought this corporate outhouse couldn't get any goofier, Mannatech fired its independent auditor when the firm insisted that the chairman step down from his post.

And as for Kiyosaki: just read this blistering expose from John T. Reed.

Of course, it's possible that my impression of either of these entities could have been wrong. But Robert Kiyosaki speaking at Mannafest is the equivalent of Gary Condit and Mark Foley teaming up for a seminar on ethics.

HarperCollins Publishers is establishing a new unit -- it doesn't have a name just yet -- to be run by Hyperion founder Robert S. Miller.

There's a twist: this imprint is looking to substitute profit-sharing with authors for advances and, even more interestingly, eliminate the practice of extending unlimited rights of return to retailers.

It remains to be seen whether they'll get anywhere with that but if the publishing industry tightens up its liberal return policies, booksellers like Borders (NYSE: BGP), which is already in the outhouse, could find themselves in a world of hurt.

They'd have to take a hard look at their inventories and might have to stock less variety -- which would make them less competitive with online booksellers and big-box retailers.

Still, I doubt that this will catch on. With booksellers struggling, publishers aren't really in a position to extract more blood.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is looking pretty good. In his 2007 book The Black Swan, the futures trader turned philosophy guru warned about the impact that large, fat-tail events can have on financial markets. He has been saying for years that traditional risk management models are inadequate and The Bear Stearns Companies (NYSE: BSC), Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER), and just about everyone else are probably agreeing with him right about now.

The Black Swan has outsold Alan Greenspan's new book -- a testament to the intelligence of readers. With the meltdown in housing, Taleb is finally getting the media attention her deserves.

The latest issue of Bloomberg Markets has a fantastic profile of him, as does Fortune.

If you have children in elementary school, then you know Scholastic Corporation (NASDAQ: SCHL), operator of the annnual school book fair. Scholastic does an excellent job publishing high-quality children's literature and other educational materials. If only it could do so at a profit. Scholastic has been the U.S. publisher for the Harry Potter series these past few years. But even during the height of Pottermania, Scholastic did not turn much of a profit. This year is no exception. The company recently released 3Q 2008 results. Revenue increased $12 million to $458 million, yet losses continue to widen to $4.6 million for the quarter in which there was no Harry Potter release.

YTD 2008 figures show revenue increased 20% and net income more than doubled due to the last Harry Potter release in the previous quarter. Yet YTD net loss now totals $9.3 million or $0.24 per share compared to net income of $20.5 million in the previous year. To be fair, Scholastic has taken huge losses -- $82 million in Q3 2008 alone -- to exit its direct-to-home sales channel. This led to a $77.5 million net loss in Q3. But even with all business segments "performing solidly," according to CEO Richard Robinson, the company continues to bleed money.

Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, the British publisher of Harry Potter, recently reported robust sales and profit from Harry Potter books. Given that Scholastic also published this year's Caldecott Medal winner, Brain Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, why is the company still drownding in red ink? S&P Equity downgraded the comapny from Buy to Hold.

Cynthia Cooper was a true corporate whistleblower. She became famous, not by choice, but because of the WorldCom financial statement fraud valued at $11 billion. She was the Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom, a position that was not easily obtained. She almost single-handedly created the internal audit department at WorldCom, and her book Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower details the struggle to get management to take internal audit seriously.

Things started going wrong at WorldCom very early. The company went on an acquisition spree, and the merging of many small companies, managers, and accounting systems was a disaster waiting to happen. Cynthia says that WorldCom was much better at acquiring companies than integrating them, and that is clear.

From an accounting perspective, it was next to impossible to create a properly controlled system. There were too many small systems being pieced together, and it was easy for numbers and authorizations to get lost in the shuffle. This struggle is well-documented by Cynthia, who no doubt painstakingly researched the various acquisitions in order to give such a complete history.

At times the book seems to get a little off-topic as Cynthia goes through each player's background briefly. Honestly, that information isn't really relevant to the story and, while it was probably intended to make these characters relatable human beings, it really just serves to make the book longer than necessary. It prolongs the process of getting to the real heart of the story.

Investors will want to take at least a quick read through Patricia Aburdene's recently revised book Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. Aburdene has isolated seven trends she sees will drive business and investor behavior for the near future.

1) Power of Spirituality in individual lives. People do not want their work and their personal morality to be in opposition to one another.

2) Strengthening of Conscious Capitalism that is responsible to both shareholders AND stakeholders.

3) Leading from the Middle in which middle managers acquire more voice and moral authority over business decisions.

4) Spirituality in Business leading to a wider acceptance of faith at work.

5) Values Driven Consumers who shop with their values as well as their dollars.

In the last few days, bookselling giant Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) has made a few more enemies in the publishing world by forcing the little-known group of print-on-demand (POD) publishers to either submit to using its POD subsidiary, Booksurge, or risk being prohibited from selling on its industry-leading website. No matter the cost and complications of breaking off relationships with other vendors, reformatting books and a host of other problems, Amazon laid down the law, saying convert -- and do it quickly -- or face the consequences.

What's more disconcerting is that an official press release was made public only after smaller publishers like Angela Hoy of Booklocker.com started writing publicly about blackmail-type phone calls from Booksurge representatives. Fearful of losing their businesses literally overnight, many POD publishers such as iUniverse and Lulu have capitulated while strong willed publisher PublishAmerica refused to give in -- and was quickly made an example of when Amazon disabled the buy buttons on their book titles!

As an author selling my own critically-acclaimed POD book An American Hedge Fund on Amazon, outrage has compelled me to write about how unethical and more importantly, monopolistic this all is.

The real estate meltdown has claimed big-time financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns Cos. (NYSE: BSC) and Countrywide (NYSE: CFC). Other mega firms – like Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and Citigroup (NYSE: C) – have had to raise billions from sovereign wealth funds to deal with the implosion.

Of course, there are millions of Americans in pain, as the foreclosure rates have skyrocketed. True, the federal government is taking some action – but such things will take time.

So what to do? Well, David Petrovich has published Fight Foreclosure!. He has more than 20 years in the real estate business and is the executive director of the Society for the Preservation of Continued Homeownership (which provides preforeclosure counseling).

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As a former English teacher, I can't count the times that I had to listen to a student complain about the "relevance" of this book or that book. I usually tried to explain how literature affects culture and books change the world. I only wish that I'd thought to check out Scholastic Corporation's finances.

On Thursday, citing a tough economy, Scholastic Corporation stated that its expectations for the forthcoming year were somewhat dark. This, combined with a considerable quarterly loss, led to a 13.5% drop in its stock value, leaving it at $30.69 per share. Today, it dropped slightly more, and is currently at $30.25.

I have fond memories of reading Scholastic's books when I was a kid, and I certainly don't like to see the company in pain. However, as an author, I have to admit a certain amount of wondrous amazement at the situation currently unfolding. You see, Scholastic's dire predictions for 2008 center around the fact that it will not have a "Harry Potter" book to give its sales a shot of adrenalin.