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.

Who hasn't had a U-Haul experience? Several times, I rented a U-Haul while in college – and many times since. It's really a brilliant idea and also a great story of American entrepreneurialism on par with McDonald's Corporation (NYSE: MCD)'s Ray Kroc or Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT)'s Sam Walton. And now there is a new book on the U-Haul story, called A Noble Function: How U-Haul Moved America.

The author, Luke Krueger, covers the first 20 years of the company's history. To bring the story to life, he interviewed dozens of the key players who built the company. "They welcomed me into their homes, fed me, and most importantly, shared their memories with me," writes Krueger.

Right Idea, Right Time

Sam Shoen, along with his wife Anna Mary, launched U-Haul in 1945. They were struggling financially, having to live with Anna Mary's parents. But their idea was quite innovative: one-way trailer rentals.

Moreover, the timing was spot-on. With the end of the Great Depression and World War II, America was anxious for economic growth. It would mean that millions would move across the nation, setting up their homes and businesses. For example, there were 69,500 new car sales in 1945. Five years later, there were 40.3 million registered cars on the highways.

If you want to understand corporate governance, there are three books you absolutely must read: A Weekend with Warren Buffett and Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures takes an amusing look at the author's journey to dozens of annual meetings, which leads him to the conclusion that shareholder democracy is basically a myth. The second is John Bogle's The Battle For the Soul of Capitalism.

Then there is Allan Murray's Revolt in the Boardroom. This book looks at the changing face of corporate governance: the era of the imperial CEO is essentially over, boards have greater responsibilities and, at last, America's largest public companies are being forced to pay attention to their owners.

Murray has composed an exciting narrative, drawing on several of the better-known boardroom brawls that have occurred in the past few years: corporate espionage at Hewlett-Packard, Spitzer's investigation of AIG that led to the ousting of the company's long-time CEO, and the relatively minor extramarital affair at Boeing that somehow led to the firing of that company's CEO.

But Murray manages to avoid getting too bogged down with anecdotes. Interviews with the vice president of Institutional Shareholder Services and others who are shaping the new corporate establishment shed light on how much corporate America really is changing.

Get is used on Amazon for less than $10.

Can't tell a leading from a lagging economic indicator to save your life? Don't understand why people get so excited about a book whose cover is, after all, beige? Want to know the latest information on business confidence in Japan but don't know who to ask? Bernard Baumohl's The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities is the book for you.

Surprisingly accessible, written not at all in the style of "the dismal science," Secrets of Economic Indicators provides a survey of the most influential economic indicators for both domestic and major international markets, including Germany, Japan, China, India and Brazil.

For the U.S., economic indicators are organized topically into categories covering employment, consumer spending, national outputs, housing and construction, the Federal Reserve, foreign trade and prices. Each category contains numerous entries for relevant economic indicators. As an example of a national output indicator, Baumohl includes an entry for Durable Goods Orders. This entry lists other names for the economic indicator, its relationship to overall market activity, a website where the latest information is available, the schedule for regular releases and how often, as well as what agency or department of the government is responsible for providing the information. Baumohl also provides a narrative description of the indicator, why it is important, how the indicator is computed based on what information, and what the last few figures have been for the indicator, organized in handy chart format.

Entries for economic indicators that are leading, as distinct from lagging, include a section on how this indicator provides clues for shorter and longer term economic activity, a very helpful piece of information for all types of investors.

Whether it is called crowdsourcing or wikis or social networking, there is a wealth of collaborative experience and expertise available online to help improve decision making, increase profitability, drive product innovation and expand into new markets.

Authors Barry Libert and Jon Spector have collated the contributions of hundreds of collaborators into an easy-to-read, information-filled guide book, We Are Smarter Than Me, to help entrepreneurs as well as those in established businesses harness the collaborative possibilities on the Web. The guide book includes case studies from well-established firms in addition to highlighting newly emerging collaborative possibilities. The authors include many helpful "what to do" suggestions to allow mass collaborative efforts to work for all types of busines-related situations.

The authors provide numerous examples of how mass collaboration can help raise capital for start-ups, provide wide-ranging but low-cost expertise, solicit customer input on product design features prior to production, and form communities of customer support for products already purchased. Lots of graphics and bulleted sections make the guide quite user-friendly.

We Are Smarter is already at work on its second collaborative volume, this one dealing with mass collaborative efforts to increase and enhance marketing and sales efforts. Contributions are currently being solicited, so you can still be part of the WE.

Over the weekend, we had a wide range of "Money Face-Off's" here on Bloggingstocks, and I brought you the face-off between Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. In discussing Greenspan, I noted that one of the main ways a Fed Chief can stay in power for as long as he did was to keep his Presidents happy. Now that Greenspan is no longer under the thumb of President Bush, he obviously feels no such responsibility, and that is made evident in the harsh comments he has on the current President in his book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," due to be released today.

Even though the book was not scheduled to come out until today, the Associated Press got its hands on a copy over the weekend and quickly pointed out that the former Fed Chief has some pretty nasty things to say about our current President, as well as on the future of the economy in his much anticipated memoirs.

In his book, Greenspan said that the greatest frustration he had with President Bush was his consistent unwillingness to veto "out-of-control spending." Let's remember that Greenspan is a well-known Republican, so watching an administration ignore party doctrine and move away from small government principals has to hurt a bit, especially when that government is being led by another member of the Republican party.

My email inbox is full these days with investors wanting to know how to manage these fickle and turbulent markets. It is true that, given the increasing complexity and sensationalism (mortgage defaults, Chinese dominance, global warming) plaguing the financial markets, it is easy to lose one's way.

In Invest Like a Fox . . . Not Like a Hedgehog, Robert C. Carlson, editor of the monthly newsletter Retirement Watch and managing member of Carlson Wealth Advisors, provides a clear-cut essential guide for enhancing any investor's financial prowess. Carlson's innovative approach to developing investment strategies eliminates the "noise" that frequently overwhelms investors.

Invest Like a Fox is the type of book I personally look for: A driver's manual for the investor looking to navigate today's financial markets. The book trains you how to avoid looking back at your mistakes or successes, but instead promotes keeping your eyes on the volatile and bumpy road ahead. Packed with expert advice and in-depth insight, this all-inclusive guide will enhance the way you think about investing and assist you in creating an investment strategy.

Sometimes when you buy something cheap you get what you pay for. This comes to mind in considering the latest poisoning scandal brought to us by China. Recently, a product called "Veggie Booty," a snack popular with children, made 57 people sick. In some bags, the "veggie" seasoning, made in China, was contaminated with salmonella.

The good news is that there's an American author who is profiting from these poisoning incidents. According to the International Herald Tribune, that American profiteer is named Sara Bongiorni. She decided that her family would try to live an entire year without using products that were made in China, and her findings are detailed in a new book, "A Year Without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy."

As she describes in this NPR interview, it is very difficult to avoid buying Chinese products. She spent weeks trying to buy birthday candles, and couldn't find sneakers for her children not made in China. Eventually she found sneakers made in Italy which cost $70 versus $15 for the pair made in China. When her coffeemaker broke, it was impossible to find a unit NOT made in China, so she ultimately was left with the old-fashioned option of heating water in a pan and pouring it over the beans each morning. Does that mean that French presses and Bialetti's are now made in China?

The reviews of my brother William D. Cohan's book, The Last Tycoons, on Lazard Ltd. (NYSE: LAZ) have varied depending on reviewers' economic ties to LAZ. Reviewers who depend on LAZ executives for access or deal flow tended to trash the book. Those who lacked such ties seemed to like it.

I have particularly enjoyed listening to my brother tell one incredible story after another about the fascinating foibles of the "great men" of Lazard. If you're interested in the out-sized personal lives, art collections, real estate, and cigar smoking habits of a group of world-shaping financiers, you will find it hard to put down The Last Tycoons.

But those who depend on LAZ's CEO, Bruce Wasserstein, or other power brokers with ties to the firm do not share my view. For example: