We’re each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the "nature" part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the "nurture" side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Given the outpouring of ink in recent years on the varieties of human intelligence (such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed), it’s no surprise that business authors would seek to apply this evolving science to the workplace. This month, we look at four recently released books that delve into the connections between personality type and business performance.

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Davies-Black, $18.95, ISBN 0891061495), by William Bridges, is an updated edition of a title that gained critical acclaim upon its initial appearance a decade ago. Bridges looks at businesses as organisms, with their own personal histories and inherited characteristics. He argues convincingly that a company’s character is much more than the sum of its employees’ personalities, and he offers guidance in understanding how different types of organizations think, feel, perceive, and behave. Applied properly, his analysis may be able to steer a firm away from patterns of action that are self-defeating and toward actions that better suit its strengths.

As I read through Bridges’s 16 types of organizational personalities (modeled on the individual personality types of the widely used Myers-Briggs personality assessments), a Rorschach effect sets in. I see one of my former employers in the profile of an ENFJ corporation (a type in which extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors predominate), and then I see it again in the quite different profile of an ISTJ company (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging). I find another ex-employer in four different personality-type ink blots. Accurately defining one’s true type is hard in Bridges’ system (as it is in the Myers-Briggs system), but the very act of trying to figure out which profile fits best can improve self-knowledge.

Bridges includes in his book an "Organizational Character Index" that business teams can use to evaluate the character of their companies and, by implication, determine what kinds of people will fit best within a given corporate culture. The author is at pains to stress that his index should not be used as a screening tool by employers, stressing that there are no "good" or "bad" personality types just different types that are more well-suited, or less well-suited, to be part of a certain type of team. Just as a career counselor can help an individual focus on jobs he or she is good at, The Character of Organizations can help a company hone strategies that make the most of its strengths.

Conversely, another new book tries to help workers avoid being harmed by their own personality defects and, one must admit, we’ve each got a few of those. Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns that Keep You from Getting Ahead (Doubleday, $24.95, ISBN 0385498497), by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, is a thoughtful and useful compendium of things not to do and ways not to be, while you’re on the job.

Maximum Success is the consummate self-help guide for talented people who keep running into the same problems over and over, in different jobs. There are employees who never feel quite good enough to deserve the jobs they have. There are workers for whom no job is ever good enough. There are those who try to do too much at once, those who avoid conflict at any cost, those who can’t get along with the boss, and those who feel they have lost track of their career paths. The authors, who head up the Harvard Business School’s MBA career development office, have seen it all.

The downside of perusing a book like this is that it often brings on moments of rueful recognition. Playing the "peacemaker" or the "bulldozer," exhibiting a "reactive stance toward authority" or "emotional tone-deafness" these are workplace behaviors that emerge out of a person’s deepest psychological being. Confronting them means confronting a piece of yourself. Like Bridges, Waldroop and Butler go out of their way not to be judgmental about such habits. But, again like Bridges, they draw on a body of psychological literature stretching back to Karl Jung as they offer constructive suggestions for recognizing these tendencies and avoiding the career ruin they can cause.

The human resource manager’s role as group psychologist is the subject of Making Change Happen One Person at a Time: Assessing Change Capacity Within Your Organization, by Charles H. Bishop, Jr. (AMACOM, $27.95, ISBN 0814405282). Bishop lays out the characteristics of four different personality types, classified by how they react to change. Making Change Happen is a precise, step-by-step guide to determining who within a company will be most likely to succeed during and after the implementation of a change initiative.

Here, too, part of the lesson is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all personality template that produces ideal employees. A company with too many of Bishop’s "A-players" or "active responders" the Alpha Males of the corporate world who embrace change, pinpoint opportunities and learn from mistakes will face leadership and succession problems because there’s not room enough at the top for everyone. On the other hand, Bishop is tellingly sparse with suggested roles for "D-players" who resist change: From the HR man’s perspective, the main point is to make sure these misfits don’t get in the way. And now for something completely different but once again related to psychological typecasting. Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, by Gretchen Craft Rubin (Pocket, $25.95, ISBN 0671041282), is an archly written guide to making a complete creep of oneself. Take Rubin’s advice to heart, and you can become any organization’s worst nightmare: a talented tyrant, a "user." Like the other featured authors, Rubin is scrupulously non-judgmental. And her work is not exactly satire. It’s something that bites deeper an exposŽ of a certain type of person that lives among us.

Naturally, it begins with a personality assessment quiz. Presuming you are a "striver" and do crave power, the quiz is intended to determine whether you seek direct or indirect power. Power, Rubin notes trenchantly, will get you a lot further in life than merit. She then spells out how to use people to get power, money, fame, and sex, and then how to use power, money, fame, and sex to get more power, money, fame, and sex.

Advice like "Never let your effort show" and "Traffic only in the right products, places and pastimes" could have come straight out of J.P. Donleavy’s sadly out-of-print gonzo manners manual, The Unexpurgated Code. A discussion of "useful defects and harmful virtues" turns everything your scoutmaster tried to teach you on its head. Here as elsewhere, Rubin raises questions that cut through the book’s veil of irony for instance: "Did Richard Nixon become president despite his insecurity and mistrust, or at least partly because of those traits?" If it all sounds unsavory, and these postmodern perversions of the idea of manners strike you as something not quite cricket, then you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how others are trying to manipulate you. Rubin is not an advocate for this sort of behavior, after all. She’s just pointing out how it works. And I know a few people who would study a book like this carefully, doing their best to follow it to the letter.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

In The Great American Tax Dodge (Little, Brown, $22.95, ISBN 0316811351), Time Inc. senior writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele take on the inequities and iniquities of the American tax system. In the tradition of firebrand financial populism exemplified by William Greider’s Who Will Tell the People?, they expose the loopholes that allow thousands of people with six-figure incomes to pay no income tax at all, as well as the fact that millions don’t even file returns.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Random House, $26.95, ISBN 037550317X), by Roger Lowenstein, narrates the inside-the-boardroom drama of the 1998 collapse of a hedge fund whose failure threatened to plunge the world’s financial system into chaos. Lowenstein not only explains the excruciatingly complex dealings of the fund in clear layman’s prose, he also spins a gripping and minutely detailed tale of the torturous negotiations among Wall Street titans and the Federal Reserve that led to a bailout involving $3.6 billion in private funding.

Howard Kurtz, dean of U.S. press critics, unmasks Wall Street’s hype machine in The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Fame of Money, Media, and Manipulation (Free Press, $26, ISBN 0684868792). The role of financial media outlets like CNBC in whipping up the stock-trading frenzies of recent years was ripe for scrutiny, and Kurtz lays bare the log-rolling dynamics of a new media industry that needs overblown stock stories as badly as stock promoters do.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

Briefly noted In The Great American Tax Dodge (Little, Brown, $22.95, ISBN 0316811351), Time Inc. senior writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele take on the inequities and iniquities of the American tax system. In the tradition of firebrand financial populism exemplified by William Greider’s Who Will Tell the People?, they expose the loopholes that allow thousands of people with six-figure incomes to pay no income tax at all, as well as the fact that millions don’t even file returns.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Random House, $26.95, ISBN 037550317X), by Roger Lowenstein, narrates the inside-the-boardroom drama of the 1998 collapse of a hedge fund whose failure threatened to plunge the world’s financial system into chaos. Lowenstein not only explains the excruciatingly complex dealings of the fund in clear layman’s prose, he also spins a gripping and minutely detailed tale of the torturous negotiations among Wall Street titans and the Federal Reserve that led to a bailout involving $3.6 billion in private funding.

Howard Kurtz, dean of U.S. press critics, unmasks Wall Street’s hype machine in The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Fame of Money, Media, and Manipulation (Free Press, $26, ISBN 0684868792). The role of financial media outlets like CNBC in whipping up the stock-trading frenzies of recent years was ripe for scrutiny, and Kurtz lays bare the log-rolling dynamics of a new media industry that needs overblown stock stories as badly as stock promoters do.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

Advice on navigating the new financial terrain Individual investors face a whole new set of challenges in today’s markets. An understanding of p/e ratios and balance sheets is no longer sufficient in the dot.com world, where stock prices sometimes bear little relationship to old-fashioned concepts like sales and profits. Whether you’re a neophyte in the financial world or a more accomplished investor, several new books offer help on negotiating this new territory. Here are four of the best: Investing 101 (Bloomberg, $14.95, ISBN 1576600440) by Kathy Kristof is a reader friendly introduction to the basics of investing and personal finance. Kristof leads investors through assessing a starting point, determining their adversity to risk, building an emergency fund, and determining how to save for such big ticket items as a car or a house and for such long term goals as retirement or a child’s college education. Kristof educates the reader on fundamentals like diversification and assessment of how different investments fit into their goals. One of the best features of the book is a chapter on picking individual stocks. Kristof teaches the reader how to read a financial statement and make some basic calculations to determine whether or not to buy or sell a stock. If I had to suggest a book on investing and personal finance to an absolute beginner, it would be Investing 101.

Victoria Collins combines a doctorate in psychology with years of experience as a financial planner to examine the impact of the Internet on investing and financial markets in Invest Beyond.com: A New Look at Investing in Today’s Changing Markets (Dearborn, $18.95, ISBN 0793138175). Collins explains many basic issues ranging from what the Dow Jones Industrial average is and how it is compiled to what a p/e ratio is and how it is useful to an investor. Collins also tells the reader where to get information and how to establish a relationship with a financial advisor. She examines how markets have changed and why the investment philosophies of such Wall Street gurus as Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros may or may not be applicable in the new Internet-influenced market. Invest Beyond.com is not only a very helpful tool for those interested in making sense of investing since the advent of the Internet, it can serve as an extremely valuable reference for the beginning investor as well.

Former Motley Fool columnist Robert Sheard defines financial independence not as the date when one retires, but the point at which a person has the ability to live indefinitely on the growth of an investment portfolio. In Money For Life: The 20 Factor Plan for Accumulating Wealth While You’re Young (Harper- Business, $25, ISBN 0066620430), Sheard directs the reader to determine how big a portfolio must be for an investor to live on its growth. He then shows what steps to take to reach that financial goal. Sheard’s final step is to teach the reader how to manage a portfolio once the financial goal is reached. Sheard advocates what he calls a “charitable foundation” approach to personal investing. Money for Life is written in a straightforward manner well suited for readers who are beginning to take hold of their financial life, as well as the more experienced person who wants to learn how to maintain his or her finances.

The days when a woman could rely on the man in her life to manage financial decisions are long past. To guide women on how to take hold of their financial futures, personal finance expert Marsha Bertran has written A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Future (AMACOM, $16.95, ISBN 0814470998). Newly released in paperback this month, this book is an excellent guide for women who want to learn about investing. In this age, investing to most people means mainly stocks and bonds, but Bertrand examines various investment approaches, including buying stocks with puts, calls, shorts, and margins, real estate investment trusts, unit investment trusts, and initial public offerings. One of the best features of the book is that Bertrand holds the reader’s hand as she explains and then demonstrates how to run the numbers on an investment to calculate ratios, gains and losses, investment returns, and income tax ramifications. She also explains where to find public investor information, how to read annual reports, select a broker, and start an investment club. A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing is an excellent resource for any man or woman interested in improving their investing skills.

Jeff Morris is CPA in Nashville and has worked with investments and personal finance since 1992.

I made my first million in Poland, back in 1992. All I had to do was buy a hundred dollars worth of zloty at the currency exchange. A few years later in Romania, as the leu fell victim to hyperinflation, it took not a Franklin but a mere Grant for me to re-enter the millionaires’ club.

The dirtiest little secret of American pop culture today is that a million U.S. dollars ain’t all that much. It’s worth more than a million of some play-money scrip from Eastern Europe, to be sure, but it’s hardly worth the heavy breathing you hear these days about millionaires.

A sudden million can change the life of some smart-aleck who wins it on Regis Philbin’s omnipresent game show. But a slow million is simply what an average middle-aged Jane and Joe today had better hope they save up in net worth before they retire. General inflation, rising health care costs, and lengthening life- spans could easily turn a million into a bare-minimum nest egg not too many years from now.

None of which is to cast aspersions on the flock of millionaire books in recent years. Several of them have contributed to a growing savvy among the general public about how to behave financially. The 1996 blockbuster The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko (Longstreet Press, $22, 1563523302) counseled old-fashioned thrift, patience, and self-denial. Those themes recur in aspirational guidebooks like last October’s How to Become a Millionaire: A Straightfor- ward Approach to Accumulating Personal Wealth by Mark L. Alch (Longstreet Press, $20, 1563526069) and Charles B. Carlson’s recently released Eight Steps to Seven Figures: The Investment Strategies of Everyday Millionaires and How You Can Become Wealthy Too (Bantam Doubleday Dell, $24.95, 0385497318).

A new crop of millionaire books, though, is more apt to seek out the psychological basis for the way people act as they pursue riches whether their actions take the form of upstanding corporate citizenship, fecklessly acquisitive materialism, or something in-between. This month’s featured titles approach the topic of wealth from different perspectives, but all four look beyond the bare behavioral facts that those in one tax bracket or another share to focus on the personality characteristics underlying economic conduct.

It’s no surprise Thomas J. Stanley’s follow-up to The Millionaire Next Door has already followed his 1996 book to the tops of bestseller lists, since The Millionaire Mind builds on the keen observations of its predecessor. Stanley’s earlier book offers the revelation that most of the rich people in our midst have unspectacular lifestyles but impressive abilities to remain focused on their goals. This new work reveals that the rich often have unspectacular minds and social orientations that their native intelligence, their educational achievements and conduct in private life generally don’t veer too far from middle-American norms.

Stanley steers clear of the you, too, can be a millionaire! school of rah-rah personal finance coaching. Yet he does drive home a similar message: that a prep-school record of straight As and a summer calendar filled with cocktail engagements in the Hamptons are not prerequisites for plutocracy. He introduces us to millionaires and decamillionaires (Stanley draws a distinction between those with millions and tens of millions, acknowledging that a mere million is not what it used to be) whose minds are distinguished not by obvious brilliance or refinement but by clarity of purpose and self-discipline.

It’s clear that Stanley’s talent for distilling complex data into very readable narrative serves as the basis for the widespread popularity of this former professor’s work. I’m sure he has plenty of readers from every age group, but this accessible and persuasive book may be best-suited as a graduation gift. Its lessons will be of most use to people who are still in a position to change how their minds work.

In The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators (Amacom, $27.95, 0814405703), Edwin A. Locke puts forth a feisty, combative, well-argued case that the egotism driving the super-rich is a good and virtuous force in society. I could not disagree more heartily with this thesis, but I don’t write this column to foist my social theories on anyone. I have to express my respect for the vigor and strength of conviction that have gone into this book. I know people who will devour it like raw meat.

Locke is an acolyte of Ayn Rand, the late author whose musings on the virtue of selfishness energized a generation of business people as an antidote to the altruism of the 1960s left. The Prime Movers is the book Rand would have written had she lived to witness the federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft or the prosecution of Michael Milken. Locke is militantly libertarian in his outlook, and more importantly for the credibility of his stance he is staunchly consistent in applying libertarian principles to the business world as he sees it. Country-club conservatives might applaud his opposition to capital gains taxes and his affirmation that earning money is a moral achievement, but the ballroom would fall uncomfortably silent at his skewering of fat-cat execs flying in Lear jets at shareholder expense, companies discriminating against job applicants on the basis of race, and industries lobbying for corporate welfare.

The billionaire psyche, as defined by Locke (he, too, finds millionaire a paltry goal to aim for), combines integrity and vision with ruthlessness and unrelenting self-centeredness. I have to hope that Locke won’t motivate too many readers to use his lionizing of alpha-male business behavior as an excuse to be petty tyrants in the workplace. But I have to admit: It’s refreshing to encounter a rant as coherent as this one. Whatever your point of view, this book will quicken your pulse.

So will another April release, but in a very different way. Joel Anuff, with co-writer Gary Wolf, tells the tale of his enriching and entertaining descent into financial idiocy in Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (Random House, $23.95, 0375503889). If you have ever been tempted I confess, I have succumbed a couple of times into buying a zillion shares of something with a name like NoEarnings.com at 41/2 and selling an hour later at 43/4, this book is your chance to revisit the combination of sick thrill and crushing fear you felt as you made your money the new-fashioned way. Dumb Money amply demonstrates the craziness and stupidity of get-rich-quick day trading schemes. It also makes day trading look like a lot of fun.

Don’t blame Anuff and Wolf for sending a mixed message. This book just reflects its moment in history. Rational advisers like Thomas Stanley would extol the virtues of long-term investing to build a diversified portfolio of carefully chosen mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. Following such advice in recent years would have left you far behind the Joel Anuffs of the investing world. Virtue is not always rewarded. Vice is not always punished though the market can wield a terrible, swift sword when it comes time to mete out punishment to speculators. Just you wait.

Like this month’s other books, Dumb Money is a morality tale. The business of trading stocks is arguably an amoral activity in itself, but Anuff and Wolf keep coming back to one figure who illustrates the horrific dark side of the day-trading anti-culture: Mark Barton, the Atlanta trader who was charged with going on a suburban killing spree in the summer of 1999 after racking up six-figure losses in the market. Anuff is convinced there are many more Bartons out there, well-armed and just waiting for the market correction that will send them over the edge. The book’s parting words of financial advice: Learn how to duck. Sober up from the rollicking ride of Dumb Money with a book about the possible consequences of living in a fast-paced, high-stakes economy. Pick up The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt, by Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren and Jay Lawrence Westbrook (Yale University Press, $32.50, 0300079605), and see how the other half lives. If our country’s millionaires seem surprisingly middle-class, so do the Americans who find themselves in bankruptcy court. This carefully researched investigation paints a disturbing portrait of a broad social stratum that has fallen deeply into debt in spite of or, more intriguingly, because of the unprecedented prosperity of recent years.

Here’s where our millionaire fascination can take us. Certainly there are various misfortunes like medical bills and divorces that can lead to bankruptcy. However, an underlying reality runs through many of the sad stories in The Fragile Middle Class. People are willing to plunge deeply into credit card debt to in order to live the affluent life they think the millionaire next door is living. The irony borders on the tragic. Just as we realize how many real (and consistently debt-averse) millionaires live quietly among us in camouflage, we see that hordes of posers are ruining their financial lives as they put on millionaire airs.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is product-development director for the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

Individual investors face a whole new set of challenges in today’s markets. An understanding of p/e ratios and balance sheets is no longer sufficient in the dot.com world, where stock prices sometimes bear little relationship to old-fashioned concepts like sales and profits. Whether you’re a neophyte in the financial world or a more accomplished investor, several new books offer help on negotiating this new territory. Here are four of the best: Investing 101 (Bloomberg, $14.95, ISBN 1576600440) by Kathy Kristof is a reader friendly introduction to the basics of investing and personal finance. Kristof leads investors through assessing a starting point, determining their adversity to risk, building an emergency fund, and determining how to save for such big ticket items as a car or a house and for such long term goals as retirement or a child’s college education. Kristof educates the reader on fundamentals like diversification and assessment of how different investments fit into their goals. One of the best features of the book is a chapter on picking individual stocks. Kristof teaches the reader how to read a financial statement and make some basic calculations to determine whether or not to buy or sell a stock. If I had to suggest a book on investing and personal finance to an absolute beginner, it would be Investing 101.

Victoria Collins combines a doctorate in psychology with years of experience as a financial planner to examine the impact of the Internet on investing and financial markets in Invest Beyond.com: A New Look at Investing in Today’s Changing Markets (Dearborn, $18.95, ISBN 0793138175). Collins explains many basic issues ranging from what the Dow Jones Industrial average is and how it is compiled to what a p/e ratio is and how it is useful to an investor. Collins also tells the reader where to get information and how to establish a relationship with a financial advisor. She examines how markets have changed and why the investment philosophies of such Wall Street gurus as Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros may or may not be applicable in the new Internet-influenced market. Invest Beyond.com is not only a very helpful tool for those interested in making sense of investing since the advent of the Internet, it can serve as an extremely valuable reference for the beginning investor as well.

Former Motley Fool columnist Robert Sheard defines financial independence not as the date when one retires, but the point at which a person has the ability to live indefinitely on the growth of an investment portfolio. In Money For Life: The 20 Factor Plan for Accumulating Wealth While You’re Young (Harper- Business, $25, ISBN 0066620430), Sheard directs the reader to determine how big a portfolio must be for an investor to live on its growth. He then shows what steps to take to reach that financial goal. Sheard’s final step is to teach the reader how to manage a portfolio once the financial goal is reached. Sheard advocates what he calls a "charitable foundation" approach to personal investing. Money for Life is written in a straightforward manner well suited for readers who are beginning to take hold of their financial life, as well as the more experienced person who wants to learn how to maintain his or her finances.

The days when a woman could rely on the man in her life to manage financial decisions are long past. To guide women on how to take hold of their financial futures, personal finance expert Marsha Bertran has written A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Future (AMACOM, $16.95, ISBN 0814470998). Newly released in paperback this month, this book is an excellent guide for women who want to learn about investing. In this age, investing to most people means mainly stocks and bonds, but Bertrand examines various investment approaches, including buying stocks with puts, calls, shorts, and margins, real estate investment trusts, unit investment trusts, and initial public offerings. One of the best features of the book is that Bertrand holds the reader’s hand as she explains and then demonstrates how to run the numbers on an investment to calculate ratios, gains and losses, investment returns, and income tax ramifications. She also explains where to find public investor information, how to read annual reports, select a broker, and start an investment club. A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing is an excellent resource for any man or woman interested in improving their investing skills.

Jeff Morris is CPA in Nashville and has worked with investments and personal finance since 1992.

Individual investors face a whole new set of challenges in today’s markets. An understanding of p/e ratios and balance sheets is no longer sufficient in the dot.com world, where stock prices sometimes bear little relationship to old-fashioned concepts like sales and profits. Whether you’re a neophyte in the financial world or a more accomplished investor, several new books offer help on negotiating this new territory. Here are four of the best: Investing 101 (Bloomberg, $14.95, ISBN 1576600440) by Kathy Kristof is a reader friendly introduction to the basics of investing and personal finance. Kristof leads investors through assessing a starting point, determining their adversity to risk, building an emergency fund, and determining how to save for such big ticket items as a car or a house and for such long term goals as retirement or a child’s college education. Kristof educates the reader on fundamentals like diversification and assessment of how different investments fit into their goals. One of the best features of the book is a chapter on picking individual stocks. Kristof teaches the reader how to read a financial statement and make some basic calculations to determine whether or not to buy or sell a stock. If I had to suggest a book on investing and personal finance to an absolute beginner, it would be Investing 101.

Victoria Collins combines a doctorate in psychology with years of experience as a financial planner to examine the impact of the Internet on investing and financial markets in Invest Beyond.com: A New Look at Investing in Today’s Changing Markets (Dearborn, $18.95, ISBN 0793138175). Collins explains many basic issues ranging from what the Dow Jones Industrial average is and how it is compiled to what a p/e ratio is and how it is useful to an investor. Collins also tells the reader where to get information and how to establish a relationship with a financial advisor. She examines how markets have changed and why the investment philosophies of such Wall Street gurus as Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros may or may not be applicable in the new Internet-influenced market. Invest Beyond.com is not only a very helpful tool for those interested in making sense of investing since the advent of the Internet, it can serve as an extremely valuable reference for the beginning investor as well.

Former Motley Fool columnist Robert Sheard defines financial independence not as the date when one retires, but the point at which a person has the ability to live indefinitely on the growth of an investment portfolio. In Money For Life: The 20 Factor Plan for Accumulating Wealth While You’re Young (Harper- Business, $25, ISBN 0066620430), Sheard directs the reader to determine how big a portfolio must be for an investor to live on its growth. He then shows what steps to take to reach that financial goal. Sheard’s final step is to teach the reader how to manage a portfolio once the financial goal is reached. Sheard advocates what he calls a "charitable foundation" approach to personal investing. Money for Life is written in a straightforward manner well suited for readers who are beginning to take hold of their financial life, as well as the more experienced person who wants to learn how to maintain his or her finances.

The days when a woman could rely on the man in her life to manage financial decisions are long past. To guide women on how to take hold of their financial futures, personal finance expert Marsha Bertran has written A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Future (AMACOM, $16.95, ISBN 0814470998). Newly released in paperback this month, this book is an excellent guide for women who want to learn about investing. In this age, investing to most people means mainly stocks and bonds, but Bertrand examines various investment approaches, including buying stocks with puts, calls, shorts, and margins, real estate investment trusts, unit investment trusts, and initial public offerings. One of the best features of the book is that Bertrand holds the reader’s hand as she explains and then demonstrates how to run the numbers on an investment to calculate ratios, gains and losses, investment returns, and income tax ramifications. She also explains where to find public investor information, how to read annual reports, select a broker, and start an investment club. A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing is an excellent resource for any man or woman interested in improving their investing skills.

Jeff Morris is CPA in Nashville and has worked with investments and personal finance since 1992.

Several years back, most readers probably wouldn’t have given a wooden nickel for a book about thrift. But in today’s challenging economic environment, Lauren Weber’s In Cheap We Trust makes for a most interesting read.

Weber, herself a notorious cheapo and the daughter of the “ultimate cheapskate,’’ gives us a rare look at frugality in America, through historical perspective, provocative questions and great stories about thrifty people.

“This book is a reconsideration of cheapness. It asks why we malign and make fun of people who save money,” Weber tells us in her introduction. “After all, when we as a nation and as individuals are so dangerously over-leveraged, when we’ve watched our global financial system teeter and then tumble because of greed and ill considered spending, when all of us could use a little more parsimony in our daily lives, why is it an insult to be called ‘cheap?’ “

Frugality can definitely be born out of necessity but there are other factors that figure in too—patriotic wartime thrift (“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without’’), the morality movement in which frugality was a virtue because it proved one’s immunity to the temptations of the world, the simplicity movement (think Thoreau) and more recently the environmental movement (eco-cheap) of recycling and generally using/buying less stuff.

And of course, Weber duly notes that you can’t discount the importance of the thrill of the hunt for treasures at bargain prices: “Everyone, even the rich, maybe even especially the rich—loves a bargain.’’

In a book like this, you would expect references to famous frugal people such as Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather, but there are also fun stories about ultra-thrifty people—like the author’s father, who forbade the family from turning the thermostat above 50 degrees, and opted to use hand signals out the window of his car instead of the turning lights; Hetty Green, the early 20th-century millionaire who was a “moneybags who lived like a pauper’’; a group of folks who recently embarked on a year-long embargo on buying new stuff; a doctor who uses surgical forceps to hang up his tea bags so he can reuse them two or three times; and Weber herself—who admits to dumpster diving, giving up her car and relying on public transportation and her bike, making her own laundry detergent and “mostly’’ giving up haircuts.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on “Cheapskate Psychology’’ where Weber talks about overspending, underspending, self control and whether people can learn to be frugal or whether it is a trait imprinted on the psyche early in life. She writes: “I often think there’s just something different about the way cheapskates think. . . . But as frugality rolls back into fashion, a lot of books promise that it’s trainable.’’

To that end, the author gives her readers resources in the form of books and Web sites for cheapos. “In the end, I hope that shopping less means that we can make conscious, ethical choices about who we consume when we do spend money,’’ she writes.

Weber, who was a staff reporter at Reuters and Newsday and has written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, gives us perhaps more than many would want to know about the subject of frugality in this book—but hey, isn’t that what being cheap is all about—getting more than you bargained for?

Mary Hance writes a frugal consumer column called “Ms. Cheap” for the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean and is the author of three books, including 99 Things to Save Money in Your Household Budget, due out later this month from Turner Publishing.

A broader critique of the American style of capitalism is offered in Juliet B. Schor’s The Overspent American: When the Cost of Lifestyle Overtakes the Value of Life. Six years ago, Schor, a Harvard University economist, made a big splash with the best-selling The Overworked American. In it she lent academic credence to a gut feeling shared by many but not widely articulated at the time: that Americans across a broad swath were being asked to devote more time and energy to work in a pattern that many found less rewarding and more exhausting. In this latest book, Schor takes on hyper-consumerism and less successfully (for one thing, this book’s themes are more familiar) makes the case against competitive buying.

Schor writes that an upscaling of competitive consumerism has settled on the land. Many people no longer merely try to keep up with the Joneses (they lived down the street and didn’t have much more money than us, anyway). Now, Schor posits, we compete with idealized “friends” we meet on television or through advertising. The lifestyle depicted and of most influence is decidedly upper middle class. This leads to buying beyond our means, leaving stress, too many possessions and too little satisfaction.

Even in an up economy, it’s a no-win, circular game. Schor writes: “The more our consumer satisfaction is tied into social comparisons . . . the less we achieve when consumption grows, because the people we compare ourselves to are also experiencing rising consumption.” Schor also spends some time with “downshifters,” people who have chosen to step off the perceived work-and-spend merry-go-round. They’ll accept less income and fewer things for less stress and more time to smell the flowers. Schor aptly points out that such choices aren’t automatic entrees into carefree, more genuine lives. One woman, for example, frets that she can no longer spend as much as other family members on holiday presents.

Give Schor credit for swimming against the tide. The buoyancy of financial markets combined with many years of low-inflation economic growth has many Americans feeling pretty complacent about their finances. They’ll happily indulge the urge for another wide-screen TV. But Schor offers a counter-argument to the recent glories of the gross domestic product. She writes that the GDP “fails to factor in pollution, parental time with children, the strength of the nation’s social fabric, or the chance of being mugged while walking down the street.” But what happens to economic growth if everyone takes Schor’s advice and significantly cuts consumption? After all, two-thirds of the GDP consists of consumer spending. Schor devotes a few pages near the end of the book to argue not all that convincingly that growth and much lower consumer spending can co-exist.

Reviewed by Neil Lipschutz.

Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web by business writer Evan I. Schwartz is not so much a critique of the economy as a guidepost to its possible future. In case you’ve been dwelling in a cave of late, the Internet is hot. Sizzling hot. The mere “.com” in a company name or announced plans by an established concern to enter the Internet fray is often enough to send a stock price skyrocketing. This despite the distinct lack of profits exhibited by many newer Internet-oriented companies.

Schwartz offers a knowledgeable guide to this new terrain. His essential point about this fledgling medium for commerce is a good one: you have to remember that the Internet is different. Start-up company and established retailer alike must deal with an audience, attitude, and set of expectations already established on the Web. Simply mimicking in cyberspace the way a company does business in the actual world is not likely to cut it.

Another key point stressed by Schwartz is that sellers of goods and services need to remember the Web is interactive. People want to participate, contribute, ask questions, and get quick answers. He writes: “Although great masses of people use it, the Web is not a mass medium and never will be. It’s an interactive medium, a niche medium, and ultimately a personal medium in which every user’s experience is different than every other’s.” Schwartz also writes insightfully about the products and services that lend themselves most easily to the Internet (those that are “information-rich”). He talks about Web currencies, branding, consumer data, and a host of other subjects. Like all books about dynamic issues, the informed reader will know of certain developments that took place after the book was printed and bound. Still, Schwartz’s vision transcends the occasional shifting detail and maintains its relevance even in the face of further technological change. This is quite a useful guide to where a lot of businesses may be headed.

Reviewed by Neil Lipschutz.

If China is the potential economic power in Asia, then Japan is the current and long-standing champion. But this champion has been on the ropes for a number of years. The Japanese economy is stagnant, and its blend of government-industrial cooperation is under fire. It was only a decade ago that Japan’s economy was the envy of the world. Many Americans openly lamented then that our system was only second best. If you’re wondering what happened, The Ministry: How Japan’s Most Powerful Institution Endangers World Markets will help. It’s an outright indictment of Japan’s powerful Ministry of Finance (called Okurasho in Japan), which influences all the key components of the Japanese economy. Author Peter Hartcher is an Australian journalist who lived in Japan for six years. He provides a detailed look at the inner workings of the Ministry of Finance. In fact, there is probably too much detail for many general readers. Hartcher opens a window on cronyism, wrongheaded policy, and a general distrust of market forces at the agency, all of which, he argues, have mightily helped Japan dig itself into a hole. This is a broad critique of Japan’s once much heralded bureaucracy, though much of the reporting stops after 1995. There has been some further deregulation since then, but the nation still has many structural inefficiencies. A decade ago, Japan seemed unstoppable. Now it seems unstartable.

Reviewed by Neal Lipschutz.

The informed American investor or export-oriented corporate executive now knows more about the doings in Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea than he or she imagined possible a year ago. It’s all due to the "Asian Contagion" or "Asian Flu," those snappy oversimplifications used to describe the various currency and macroeconomic woes afflicting these heretofore fast-growing Asian economies. What the problems of Asian nations ultimately mean for American businesses and financial markets remains to be seen. What is certain is that in an ever more tightly bound global economy (for better times and downturns), it’s important to know what’s going on on the other side of the globe.

So far, for the most part, China has stayed out of the doom and gloom headlines. It is, of course, a nation whose sheer size makes it of a different order. Its currency is still not convertible on world markets, its government is still officially Communist with a capital C, and yet this massive nation (population 1.3 billion and growing) has the most realistic chance of reordering the world’s economic hierarchy in the 21st century. Big Dragon: China’s Future: What It Means for Business, the Economy and the Global Order, by Daniel Burstein and Arne de Keijzer is everything you want to know about the place where such a large percentage of the world’s people reside. It’s also a well-informed, comprehensive, moderate, and cautiously optimistic treatise on the implications of China’s growing economic liberalization and power.

The wild swings in even informed American views toward China bespeak a nation still essentially a mystery to us. From euphoria at the first signs of economic opening in China (a billion-plus drinkers of Coca-Cola), the pendulum has swung to a decidedly dark view of U.S.