Time magazine called billionaire T. Boone Pickens a real-life J.R. Ewing. Both are Texas oil barons, and they're quite wealthy, thanks to plenty of business savvy and an energetic affinity for taking risks. But it's unlikely the fictional J.R. would've written a book like The First Billion is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future. In this memoir-cum-business-book, Pickens is just as up-front about his battle with depression as he is about his various corporate takeovers in an interesting mix of personal revelations and professional excitement. Every chapter includes "Booneisms" like "Don't rush the monkey and you'll see a better show" and "In a deal between friends, there's no place for a wolverine." Pickens also debunks myths about the oil industry and details his impact on corporate practices: "Through our takeover attempts, my team and I introduced the concept that reigns supreme today – shareholder value." After 40 years at the helm of Mesa Petroleum, he started up BP Capital, a commodities and equities firm, during his seventh decade. Today, at 80, he's one of the world's highest – paid hedge fund managers. Pickens' no-nonsense, you-can-do-it-too approach works, whether he's extolling the benefits of physical fitness, offering an energy plan for America or reminding readers that "Action leads to more action. One deal leads to another deal."

Lawyers are good! At least that's the inherent message behind a superb book by renowned economist Hernando DeSoto. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Succeeds in the West and Fails Everywhere Else is essential reading for lay economists, amateur public policy wonks or lawyers down on their profession. The Mystery of Capital is also a must for anyone revisiting the American economic landscape and the very basic legal structures supporting capitalism and free trade.

Named one of the greatest Latin American thinkers by Time magazine, DeSoto has crafted a challenging and fresh thinking theory that flies in the face of traditional notions of Third World poverty. While traditionalists say poverty has roots in educational and capital voids, DeSoto expertly and cogently makes the case that the Third World is not financially bereft. Far from it, he says. The Third World poor do have things but lack legal process to protect property and create capital. The underpinning of wealth in the West rests on the carefully codified legal meaning of property that Westerners take for granted. Did you fall asleep on The Wealth of Nations in a college library way back when? If so, you'll appreciate the way DeSoto revisits Adam Smith and reacquaints us with the legal structures that most Third World countries lack. Despite its theoretical direction, The Mystery of Capital is refreshingly anecdotal and unstuffy as DeSoto explains how, for once, lawyers are the good guys.

Time Management From the Inside Out is the latest book from popular organizing guru Julie Morgenstern. She's appeared on Oprah, National Public Radio and a host of other shows to talk about her unique approach to organizing work and home spaces. But who wants to read another super-organized Martha Stewart-type giving the rest of us tips on time management? Here's the catch: Morgenstern is one of us. Before she changed her ways, she was messy, disorganized and late for everything. The author describes a day when she wanted to go for a walk with her newborn baby. She started to collect the things they needed to go outside. Two hours later she was ready, but baby had waited long enough, filling the air with screams of hunger and exhaustion. New mom Morgenstern was ready to scream herself. What she did instead was change her habits and create organized time for herself. After reading this book, you'll know you can, too. If you can't get a task done, Morgenstern says, you may be the wrong person for the job. Learn to delegate to ease time pressures. Or maybe the task you've set for yourself is overly complex. Learn to simplify your work and break large projects into smaller steps. If you are constantly being interrupted during tasks, or have a disorganized partner, confront the offender. After all, you only have so much time in your day.

Two follow-ups to investment-advice bestsellers are now in bookstores, preaching the virtues of long-term holdings of individual stocks. Each, in its own way, also takes issue with the conventional investment wisdom as it is doled out on Wall Street.

Both You Have More Than You Think: The Motley Fool Guide to Investing What You Have by David and Tom Gardner and How to Retire Rich by James O'Shaughnessy showcase an unswerving belief that when investing for the long term (10 to 30 years or more) common stocks are the investor's best bet, indeed her only real choice. The stock market will go up and down, sometimes dramatically, but in the end the trend is up. Both books demonstrate average long-term stock returns are much higher than those of other investments (bonds, money market funds, etc.). Throw in the power of compounding, and the nest egg you've got on college tuition day or at your gold-watch retirement dinner will vary significantly depending on where you left your money all those years. Money manager O'Shaughnessy is particularly good at these relative investment comparisons, using theoretical couples at different stages of life.

It doesn't hurt either book's case, of course, that they are being published during one of the great historic bull markets in stocks. Returns on stocks in the past three or four years have blown away the longer-term annual average 11% return cited in You Have More Than You Think. While both books urge investors to stay the course through good times and bad (O'Shaughnessy devotes a lot of space to how to avoid panic selling), the books' basic messages are a lot easier to swallow as the good times roll.

If the names of authors David Gardner and Tom Gardner (they're brothers) don't immediately ring a bell, you're more likely to know them by their shared persona, Motley Fool. Founders of a burgeoning online empire of financial information and discourse under the Motley Fool name, the brothers epitomize the emergence in the past few years of individual investors and Internet investing and stock talk as crucial elements in the overall stock market.

You Have More Than You Think follows the brothers' best-selling The Motley Fool Investment Guide. In this latest tome, ostensibly about getting started investing, they range widely from anti-lottery diatribes to sound advice on buying a car or home and avoiding credit card debt. When they get around to investing, they propose a relatively small number of well-established stocks, often of big consumer products companies. Whether or not you agree with their advice or with their generally anti-financial establishment stance, you're unlikely to find a more brightly written and fun-to-read book offering investment guidance. After all, as they happily admit, we're talking about two English majors here.

That in a sense is the essential point Motley Fool tries to make, that you don't have to be an expert with an advanced degree in finance to understand and successfully invest in financial markets. The authors don't like mutual funds (they generally underperform the market), they think full-service brokers are often not worth the money (they don't like commissions), and they don't like the financial press (accused of encouraging short-term thinking). No strangers to taking on convention, the Gardners think individual investors, picking specific stocks for the long term, can outperform the market.

That last thought is shared by James O'Shaughnessy, founder and chairman of the O'Shaughnessy Funds, a family of no-load mutual funds. In How to Retire Rich he makes a clear case for his own investment strategy, which against conventional Wall Street wisdom, doesn't involve any fundamental analysis of a company's actual business prospects. Since the book focuses on retirement, the author is a big plugger for starting to save now and staying invested for the long term. One of his key messages is to get started saving, whether you are in your 20s and retirement appears to inhabit another universe or whether you are closing in on retirement age and have given up on being prepared because you haven't started saving. This narrowly focused book follows O'Shaughnessy's best-selling What Works on Wall Street. As in the earlier book, he relies on strategies based on 45 years' worth of price performance of a large number of stocks. He offers a variety of easy-to-understand plans, each differing in risk/reward levels, that feature a collection of 25 to 50 stocks selected on technical criteria and regularly rotated.

When two hairs unite, a chain reaction ensues. They attract another hair. And another. And another.

"Before long," explains author Gordon MacKenzie, "where there was once nothing, this tangled impenetrable mass has begun to form." It is this resulting mass of hair this hairball that drives MacKenzie to write: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace.

MacKenzie's guide is, in fact, 224 pages of wisdom and artistry that speaks to rank-and-file workers about creativity, and to corporate leaders about the structure and goals of their enterprises.

The message to workers, honed in his 30 years with Hallmark Cards: Break the stranglehold of company convention and commit yourselves to the creative experience if you are to migrate from that tangled web the corporate hairball. Only then can you learn to glide in orbit, tethered by gravity to the hairball but unleashed from conformity and mediocrity.

His message to the corporate leaders: Traditional corporate structure and managers tend to stifle creativity. Hallmark, in fact, recognized MacKenzie's talents, eventually granting him the title, "Creative Paradox." He became the bridge between Hallmark's creative forces and its executives a self-styled corporate holy man. It was a role in which he excelled. MacKenzie writes that as the Creative Paradox, he had no power. Maybe. But he certainly had the perception of power. And that was what counted. Soon, others began to seek his guidance.

For three years, employees outlined their creative ideas to him. For three years, he gave all of them the pronouncement, "Good idea." The effect was dramatic within the institution. A boss, speculating that the Creative Paradox had power, must have thought, "If the Creative Paradox supports the idea, maybe I'd better support it too," surmises MacKenzie.

And so, with the blessing of the Creative Paradox, ideas gained momentum.

"Did you always tell people their ideas were good?" someone later asked him at a conference. "Yes," came his answer.

"Were all the ideas good?" "Almost all." MacKenzie's reasoning: Most companies are peppered with people quick to reject ideas. "I was simply leveling the imbalance . . ." he writes.

The author also gives his view of the classic corporate structure the pyramid. It is a tomb. Better to be a tree, with creators at top, nourished by the roots, or managers.

And what of the hairballs? They are an inescapable part of the "galaxy of corporate symbiosis," as MacKenzie explains through a wonderfully childlike drawing.

Even MacKenzie, in his early years as a design supervisor, "became a little hairball," he observes. Satellites writers and artists orbited around him. And his system, in turn, orbited the big hairball. MacKenzie describes his own ascension into orbit as emerging from the company cocoon and slipping the bonds of the hairball. "Orbiting," he writes, "is following your bliss."

Prestbo is markets editor of the Wall Street Journal and Sease is a WSJ editor and writer. That's one clue of how plugged in this book is. And the authors take a pretty orderly approach, outlining the risks, rewards, vehicles to approach (such as American depositary receipts) and those to avoid (such as foreign bonds). Issues such as privatization, primitive management, and the quirks of emerging markets are touched on. It would be hard to top Jim Rogers' great international investing book from a few years back, Investment Biker. This book doesn't try, being more of a dry, journalistic reference. And no one should assume that one book is enough to get a handle on such a large topic. Still, Prestbo and Sease do a yeoman's job of defining some of the parameters, telling how to choose the right kind of money manager, and outlining how to structure an international portfolio. Result? The book is a great way to prepare for testing some deep waters.

THE BUSINESS OF BLOOMBERG

Michael Bloomberg is one of the most intriguing characters of the late 20th century. When he took a multimillion-dollar retirement from Salomon Brothers, instead of investing it in the stock market (where he arguably had some expertise) or sailing around the world for a few years, he immediately plunged a large portion of his stake into a brand new company with very dicey chances of success. Now, almost 20 years later, it looks like his bet was a solid one. The name Bloomberg stands for innovation in the world of financial data-gathering. In many ways Michael Bloomberg is the Ted Turner of the 1990s.

Several years ago Bloomberg hired "Wall Street Journal" reporter Matthew Winkler to spearhead his news operation, and Winkler has also been on tap to help with this book which has been several years in the making. The book is told as though one were interviewing Bloomberg, with a narrative as smooth and readable as natural conversation. Of course there's a lot of self-aggrandizement, but it seems deserved. Bloomberg has accomplished a lot. Plus, he is not so full of himself that he can't boil some of his success down to some simple, transferable maxims. As a result, his book is entertaining, informative and potentially helpful to people who take risks with their own businesses.

LESSONS FOR BUSINESS

This slim volume is unusually eloquent in relating the trends of contemporary popular culture to the structure of authority in working groups. Hirschorn has been studying the subject at many companies and has concluded that traditional models of authority have lost their effectiveness. The cases he presents here support the argument for more vulnerability and openness in the post-modern organization. Hirschorn has learned some of these lessons the hard way. His best examples come not from instances where he went into the organization and saved the day. The most telling lessons arise out of consulting engagements that appear headed for disaster. The value of such encounters can be much higher than the typical glib assessments and formulas applied by many organizational thinkers.

WORKING TOGETHER

Not since Michael Schrage's No More Teams has there been such as nice, case-by-case analysis of successful collaborations. The authors study famous teams such as the Manhattan Project, Black Mountain College, as well as groups led by James Carville, Steve Jobs and others. They examine closely how great work is created in groups. The reader can take many of these lessons and apply them to a wide range of collaborative situations. The literature of collaborative effort has expanded in recent years with the increased focus on working in teams and putting together groups on a task basis. There's also been a lot of new work on the evolution of thinking within groups. Bennis and Biederman remind us of the many precedents worth examining not only for the exemplary work but for the creative process that went into it.

THE FIRST CHOICE IN MARKETING

The first couple of chapters set the tone for this novel book. Chapter 1 is called "Advertising: The Last Choice in Marketing." Chapter 2 is called "Personal Recommendation: The First Choice in Marketing." Need we say more? Probably not, but it is refreshing to see a marketing book that deals with such basic elements as trust, helping people and educating customers. Particularly for the small business, these discussions are invaluable. Yes, there's also the (sigh) chapter on Internet marketing, and chapter on the marketing plan. Even those items are put in the proper perspective. One would think the authors, with 50,000 copies in print of the first edition of their book, might have some say in the title. But no, the publishers rejected the author's choice of title: "It Worked for Jesus!"

BEST BET FOR INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS

Independent contractors — the fastest-growing class of workers in America — face organizational, tax, legal, accounting and other hurdles they are ill prepared for, even with an entire previous career that might have been spent in the womb of a corporation. Even though they have tacked on a snappier title than one used to expect from Nolo, this has all the quality of that reliable self-help law imprint. It walks the reader through the basics of choosing a form for your business, dealing with start-up concerns, the myriad tax paying and reporting issues, and introductory information on recordkeeping, intellectual property and agreements. The book contains many sample agreements. The enclosed floppy disk also contains independent contractor agreements.

This second edition of Fishman's book could be considered a companion title to the above, particularly for independent contractors who hire each other. The emphasis on hiring rather than being an independent contractor means there are more laws and regulations to keep track of. And although there are many benefits to using IC's instead of hiring employees, important distinctions must be maintained which keep the parties separate in the eyes of the law. This book covers everything from properly classifying different kinds of contractors, from family members to consultants, and also provides forms in both printed and floppy disk form.

MIND OVER MONEY

Savvy recordkeeping, diligent tax deductions, and smart shopping are the author's remedies for the worst of all problems for the self-employed: cash flow. It's the item that sinks more small startups than any other, and one of the things the newly self-employed find it easiest to underestimate. This book is almost like a personal finance guide for the self-employed, and the author has tried most of the tips she advocates. The entire book, but particularly the "Annual Checkup" at the end, will serve as a ready reference for anyone caught in the adventure of being self-employed.

SELLING SMART

As a big fan of Schiffman's early book Cold Calling Techniques, I've been looking forward to this one. Schiffman is an aggressive and savvy sales trainer with a talent for organizing the tools of prospecting, interviewing, presenting and closing. His engaging, no-nonsense style is like a focused refresher course on the things really important to selling. And in one chapter he tells more about attitudes and traits of success than some entire books can encompass. Any sales rep looking for a book to help them move ahead now shouldn't overlook this one.
 

It may well be the id of our economic decision-making. We spend with impunity, use our charge cards with abandon, and deliver unto ourselves the material goods our parents could not afford. We know better, of course. But on a powerful instinctual level, we don't care. Like Freudian characters on a whirlwind shopping spree, we are driven to dismantle our financial futures as we erode the spiritual side of our financial lives. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way, as these authors will attest.

The authors of two new books would have us conquer ruinous spending tendencies and set forth on a path of psychic fulfillment in our economic lives. As we embark on this path, authors of three other books would guide us in making the right choices in investing in the stock market, in mutual funds, and, ultimately, in ourselves. Let's begin with a key question: since we are capable of achieving wealth, why aren't we rich? Do we feel guilt for wanting more than we have? Insecurity about what we already possess? These emotions are potent psychological barriers to wealth. The Courage to Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance, shows how to overcome those hurdles. Abundance is available, promises Suze Orman, the book's widely known author and financial planner. Riches are attainable. But emotional obstacles can keep us from having what we want and fully enjoying what is ours.

Orman should know. The PBS luminary and author of the best-selling book The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom lost her courage after discovering that a burglar had plundered the files of her young business. While recovering from that devastating setback, she began to look at her personal life in a new way, following a course that eventually restored her pocketbook and replenished her personal well-being. In this, Orman's third book, the author tells how we can change our lives, too, leaving behind our mistakes as we seek to achieve personal and monetary wealth.

The author provides plenty of financial guidance, from home-buying to opening an Individual Retirement Account and charitable giving. She tackles common-sense questions typically not addressed in other money-management books: am I liable for the debts my spouse incurred before our marriage? (No.) Do I have a legal duty to support my spouse during marriage? (Yes.) One chapter focuses on what is yours, mine and ours in a relationship addressing many of the questions people face in second marriages or life partnerships.

Money, explains Orman, has its own life force that affects all aspects of our lives. If we neglect our checking accounts and accumulate belongings for which we have no immediate need, we strip ourselves of more than money. When we face financial bankruptcy, is it any wonder we face spiritual bankruptcy, too? The opposite condition the one to which we all aspire is Orman's vision of a rich and radiantly abundant life, where there is spiritual fullness and clarity of purpose, where we value people, money, and material things in that order.

While Orman delves into the courageous side of wealth, author Maria Nemeth's forte is the psychological power money holds over each of our lives. Nemeth's book, The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment, asks us to view our relationship with money as a metaphor for the other connections in our lives.

In short, basic assumptions we make about ourselves and our personal associations also govern our decisions about money. To understand this is to grasp motivations in nearly all our activities: Why we spend. Why we save. Why we go through life without properly defining what we want to achieve. Why we neglect or insidiously misdirect our personal lives. What's more, once we are swept in a misguided direction, how do we recognize where we went wrong and embark, instead, on the road to abundance in our lives and in our bank accounts? We are so immersed in the culture of currency, explains Nemeth, a clinical psychologist, that asking us to look at our relationship with money is like asking a fish to look at the water it's swimming in. Maybe so. But Nemeth does a commendable job of getting us to examine the lives we create for ourselves so that we may better recognize our motivations and fulfill our standards of integrity relating to our handling of money. Once we have identified our inner blocks to progress, writes Nemeth, we can abandon old beliefs, conquer obstacles, and willingly accept support from others. This, she promises, will set us on the path to mastering the energy of money.

Of course, as we begin to master money, we must learn how to properly invest it. The Book of Investing Wisdom: Classic Writings by Great Stock-Pickers and Legends of Wall Street serves as a foundation. Edited by Peter Krass, this anthology is a classic in a sea of modernistic investment theory, with contributions by stock-pickers and legends such as Warren E. Buffett and Abby Joseph Cohen.

The introduction traces Wall Street from its historical beginnings. Wall Street in Manhattan, for example, started as a 12-foot-high wooden stockade the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam built to protect themselves from repeated attacks from the British. After the Dutch surrender, the British in 1685 built a road alongside the former stockade site and named it Wall Street. American securities trading and modern analysis, naturally, came later. But the connection to history seems evident still in Warren E. Buffett's contribution to the analysis section. Buffett studied under the late Benjamin Graham, who in 1934 co-wrote a seminal book on securities analysis and whose writings are included in the anthology.

Contributors also include gurus Peter Lynch, made famous for transforming Fidelity's Magellan Fund into a $13 billion powerhouse, and Abby Joseph Cohen, the woman who's assessments of impending market cycles are among the most closely watched on Wall Street. Martin E. Zweig of the top-ranked newsletter, Zweig Forecast, tells why it's sometimes better to sell short (bet that a stock will go down). And real estate magnate Donald Trump tells us why, on occasion, he fights back and wins. His telling observation: Money always talks in the end.

Making sound investment choices is central to the next book, The Winning Portfolio: Choosing Your 10 Best Mutual Funds by author Paul B. Farrell. There's no mystery to becoming wealthy. It takes discipline, writes Farrell, director of CBS MarketWatch's Mutual Fund Center. But it need not take all your spare time.

Indeed, Farrell's strategies for investing are refreshing and ingenious in their simplicity. Among them: do your own investing and focus on mutual funds. Start saving early in life (or right away if it's late) and do so with practiced regularity. Take full advantage of your employer-sponsored 401(k) plan. Select a portfolio strategy that meets your needs (such as income preservation v. aggressive growth), and hold onto your funds once you buy them.

Most appealing is that Farrell does much of the work for the investor by researching and compiling America's top 100 superstar funds. The top 100 is a welcome relief to anyone starting out in the 10,000-plus mutual fund world. The book conveniently breaks worthwhile funds into useful categories (index funds, aggressive growth, global and international, bond funds, and so on). Best of all, Farrell provides text on each selection, giving insight into fund managers, fund performance, and the investment strategies.

There's another facet of mutual funds that many investors will want to consider. In recent years, value or socially responsible funds increasingly have allowed investors to choose portfolios that mirror their own values. Investing with Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference, by authors Hal Brill, Jack A. Brill, and Cliff Feigenbaum, is well-timed to meet this burgeoning market now a $1.3 trillion industry.

If you want to avoid companies that invest in tobacco or alcohol products, these funds can help you achieve your goals. Hope to avoid companies that engage in animal testing or make military weapons? The authors guide you through the process. The Brills are financial consultants specializing in social investing. Feigenbaum is publisher of the social industry newsletter, GreenMoney Journal. They identify funds that emphasize protecting wildlife or sustaining the environment. Other funds allow you to invest in your own community through affordable housing, small business, or community development lending. The book also tells how you can work to increase corporate responsibility on issues you care about through shareholder activism.

The writers have dubbed social investing natural investing. They define it as an act in which personal values and personal finance dwell together in mutually supportive symbiosis. Their concept is inviting: when we integrate our values with our money, we can achieve financial goals while making the world a better place to live.

Loretta Kalb is a writer in California.