Books like Wild Ride — picked by fans

I teach negotiation techniques, and this is a seminal work. It is valuable to anyone and everyone, whether in business or not. This is Mr. Trump's Bible, as he was a student of Mr. Cohen.

The title couldn't be more descriptive. It's like being able to read another person's mind or having their playbook. Wanna get what you want? Read the book and follow its lessons. Anybody can be convinced of anything given the right circumstances. Messrs Cohen and Gantry are in complete agreement on that point.

Fraud is now 40% of all crime. It is the crime we are most likely to come across. Yet the authorities seem powerless to stop it. This book explains how frauds work and, armed with that knowledge, how to prevent them happening to you. Doug has years of experience and understands the world of fraud as well as any fraudster. Read it and keep safe. 

The irony surrounding Becky Bloomwood (aka ‘The Shopaholic’) makes me smile. She’s a financial journalist who is constantly in a pickle with money. Her financial worries cause her stress, and the best way to deal with them is to go shopping, which continues the debt spiral. 

Becky is flawed but lovable, and I can relate to her predicament. How many of us try to justify our small actions that we know deep down are wrong? The book is harmless, light-hearted, easy to read, and starts off a series of other Shopaholic books. I can’t remember the plots of many of them, but I certainly remember Becky Bloomwood. 

Published in 1990, this book reflects the era in which it was written and may be slightly over-written for modern tastes. The short chapters draw you through the story as we see inside the heads of different characters, so the reader is often one step ahead of Allie, the protagonist. As Allie’s subdued flatmate starts to idolise her, I was keen to discover whether easy-going Allie would realise something was wrong. When their roles start to change halfway through the novel, it seemed things could only go one way and I started turning the pages faster. This is an interesting early example of the genre and I can see why it was made into a film.

My previous recommendations describe the rise of American finance capitalism, leading to the roaring 1920s, the 1929 debacle, and reform legislation. A Piece of the Action takes us forward into the post-World War Two period, when middle-class Americans moved from being cautious savers to become borrowers and investors on a massive scale. The author is an experienced journalist who captures these more recent developments in highly readable style.

Smart Money: The Step by Step Personal Finance Guide to Crush Debt is for the Millennial ready to act and looking for the facts. Imagine a no-nonsense personal finance book with 9 steps to get out of debt. When people start their professional lives with credit card debt and student loan debt, they have the choice to get comfortable with it and figure out ways to “manage it.” Ms. McElroy wants the reader to be deeply uncomfortable with it and to “slay it.” Along the way, she covers the financial basics, unlike many financial books that assume a level of reader knowledge that may not yet exist.

I always knew cryptography was political, but I had no idea how political until I read this book. Seeing the subject I am so fascinated by through the words of a political journalist was truly eye-opening. Steven Levy navigates a deeply fascinating period in modern technological history – the late twentieth-century battles between governments trying to maintain power and control over communications, and technologists who saw the fledgling internet as an opportunity to build a new world. Cryptography, which protects digital communications, sat plum on the frontline between these two communities, hence battles over cryptography turned into so-called 'crypto wars’ (although nobody died). Nobody who read this book was surprised with much that Edward Snowden had to say to the world in 2013 – Snowden was just reportage of the latest chapter in the same ongoing conflict.

We presume all animals love their habitat and their lot in life; birds love the sky, snakes love the grass, and bears, of course, love the woods. But not so much for the star of this book; a petulant little penguin who seems to have gotten up on the wrong side of the ice floe. He’s crabby about the too-white snow, the too-cold temperature, the too-salty sea, and his too-lookalike colony of penguin pals. Basically, everything makes him crabby, but in a way that’s amusing. After a day of carping, a wise walrus gives him a lecture about appreciating the beauty of his world and the love of his companions. This improves his attitude…for about two pages.

By the end of the book, the little grump is back to his old self, griping about the weather and the early darkness. It’s refreshing to see a character who doesn’t completely transform… show more.

Jeanne Steig wrote a giddy delightful poem for each letter of the alphabet. The poems are replete with weird and wonderful words. The goofy illustrations by William Steig tickle your eyes. One of my favorite poems is "Mishmash". Notice all of the many M words in Mishmash: mallet, misguided, minimize, mix, milk. Could Myron majestically mash potatoes? Mmmm, no.

Mishmash
Making mashed potatoes, Myron?
Must you mix them with the hammer?
This bizarre, misguided method
Causes quite a katzenjammer.

Might you add the milk and butter
In a more majestic manner?
Might a mallet not be better?
That would minimize the clamor.

There is one very excellent reason to read this book: It’s hilarious. Ms. King delivers her memoir of a 1950s-60s Southern childhood with searing, laugh-til-you-cry wit as she turns classic Southern tropes on their eccentric heads. Everything from the ubiquitous obsession with lineage (“Who are your people?”) to a mother’s nickname for a wayward child (“Mama Tried”) receives its due. It’s a must-read if you want to understand Southern culture or if only to make acquaintance with Ms. King’s most famous one-liner, an admission of the indelible effects of Southern training even in failed ladies: “No matter what sex I slept with, I never smoked on the street.”