Reading For Dollars

QUICK: WHAT'S COMING to market faster than the next Web-based bookstore and just in time former reading season? A dune-size stack of books about: how to get rich quickly, slowly, happily, gracefully or any other way you want to amass the almighty dollar.

With more than a dozen new money books out now, there's no need to shlep Grisham and Steel to the shore. You can plan for the killing you're going to make when you're done lolling in the sun. Here's what's new.

THE INVESTOR'S ANTHOLOGY
by Charles D. Ellis with James R. Vettin
(297 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $29.95)

THE BRAINIAC'S BOOK, AND I mean that fondly. A good choice for anyone who cares about the history of investing before 1987, which was when many of us woke up and noticed the stock market for the first time. Ellis, a financial analyst with all the right credentials, has compiled more than 50 readings about the behavior of stocks, bonds and money-crazed crowds. Some are off-beat, like Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes," or an essay by the late Mike Royko on why he's happy when the market tanks (poor people don't own stocks). Stock-market students will like the more scholarly writings from today's leading investment thinkers. Grade: A.

WHAT WORKS ON WALL STREET
by James R O'Shaughnessy
(324 pages. McGraw-Hill. $29.95)

O'SHAUGHNESSY IS A CLASSIC "quant," or quantitative analyst: the only things that matterare the numbers. And there are plenty of them in this book. It's an intelligent treatment of the figures you'll encounter when weeding through stocks for the one that will make you rich. He uses statistics, tables, bar charts and straightforward (sometimes dry) prose to explain earnings, profits, dividends, book values and the host of ratios that should determine which stocks you buy. For serious stockpickers, this is a decent explication of the clues buried in financial statements. For the less serious, it might be more than you want to spend for more than you want to know. Grade: B-minus.

YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO MONEY HAPPINESS
by Henry S. Brock 
($48 pages. Legacy Publishing. $24.95)

TALK ABOUT TITLES THAT promise a lot. Buy it and raft to find $20 bills falling out of the pages, and you might get cranky. Read it, and you'll get crankier still. Every chapter ends with sincere little questions like "How did you feel as you pondered particular points of this chapter?" Chances are you felt lost. Though Brock includes anecdotes about his seven kids, he also delivers more density than most readers will be able to stand about correlation coefficients, modified endowment contracts and other incomprehensible stuff that might convince you you need a financial adviser like...hey, the author, who gives over the last four pages to his own ad. I'm still cranky, and the numerous pages Brock devotes to a defense of loads, commissions and fees don't help. There are some good tables and basic investment facts here, but nothing you can't get more clearly somewhere else. Grade: D.

INVESTMENT GURUS
by Peter J. Tanous 
(414 pages. New York Institute of Finance $24.95) and
HOW TO PICK STOCKS
by Fred W. Frailey 
(253 pages. Kiplinger/Times Business. $25)

THESE TWO INDEPENDENT offerings are essentially the same book: both are compilations of insightful interviews with today's investment leaders, and feature some of the same famous names like Mario Gabelli and Michael Price. But each has its own flavor.

Tanous devotes more space to academicians like Nobel Prize winner William Sharpe, who developed the most widely used measure of stock-market risk, and Rex Sinquefield, spiritual leader of the booming you-can't-beat-the-market-so-just-buy-index-funds movement. This book is an anecdotal progression through stock-market theory and practice; and ends with the author's investment philosophy: use index funds and a few high-performance-managed funds to pump your portfolio. By the end of this book, you'll feel ready to assemble your own fund mix.

By the end of Frailey's book, you'll also be ably entertained and informed, but perhaps less clear about your own investment choices. Frailey lays out a broad menu of investment approaches but avoids picking favorites. His book is worth it for the breadth (there are 27 well-known fund managers here), for his honesty (Frailey, deputy editor at Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, admits he is a lousy stockpicker himself) and for the very entertaining interview with the managers of the top-ranked Kaufmann fund, Lawrence Auriana and Hans Utsch, who bicker away as they reveal a number of strategic secrets. Grades: "Gurus," A-minus; "How to," B.

FINANCIAL PEACE
by Dave Ramsey
(276 pages. Viking. $21.95)

YOU WANT FINANCIAL ADvice from a guy who lost $4 million in real estate and claims his Christian fervor qualifies him to write a money book? This is representative of a new spate of "God wants you to be rich" books, and it makes up for a lack of financial details with moral certainty, quotes from the New Testament and friendly little inserts from the author's supportive wife, Sharon ("Let's face it: women love to shop"). Read this one only ffyou're looking for absolutes like "You should not invest in guaranteed investment contracts or bonds" in your retirement plan, tips like "a foolish man devours all he has" and chapter-ending bullet points called "Peace Puppies." Eeeuuuw. Grade: F.

ERNST & YOUNG'S TOTAL FINANCIAL PLANNER
by Robert B. Coplan, Robert J. Garner, Barbara 
S. Jlaasch and Charles L. Rather
(531 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $39.95, including software)

FOUR AUTHORS DON'T SPOIL the broth, because this is one of the best, clearest and most comprehensive personal-finance guides around. Its most recent version includes software that allows you to calculate fun stuff like how much you'll need every month to retire or send the kids to college. Ernst @ Young, a major accounting firm, does a better job than many with the legal and tax aspects of investing, insurance and most lifecycle events. True confessions: this is the book I pull off my shelf when I forget a factoid. It's all in there. Grade: A.

DUN & BRADSTREET GUIDE TO YOUR INVESTMENTS 1997
by Nancy Dunnan 
(450 pages. Harper Perennial. $19)

THIS STRAIGHTFORWARD, educational guide has been updated and republished every year since the mid-'50s because it's good. For beginning investors, Dunnan offers definitions and explanations of market basics; tbr those further along there are stock and fund recommendations, with phone numbers included. Someone just starting to get interested in investing could buy this book, learn a lot, put it on the shelf and pull it down in a year or two and still keep learning, even fiat couple more editions have come out by then. Grade: A-minus (cheap paper).