Quick Read

Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It by Stuart E. Lucas

Congratulations! You've just come into some cash. But what to do next? With $1 trillion per year expected to pass from one generation of Americans to another over the next decade, it's a question more people than ever are facing. Writ-ing from the perspective of one who has managed wealth for clients, as well as received it (he's an heir of Carnation Foods' founder), Lucas shows step by step how to set investment goals that match your needs and values, pick the right advisers, manage taxes and avoid the pitfalls that shrink fortunes and fracture relationships.

The Bully of Bentonville by Anthony Bianco

As Wal-Mart has grown into the biggest retailer, the stack of books about it has grown, too. But if you read only one, pick this profile. Bianco uses the stories of the behemoth's insiders, as well as its adversaries, to portray a company with one foot planted firmly in the rural Ozark past and another marching at the front ranks of the globalized future. Whether Bianco's admiring Wal-Mart's masterful use of information technology and cost discipline, or damning its scorched-earth tactics toward suppliers and unions, the author gives his readers the most complete and readable accounting of the true cost of Wal-Mart's "everyday low prices."

The Disposable American by Louis Uchitelle

In the two decades since American business swapped the postwar model of secure employment for the "lean and mean" ethos of relentless cost cutting and ultraflexible labor markets, more than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs. Management gurus may trumpet layoffs as springboards to new opportunity, but for the laid-off workers Uchitelle meets--ranging from airline mechanics to bankers and top corporate managers--they're mostly tickets to lower incomes, shattered self-esteem and broken families. Uchitelle, a New York Times reporter, deserves credit for humanizing the costs of mass layoffs, but he comes up short on ways to soften the pain in an era of fierce competition. As he points out, though, so have the politicians of both parties.