The passing year was a particularly bountiful one in terms of the fascinating books it brought forth. Whether for your own edification or as holiday gifts, you may wish to choose from among these diverse gems:

1. Excepting only the Internet, the greatest technological innovation of modern times is the synthesis of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which has revolutionized the production of shale hydrocarbons—most notably natural gas—and bids fair to revitalize the American manufacturing economy. While there is still no one book that takes in the whole phenomenon for me, I offer two that were published this year, and recommend they be read in tandem.

They are The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman, which is essentially a series of parallel lives of the major actors in this defining moment, and The Boom by Russell Gold, which goes somewhat deeper into the geology and the engineering, to good effect. (Both authors are reporters for The Wall Street Journal.) For those of us intensely interested in the shale revolution and its long-term economic and geopolitical implications for our country, The Frackers taken together with The Boom becomes one very helpful book.

2. As a self-confessed economics geek, I can never be perfectly sure, but I think you will be both enlightened and charmed by Diane Coyle’s little (140 pages) volume GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. It is, as the title suggests, an accessible history of the effort to quantify national income, beginning seriously in the 1930s under Simon Kuznets and accelerating after WWII with the advent of the computer. Ms. Coyle deftly renders the extent to which the growing conceit that GDP could be very finely calibrated may have led to the illusion that national income could be effectively managed by government fiscal policy. Instead, she finds any number of assumptions, anomalies and ambiguities in GDP accounting which impeach its accuracy and hence its utility. Great, geeky fun.

3. As someone who entered the business in the first great era of mass-marketed mutual funds in the 1960s, I particularly loved Michael R. Yogg’s short, very readable book Passion for Reality: The Extraordinary Life of the Investing Pioneer Paul Cabot. Cabot, from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Boston, was the founder of one of the first mutual funds, State Street Investment Corporation. If you can believe it, he was also—even while running State Street—the treasurer of Harvard University, and the person responsible for managing its endowment. Cabot was a superb investor, a legendary director of companies (on a par with his great friend Sidney Weinberg), and a pioneer in bringing professionally managed investing within reach of the common man. All advisors interested in the development of their craft will profit from—and richly enjoy—this lovely book.

4. I read with interest Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. It’s an authoritative, fast-moving and well-written account of one of the age’s leading entrepreneurs and the revolution he has wrought. Though many of the supporting players come and go rapidly in the book—as early recruits get rich and/or burn out—the somewhat enigmatic central character abides. If at the end of the book I still had no idea when or how Amazon is ever going to become consistently profitable, The Everything Store was nonetheless a very worthwhile and entertaining read.

5. One of my Books of the Year a couple of years back was Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge, about how America employed the private sector—and within limitations, the free-market system—to produce the planes, ships, tanks and guns that ultimately overwhelmed the Axis powers in WWII. Readers who enjoyed that work—and many of you have said that you did—will want to read A. J. Baime’s The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War. As the subtitle indicates, this book focuses on the role of the automobile industry in general, and the Ford Motor Company in particular, in converting to war production on a tremendous scale.

The irony is that the elder Henry Ford was, with Charles Lindbergh, among the highest-profile opponents of America’s involvement in the war during the long run-up to Pearl Harbor. And so it fell to Henry’s son Edsel, by then president of the company, to spearhead the automaker’s conversion—and indeed expansion—into mass production of the B-24 Liberator bomber. (At its peak, Ford was producing 500 of these planes per month.) The story plays out against the backdrop of Edsel Ford’s struggles with his aging and increasingly irrational father, which ended in the son’s untimely death in 1943. At the Teheran Conference later that year, Stalin famously offered a toast: “To American production, without which this war would have been lost.” The Arsenal of Democracy goes a long way toward explaining how this was true, and is a crackling good read into the bargain.

6. I have on a number of occasions recommended Lawrence Cunningham’s peerless The Essays of Warren Buffett through several editions. Prepared with the active participation of the Oracle himself, this book organizes excerpts from decades of Buffett’s annual shareholder letters thematically, making it relatively easy to follow his evolving trains of thought on a wide variety of subjects and issues.

This fall, Professor Cunningham published Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values, which I consider an absolute must-read for advisors. As the question of whether and in what form Berkshire can survive Buffett grows actuarially more pressing, investors and advisors have good reason to question the sustainability of a $300 billion conglomerate with 50 direct subsidiaries, organized and managed lo this half century by a genius, indeed the greatest capital allocator who ever lived.

The great service rendered by Professor Cunningham in this book is, however, not primarily predictive. He seeks rather to show the iron similarities which have drawn entrepreneurial businesses to the Berkshire fold over the decades, and which in turn attracted Buffett to those companies. Here he finds a remarkable consistency, in timeless qualities like thrift, integrity, autonomy and multigenerational entrepreneurship (a number of Berkshire companies are run by the fourth generation of the founding family, and one by a fifth.) On these merits alone, this book is one of the great chronicles of corporate history.

The reader may conclude at the end of this exceptional volume that the thesis remains unproven. That is, one may legitimately be unconvinced that the company will or even should continue in its present form. What one sees clearly, instead, is that the whole seems to be worth less than the sum of its brilliantly assembled and managed parts, because of qualities that remain consistent throughout—as the book’s subtitle has it, “the enduring value of values.”

7. From Walter Isaacson, author of the magisterial 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, now comes The Innovators, which may be the definitive history of computing, or more accurately of the men and (vastly underappreciated) women who brought computing from its infancy to its present, and still rapidly evolving, state. This book demands to be read by any advisor seeking a full understanding of how information technology got where it is and where it may be going. (Isaacson makes the case that the next great leap is not artificial intelligence but a symbiosis between man and machine on a hitherto unimaginable scale.)

Other themes which come out of The Innovators include the extraordinary extent to which progress in computing has been intensely collaborative, and the ways in which so many seminal participants in that progress can be found at the interstices of technology and art. Even an innumerate technophobe such as your present correspondent found this book highly and rewardingly readable.

8. Finally, although I can hardly be objective about it, comes the one genuine “book of the year” for advisors. It’s Roy Diliberto’s Basic Truths for Financial Life Planners, and the reason I can’t claim any objectivity is that I love the book so much that I broke my own rule, and accepted an invitation to write the Foreword.

Basic Truths is that exquisitely rare book, an immensely practical guide to a successful, profitable and happy financial planning practice, written clearly and compellingly by one of the industry’s most notably successful practitioners. It presents Roy’s and his firm’s beliefs and behaviors in the quest for what I describe as an attainable utopia. That is, a practice which always places the client’s interest first, which integrates his emotional and financial needs, which inculcates in its partners and staff a shared sense of values and mission, and which  therefore becomes a genuinely happy experience for all its stakeholders.

Consciously or unconsciously, we all came into the profession of financial advice for three reasons: to do good, to do well by doing good, and to be happy doing well by doing good. Basic Truths for Financial Life Planners cannot fail to help you recover that hierarchy of motivations, and to realign your practice and your life with it.   
    
© 2014 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. All the books cited here were previously reviewed in the “Resources” feature of Nick’s monthly newsletter Nick Murray Interactive. To download a sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com and click on “Newsletter.”