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.”