I came this close to missing my hands-down financial book of the year, Scott Nations’ A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation, on account of (a) the hyperbolic subtitle, (b) an early, unperceptive review I saw, (c) the fact that the book’s cover identifies the author as “a CNBC contributor,” which is no sort of credential to me, and (d) the seemingly dumb idea that the 2010 “Flash Crash”—which I’d always thought of as a glorified computer glitch—belonged on a par with the great crashes.

Thank goodness, I read it anyway, and discovered an incredibly rich mine of market history for the informed advisor. The five disasters covered in the book are the crashes of 1907, 1929, 1987, 2008 and the aforementioned 2010 event. In each of the first four, Mr. Nations identifies causal and contributing factors, making connections that even the most seasoned reader will find noteworthy and enlightening. His meticulous second-by-second report of the “Flash Crash,” and of the hubris that spawned it, is definitive. Indeed, it is alone worth the entire price of the book.

Mr. Nations is the author of two previous technical books for options traders. He is not a natural writer of narrative, and the book occasionally suffers from a dearth of good editing. But the breadth of his scholarship and the depth of his knowledge of modern markets are absolutely first class, and more than carry the book forward. Five Crashes will be an indispensable resource for advisors for years to come.

Two thousand seventeen also saw the publication of Ron Chernow’s long- and eagerly-awaited biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It takes its place with his Alexander Hamilton (inspiration, oddly enough, for the wildly popular musical), his George Washington, and his John D. Rockefeller pere et fils as one of the classic biographies of our time.

Grant has always been a massively misunderstood and underestimated figure, his Civil War triumphs too often written off as butchery, and his presidency—which did more than anyone’s except Lincoln’s to safeguard African-Americans—as a sinkhole of nepotism and corruption. The restoration of his reputation as a military genius and a principled (if too easily misled) chief executive began only about 15 years ago; it now reaches its apotheosis in Mr. Chernow’s magnificent biography, which is surely as close to definitive as any one-volume life will ever come.

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