I almost hesitate to designate Howard Marks’s Mastering the Market Cycle as my Book of the Year, for fear of damning it with faint praise: thoughtful financial advisors will find it the book of the millennium so far. Indeed, I expect it to take its place as a timeless investment classic, on the order of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and Charles Ellis’s Winning the Loser’s Game.

Mr. Marks is a legendary investor, and a writer of occasional letters that are avidly read by top investment professionals worldwide. Yet he writes with a simplicity, a clarity and above all a humility—a profound respect for the unknowable—that set him apart from anyone I know who is writing today from deep and successful investment experience.

His subject here is the inexorability of the great cycle of human nature as it plays out in the capital markets, and how investors trying to determine how much or how little risk to take on might seek to do so based on a sense of where we are in that cycle.

We find ourselves today 10 years into one of the all-time great bull markets in equities, during which they have quadrupled their panic lows of the last cycle. Little wonder, then, that we and our clients struggle incessantly to infer from current economic data where in the cycle we are now. Mr. Marks gently invites us to back away from the data, and observe what we can about the immutable cycle of behavior.

You may find, as I certainly did, that this book has come along just when we needed it most.

• Nearly a decade ago, I discovered the Swedish academic superstar Hans Rosling’s video “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes.” I was delighted by its message of secularly improving world health and wealth, and even more so by the infectious enthusiasm of the man himself.

In early 2016, Rosling was stricken with incurable pancreatic cancer; he canceled his many speaking engagements and other initiatives, and spent the last year of his life writing, with his son and daughter-in-law, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. It is the summation of his life’s work, debunking declinism and extolling the dramatic and accelerating progress of our world.

I can’t praise it enough; it’s a must-read for every advisor and a perceptive holiday gift to your more thoughtful clients. Hans Rosling died in February 2017, but will live forever in Factfulness.

• How could I, of all people, not love Ken Langone? Aside from the facts that he’s much smarter than I am, and much, much wealthier, we have a lot in common: poor kids from nowhere (east of Manhattan); Catholic; fell in love the summer after freshman year in college and married for life; went to Wall Street to seek our fortune. The list goes on.

Hence, when his new book I Love Capitalism! was announced, I asked my bookseller, Scott Raulsome of the great Burton’s Bookstore in Greenport, N.Y., to snag me the first copy he could lay hands on. This he did—three days before the official publication date!—and I devoured it in essentially one sitting. So much so that I immediately had to start reading it again.

Ken Langone is the guy who took Ross Perot’s EDS public while working for a small firm that had never done an IPO before. Founded Home Depot (the story of how he had to scramble around to find two million dollars of seed money is alone worth the price of the book). Stood loyal to Dick Grasso of the NYSE as Eliot Spitzer (a.k.a. Client 9) tried to crucify both of them. Said no to Madoff a couple of weeks before he imploded, not primarily because he couldn’t understand what Madoff was offering, but because that offer meant he was being disloyal to his past clients, many of whom Langone knew. Again: how could I not love this guy?

Well, be assured that you won’t be able to not love him either, and that you’ll find I Love Capitalism! both entertaining and inspiring.

• My friend Steven Pressfield wrote a great golf novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was transmogrified by Robert Redford into a pretty bad movie. Steve’s underappreciated memoir of that whole experience, The Authentic Swing, is a worthy follow-up to his The War of Art, and contains lessons for all of us. I mention it here because, a couple of times in Swing, Steve concludes that it’s impossible to make a serious film about golf—that the only truly successful golf movie is Caddyshack.

I was reminded of this observation by the publication of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty. The first third of the book retells the basic progression: Harvard Lampoon—National Lampoon—Saturday Night Live—Animal House, with which many readers may be familiar. But it then develops into a hugely entertaining account of the chaotic creation of that iconic film.

I thought I remembered that my grandchildren’s father, David Dickerson, was an aficionado of the movie, and e-mailed my daughter Karen to ask if this were correct. She wrote back, “It is the basis of his life’s philosophy.” I gave it to David for Father’s Day, and now it’ll be a most welcome holiday gift for every person whose soul soars upon hearing the exclamation, “You buy a hat like that you get a free bowl of soup, eh?” And who reflexively cries out in response, “Looks good on you, though!”

• I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget reading the hagiographic puff piece in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, extolling at great length an extraordinary young woman named Elizabeth Holmes and the revolutionary medical technology company she had created: Theranos.

Based on a stunning breakthrough that purportedly allowed Theranos to do the full range of blood testing from a pinprick, Ms. Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, attracted such world class luminaries as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger to her board, and secured potentially massive agreements from retail partners like Safeway and Walgreens to offer the tests in all their locations.

The only problem was that there was no such technology, and the whole enterprise had long since degenerated into a massive fraud perpetrated and sustained by Ms. Holmes and her thuggish lover. A Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreyrou began writing increasingly skeptical stories in 2015, and by 2017 the value of Theranos was zero. Mr. Carreyrou reports the whole (forgive me) blood-curdling saga in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.

Bethany McLean, who co-wrote the definitive book about Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, puts it best in a jacket blurb, to which I defer: “You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.” Bad Blood is an importantly cautionary tale.

• Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power by Meghan O’Sullivan is, quite simply, the most important book written about oil since Daniel Yergin’s 1990 classic, The Prize. A Harvard professor and former assistant to President George W. Bush, Ms. O’Sullivan has written both a definitive short history of the fracking/horizontal drilling revolution and a comprehensive geopolitical theory of its far-reaching—and not at all obvious—implications. It isn’t light reading, but Windfall is smart, well-written, and very much worth the effort.

• I am of that generation of American boys who can still tell you, at the drop of a hat, the names of the seven original Mercury astronauts. (Full disclosure: there’s a mnemonic to it. All seven surnames start with one of only three letters.) Thus it was inevitable that I was going to love Robert Kurson’s new book Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon. In truth, it’s impossible not to love it.

JFK’s epic challenge—to land men on the moon and bring them safely home before the 1960s ended—was in deep jeopardy in 1968. After the Apollo 1 fire claimed the lives of three astronauts in January 1967, the program had been significantly set back—just as evidence was accumulating that the Soviet effort was accelerating. The decision was made to recast Apollo 8, originally scheduled to be an earth orbital flight, into a lunar orbital one. NASA and Frank Borman’s three-man crew had all of 16 weeks to re-engineer the mission.

In the event, the flight was engineering perfection. No one who has seen it in the intervening half century will ever forget Bill Anders’ photograph “Earthrise.” And no one who heard it will ever forget the astronauts, on their own initiative, reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve. Truly, as someone wrote to the crew afterward, “You saved 1968.” Rocket Men is a riveting account of a great American moment. Not to be missed, and a slam dunk holiday gift for the aging rocket boy on your list.           

© 2018 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. All these books were reviewed upon publication in Nick’s monthly newsletter Nick Murray Interactive. You may download a sample issue at www.nickmurraynewsletters.com.