The Longlist for the 2012 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book Award

Andrew Hill's article yesterday in The Financial Times announcing the longlist for the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award was entitled A reading list to reflect loss of faith in capitalism. That headline is more than a little hyperbolic. The statement in the article itself that the list "includes an array of titles charting the strengths and weaknesses of the American corporate, economic and financial system" is a bit more accurate, especially if you replace the word "American" with "global." All that said, the list of books they've put together is really, really good.

• Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler, Free Press
• American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman, Crown Business
• Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma, W. W. Norton & Company
• A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity by Luigi Zingales, Basic Books
• The End of Leadership by Barbara Kellerman, Harper Business
• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by John Coates, The Penguin Press
• Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con by Guy Lawson, Crown Business
• Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order by Philip Coggan, PublicAffairs
• The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business by Charles Duhigg, Random House
• Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll, The Penguin Press
• Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere by Christopher Meyer & Julia Kirby, Harvard Business Review Press
• Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster
• Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence by William L. Silber, Bloomsbury Press
• What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism and China's Modern Consumer by Tom Doctoroff, Palgrave Macmillan
• What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits Of Markets by Michael J. Sandel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson, Crown Business

We're so immersed in the flood of books that arrives here every day, noses down, plugging away on various ideas and projects to help spread those books and the ideas that they contain, that I sometimes forget to look up to take stock of the larger trends and bigger picture in publishing (that will certainly come later when we begin looking at the submissions for our own awards). Looking at this list yesterday afternoon made me realize just how solid this year has been so far, and that for as much as we read here I still have a lot more to do.

And so it's back to the grindstone.