What do you do when you're the subject of books you're judging for literary merit? That's the unusual spot Goldman Sachs finds itself in this year with the Business Book of the Year honor, an annual award that it gives out with the Financial Times. The long list of nominees, just announced, features a number of titles about the recent financial crisis, which Goldman was deeply embroiled in. Consequently Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman, is recusing himself as a judge.
The award, which is now in its sixth year and was founded by Goldman and the FT to celebrate "the book providing the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues," will be given on October 27 at an award dinner in New York. Other judges include Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, author/businessman Liaquat Ahamed (Lords of Finance), and London Business School professor Lynda Gratton.
The long list of nominees is:
The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
Ian Bremmer (Portfolio/Penguin)
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
John Cassidy (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, Farrar, Straus and Giroux US)
Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon (Random House/Crown Publishing Group, Broadway Books)
Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis
Fred Goodman (Simon & Schuster)
Union Atlantic: A Novel
Adam Haslett (Tuskar Rock/Atlantic Books, Doubleday/Nan A Talese)
The Art of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar (Little, Brown, Twelve/Hachette Group)
The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
Walter Kiechel (Harvard Business Review Press)
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, WW Norton & Co US)
More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
Sebastian Mallaby (Bloomsbury, Penguin Press)
All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (Portfolio/Penguin)
What Works: Success in Stressful Times
Hamish McRae (Harper Press/HarperCollins)
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
Raghuram Rajan (Princeton University Press)
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley (Harper/Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers)
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves
Andrew Ross Sorkin (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, Viking/Penguin US)
MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Atlantic Books, Portfolio/Penguin)
