Of Meltdowns, Moguls, and Mad Ave.

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The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (Penguin Press) elegantly interweaves the stories of four petroleum barons of the Lone Star State: Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and H.L. Hunt. Author Bryan Burrough offers particularly compelling accounts of Cullen, the fifth-grade dropout who became the richest man in the U.S., and Hunt, the onetime professional poker player who gained fame bankrolling right-wing political causes. All benefited from what the author calls "among the greatest periods of wealth creation in American history."

Another tale of fierce determination and entrepreneurial drive is former BusinessWeek staffer Linda Himelstein's The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire (Harper). Smirnov, who began his enterprise in 1864, not only invented his own recipes but also proved a skilled marketer. By 1886 he had become the official vodka purveyor to the Tsar. After the Bolsheviks nationalized the outfit, the brand was reborn in 1920s Europe and later in the U.S., thanks to émigré Smirnovs who inherited the family's go-getter genes.

Robert Skidelsky's Keynes: The Return of the Master (PublicAffairs) makes a strong case for rereading one of the seminal figures of modern macroeconomics. A key Keynesian concept is that the future is unpredictable, but there will certainly be economic shocks, Keynes felt, and the system must include mechanisms that can respond. Keynes also emphasized the connection between economics and an ethical life.

Finally, veteran New Yorker writer Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World As We Know It (Penguin Press) is a deeply reported profile of the search powerhouse. Google's engineering-focused culture, says the author, is both its greatest strength and its Achilles' heel: Having the best search technology has let Google (GOOG) dominate the search-ad market, but it may have made it insensitive to criticism. Auletta concludes: "If Google maintains its deposit of public trust...and if it stays humble and moves with the swiftness of a fox, it will be difficult to catch."

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