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Unless you’re financially savvy, annual reports with all those figures, frustrating footnotes, and fine print are boring and intimidating. However, once you have a fundamental knowledge of finance and its basic terminology, you can find the juicy parts. Reading Financial Reports For Dummies by Lita Epstein, a teacher of online financial courses and author of Trading for Dummies , gets you up to speed so you can:

• Go past the prose that can maximize the positive and minimize the negative and get information in dollars and cents
• Get an overview from the big three—the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows
• Understand the lingo and read between the lines
• Calculate basics like PE, Dividend Payout Ratio, ROS, ROA, ROE, Operating Margin, and Net Margin

It pays for investors to be somewhat skeptical instead of gullible. Pressured to please Wall Street, companies are sometimes tempted to use “creative” accounting. You’ll discover how to:

• Detect red flags (that, unfortunately, aren’t emphasized in red) such as lawsuits, changes in accounting methods, and obligations to retirees and future retirees
• Understand the different reporting requirements for public companies and private companies with various types of business structures
• Analyze a company’s cash flow, a prime indicator of its financial health
• Scrutinize deals such as mergers, acquisitions, liquidations and other major changes in key assets

Organized so you can start where you’re comfortable and proceed at your own pace, Reading Financial Reports for Dummies helps managers prepare annual reports and use financial reporting to budget more efficiently and helps investors base their decisions on knowledge instead of hype. Whether you’re in business or in the stock market, knowledge is always an asset.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point , and is a staff writer for The New Yorker .

Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies–and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have–which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world.

Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness , and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating–and in some ways troubling–facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We’re far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren’t particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren’t nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that–and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness . This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. –Malcolm Gladwell

Dear Amazon Customer,

Glad to see you here and hopefully purchasing my book. I’ve heard if you buy multiple copies it’s a better experience–a better one for me! But seriously, I’m usually on Amazon, too. I’ve been buying books through the site for ten years. I enjoy reading the reviews. I get a good sense of the book, and I like to hear what other people have to say. Like in a traditional bookstore, I can look at the cover, peek inside the book, and check out the bestseller lists.

Valerie

1. Do you have a favorite character from a book? I love Scout and Atticus from To Kill A Mockingbird .
2. If you can be any character from a book, who would you like to be? I would like to be Scarlett and I would let Rhett know how much I love him.
3. How do you decide what next book you want to read? If it’s for my book group, whoever hosts the next gathering picks the book, so it’s picked for me seven out of eight times. But on my own, I read reviews and ask people whose taste I like what they’re reading.
4. Where’s your favorite place to read? Either lying in bed or on the sofa next to the fireplace.
5. What is your favorite genre? I don’t really have one.

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth , Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business—whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in. your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited , you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

It is an intelligence war conducted behind the scenes, aimed at confusing, misleading, and ultimately defeating the enemy. The goal is nothing less than toppling the regime in power. A network of agents has been planted at key crossroads of power, stealing secrets, planting disinformation, and cooking intelligence. The plan involves sophisticated political sabotage operations that bring in opposition forces who can challenge the regime openly, in a way the CIA cannot. The scope is breathtaking.

Who is the target of this vast, sophisticated CIA operation? Not the mullahs in Tehran or North Korea’s power-mad Kim Jong Il; the target is America’s president, George W. Bush.

Drawing on exclusive information from senior government officials, intelligence operatives, and many others, investigative reporter Kenneth Timmerman provides the full, untold story of the sabotage that occurs behind the scenes at key government agencies like the CIA and State Department–and the profound effect it has on America’s ability to confront its most dangerous enemies. In Shadow Warriors, Timmerman brings to light the vast underground working to undercut our nation’s efforts to win the war on terror–revealing the when, where, how, and who for the first time. He also exposes the Democratic politicians who have sold out America’s national security for political gain.

In Shadow Warriors you’ll learn:

•How the CIA and State Department sabotaged the administration’s Iraq war plans from the start–sparking the insurgency in the process
•How a high-level State Department official gathered aides after Bush’s reelection to insist they owed no allegiance to the president or his policies
•How pre-war intelligence on Iraq was cooked–not by the Bush administration, but by its opponents
•How and why the shadow warriors have leaked details of virtually every covert U.S. intelligence tool used in the war on terror
•How the leaks have devastated our efforts to fight terrorism–such as when a key U.S. ally rebuffed the CIA director’s request for assistance by saying, “You Americans can’t keep secrets”
•Why U.S. intelligence refused to examine important documents detailing the secret Iraqi networks that became the heart of the insurgency
•How newly discovered Iraqi government documents reveal the extent of Saddam Hussein’s ties to international terrorists and the truth about his WMD arsenal

Shadow Warriors shows that George W. Bush never got the first rule of Washington: People are policy. He allowed his political enemies to run roughshod over his administration. This insider’s look at secret White House meetings, political backstabbing, and war-room summits is an eye-opening account of the mind-set that is crippling our effectiveness in Iraq and around the world.