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Financial Titans, Listen Up

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By KEVIN WALKER kwalker@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2008

I have a book to recommend to those financial titans "working" on Wall Street.

In "The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All," by Nick Tasler (Fireside, $24.95), the director of research and development for TalentSmart offers an "innovative approach to better decision making." Think that could help up in New York City? Yes, me, too. Then again, you might want to check it for yourself if you are interested in what makes some people jump into new and possibly dangerous experiences while others prefer to think things through.

There's more self-help stuff this week. In "Who: The A Method for Hiring" (Ballantine Books, $24), authors Geoff Smart (nice name) and Randy Street propose the idea that it's not so much what a problem is but whom you choose to help you deal with it. After interviewing 20 billionaires and 300 chief executives (hopefully none of these CEOs was with an investment bank - sorry, that was an easy shot), the duo have come up with the idea for discovering "A players" to help out with businesses.

(By the way, I am listening to the disc "Pershing" by the band Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin as a I write this, and it is highly recommended.)

Also new in nonfiction this week, and probably of more interest to the literary-minded people who frequent this page than business advice books (not to mention Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin), is "Letters of Ted Hughes" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $45), selected and edited by Christopher Reid. If you like the author, these sort of books are like a Christmas gift, an invitation into the mind of the person who created some of your favorite books. Hughes wrote more than 40 books of poetry during his life (he died in 1998), including "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being." In this collection, he writes about his marriage to Sylvia Plath, as well as about other people whose paths he crossed (including W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot). Plus, Hughes is just a wonderful writer, and getting a glimpse into his world should prove interesting.

Warning: You might have to reach for a dictionary to look up phrases such as "uxorial fatuity." But is that really a bad thing? No.

Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River"), the Boston native who spends part of his year down here, has released "The Given Day" (William Morrow, $27.95), a novel set in Boston during and after World War I. I actually had the pleasure of attending an event last year in which Lehane read part of the book, and even then you could tell it was going to be something special.

It's getting rave reviews. It follows a large cast of characters through one of the more turbulent periods in Boston, and American history, including an influenza epidemic, the police strike of 1919 and widespread anti-union violence. Publishers Weekly calls the novel a "splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction."

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