Business books of the year

12 December 2007

That’s just a little reward for the brilliant political strategist who helped win Clinton his second presidential term with the identification of “soccer moms” as a key electoral constituency. But this book is a hotchpotch of bite-size chapters that identifies 75 seemingly random trends in everything from sex to politics. Some of these are inconsequential; others are more interesting.

Take an example of the former: “pet parents”, which shows that 63% of American households have pets, compared to 56% in 1988, while those with children have fallen by roughly the same amount. After three-and-a-half tedious pages of making the same point in several dozen different ways, Penn asks: “What do Pet Parents signify?”

And there’s the rub: Penn doesn’t seem to know. He ventures that pets might join their owners at work and provides an example of a court case that suggests there is a blurring of the law between pets and people. It is indeed a microtrend, but one that seemingly has little influence on “today’s big changes”, a link that the book’s title boasts about.

Maybe the fact that Americans like their dogs and cats marginally more than they used to doesn’t actually mean very much. For all the research Penn has clearly put into this book, some of its conclusions are a little uninspiring. Many readers have loved this book; but it left this reviewer cold.

Window on a world
Hedge Hunters: Hedge Fund Masters on the Rewards, the Risk, and the Reckoning
By Katherine Burton
Bloomberg, £12.95

Peter Taylor

A how-to guide for hedge fund investment it is not. But nor does Hedge Hunters, Katherine Burton’s window on executive management in the hedge fund industry, set out to be an industry manual. Rather, Burton takes a look at the minds and mentalities of leading industry managers, from Richard Perry, the Perry Capital founder, to Jim Chanos, the famous Wall Street short-seller, all the way to T Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil trader, through a series of broad profiles.