THE PICK OF THIS SEASON’S BUSINESS BOOKS...

WHY YOUR WORLD IS ABOUT TO GET A WHOLE LOT SMALLER
‘What the price of oil means for the way we live’ — the subtitle leads to another account of Peak Oil
By Jeff Rubin
Virgin Books
€22 ISBN 9781905264810

CHANGING LIVES CHANGING BUSINESS
Why retirement is disappearing and what it means for business, plus other demographic trends
By Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley
A&C Black
€18 ISBN 9781408108475

THE MANAGEMENT MYTH
Elegant hatchet job on the management consultancy industry and the damage it’s done
By Matthew Stewart
Norton
€23 ISBN 9780393065534

INTO THE HEART OF THE MAFIA
A Journey Through the Italian South
By David Lane,
Profile Books
€18.00 ISBN 9781846682698
This book is a first-class work of investigative journalism by The Economist’s business correspondent for Italy. Exploiting contacts accrued over decades, Lane journeys through the Mezzogiorno — Italy’s toe and heel — asking heroic judges and embittered businessmen about the role the mafia still plays there. It’s large, it turns out. Elements of road trip mix freely with murder narratives and a profound sense of place and economy, leaving the reader with a non-tourist vision of Europe’s failed state, where the blackened grip of family feuds and anaemic democracy combine to devastating social and economic effect. Struck by the beauty but darkness of Reggio Calabria’s bergamot groves, the tree itself a “spontaneous mutation of bitter orange or lime,” it is then noted how in the late 1980s the ’Ndrangheta’s war there ended only after the loss of 600 lives.