On the other hand, distilling a lifetime into a series of practical lessons has clearly pushed Mr Broad to do some hard thinking and self-analysis, which makes his book a useful read, especially for anyone engaging in entrepreneurship or philanthropy.

ECONOMIST: Uncommonly unreasonable

The musical analysis in the book is limited--mostly annotated transcriptions of some Desmond solos by other musicians--but for the general reader there are scores of photos and the liberal use of Desmond's lifelong correspondence with his father, Emil Breitenfeld , an organist and arranger in San Francisco responsible for much of his son's musical education.

FORBES: Better Than A Dry Martini

Partly because none of these general answers is wholly persuasive, it is the industry-by-industry analysis that is by far the best part of the book.

ECONOMIST: British industrial decline

It seems like a short time ago that Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, subject of the best-selling book Moneyball, first employed a new school of analysis that placed added value on statistics like on-base percentage while devaluing more traditional numbers like batting average and stolen bases.

FORBES: Sports Business

His book, The Day Britain Died, an analysis of post-devolution Great Britain, was published to accompany a BBC series of the same name.

BBC: political editor Andrew Marr

Nevertheless, Michael Lewis, the author of the 2003 book Moneyball, the story of how the penny-pinching Oakland A's used quantitative analysis to win at baseball, said he couldn't see the harm in additional analytics in youth and scholastic sports.

WSJ: A Stathead Carves Out a New Market: High-School Coaches