Year's best: These books meant business in 2008

— -- Biographiess, histories and books about marketing, management and investing were popular as always this year. But selections on Wall Street's meltdown took a special place on bookshelves as readers struggled to fathom what went wrong. USA TODAY Books Editor Gary H. Rawlins picks the best of the year:

Business biography/history

•The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. (Bantam, $35): Pries open the world of the Oracle of Omaha, whose life until now was nobody's business. Reveals a man of unimaginable personal complexity, who facilitates complete access to family, friends and business associates.

•Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur — Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary by Nancy Kriplen. (Amacom, $24): How the name of a miserly self-made billionaire with dubious business ethics became synonymous with philanthropy.

•The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff (Broadway, $29.95): What marriage can do to change a conservative media baron politically. Murdoch's "life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News (one of his media properties) is a vulgarity and a joke," the author writes. The catalyst: the 1999 marriage to third wife Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior.

•The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens (Crown Business, $26.95): A mishmash of his philosophy on effective corporate leadership, revelations about his personal life and countrified wisdom that Pickens calls "Booneisms."

•Call Me Tedby Ted Turner with Bill Burke (Grand Central Publishing, $30): Covers the Mouth of the South's successes and setbacks in television, movies, professional sports, championship sailing and marriage.

Management/leadership

•Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney (Portfolio, $23.95): Offers insightful nuggets on Steve Jobs, who helped create personal computers and digital music while moonlighting as a modern-day Walt Disney at animation studio Pixar.

•Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton (Penguin Press; $25.95): A firsthand account of the nuts-and-bolts pursuit of the coveted MBA, a degree considered a passport to power and wealth.

Economic ideas, trends

•The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James Galbraith (Free Press, $25): An attempt to purge the liberal mind of the false economic idols of monetary control, balanced budgets and decreased government regulations.

•Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How We Can Renew Our Global Future by Thomas Friedman (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $27.95): Exhorts the U.S. to go full throttle to develop "green" energy sources as a way to cut off the flow of dollars to oil dictators, avert disastrous climate change, boost competitiveness and grow millions of jobs.

•The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy by David Smick (Portfolio, $26.95): In financial markets, "We can't see over the horizon," the author writes. "We are always being surprised. And that is why the world has become a dangerous place."

Mortgage crisis/crime

•Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla (John Wiley & Sons, $27.95): Leads readers down the subprime money trail and through the quagmire of what went wrong inside the nation's subprime-lending firms that led to the mortgage and credit crisis.

•The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman (W.W. Norton, $24.95): How laissez-faire governing principles led to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, and what policies are needed to respond.

•The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles Morris (PublicAffairs, $22.95): Traces the birth of "structured finance," the expansion of derivatives and the mathematization of trading, which flowed together to create the credit bubble that burst.

Investing

•The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group and Took Control of Their Finances by The Smart Cookies with Jennifer Barrett (Delacorte Press, $24): A quintet of twentysomething women move from being financially inept to experts when a "debt diet" episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show inspired them to form an investment club.

Marketing

•Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker (Random House, $25): Argues that technology is diffusing marketing and making pitchmen of us all.

•Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom (Doubleday, $24.95): Presents findings of a three-year neurological marketing study in which brainwave scans of 2,000 subjects uncovered truths that market research, focus groups and polls never came close to finding.