Reading List
A group of close advisors to the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate has helped assemble a mix of books covering important topics, written by good authors that are easy and fun to read, and for the most part were recently published (as so much has happened over the last decade in financial services, technology, etc. that older books might be classics but not as relevant in today's world).
The list covers five (5) categories that are relevant to undergraduate, graduate, and professional students seeking internships and full-time jobs in real estate.
Note: hardcopy and e-book versions are available where noted. Students can contact the Mahaffey Business Library at askbuslib@nd.edu with any questions.
A summary PDF listing of the books can be downloaded here.
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The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy
This is the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the creation and growth of Airbnb, the online lodging platform that is now the largest provider of accommodations in the world. At first just the wacky idea of cofounders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb has become indispensable to millions of hosts and travelers around the world. Fortune editor Leigh Gallagher presents a nuanced, in-depth look at the Airbnb phenomenon—the successes and controversies alike—and takes us behind the scenes as the company’s CEO steers into increasingly uncharted waters.
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Am I Being Too Subtle? Straight Talk from a Business Rebel
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Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—And How It Will Reshape Our World
An automotive and tech world insider investigates the quest to develop and perfect the driverless car—an innovation that promises to be the most disruptive change to our way of life since the smartphone.
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Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse
The life and achievements of a revolutionary urban planner and visionary developer. A visionary developer and master planner, James Rouse was a key figure in the story of how and why the United States was built the way it was during the last half century. This engaging biography touches upon all aspects of Rouse's life.
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The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine
The author examines the causes of the U.S. stock market crash of 2008 and its relation to overpriced real estate, bad mortgages, shareholder demand for excessive profits, and the growth of toxic derivatives.
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Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Revised and Updated
Bloomberg by Bloomberg offers an intimate look at the creative mind and driven personality behind the Bloomberg brand. He describes in vivid detail his early Wall Street career, both the victories and frustrations, including a personal account of what it was like to be fired and given $10 million on the same day. He combines personal stories with penetrating insights into business and technology, while also offering lessons from his unique approach to management. There is no one in business or politics quite like him—or who has had more success in both areas.
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Bubble or Revolution: The Present and Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies
Some experts say that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are just a scam; others say they're "the most important invention since the internet." It's hard to tell who's right. Authored by Product Managers from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, Bubble or Revolution cuts through the hype to offer a balanced, comprehensive, and accessible analysis of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
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Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition
The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is the leading organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable communities, and healthier living conditions. Thoroughly updated to cover the latest environmental, economic, and social implications of urban design, Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition, offers insightful writing on its principles from 62 authors on how to restore urban centers, reconfigure sprawling suburbs, conserve environmental assets, and preserve our built legacy. This practical, up-to-date resource is invaluable for design professionals, developers, planners, elected officials, and citizen activists.
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Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . .” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. In Death and Life, she writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves; and the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.
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Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”
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The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
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Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and its Lessons
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Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines of New York and Chicago
Willis shows how market formulas produced characteristic forms in each city—"vernaculars of capitalism"—that resulted from local land-use patterns, municipal codes, and zoning. Refuting some common cliches of skyscraper history such as the equation of big buildings with big business and the idea of a "corporate skyline," Willis emphasizes the importance of speculative development and the impact of real-estate cycles on the forms of buildings and on their spatial distribution. Form Follows Finance cautions that the city must be understood as a complex commercial environment where buildings are themselves businesses, space is a commodity, and location and image have value.
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The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world’s most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can’t match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career.
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Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity
The Director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Program and Harvard Business School’s leading expert on urban resilience reveal what you can do to harness the power of your offices and homes to protect your health―and boost every aspect of your performance and well-being. Grounded in exposure and risk science and relevant to anyone newly concerned about how their surroundings impact their health, Healthy Buildings can help you evaluate the impact of small, easily controllable environmental fluctuations on your immediate well-being and long-term reproductive and lung health. It shows how our indoor environment can have a dramatic impact on a whole host of higher order cognitive functions―including things like concentration, strategic thinking, troubleshooting, and decision-making.
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How Google Works
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The Inside Track to Careers in Real Estate
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The Intelligent REIT Investor: How to Build Wealth with Real Estate Investment Trusts
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Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town: Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway
When Witold Rybczynski first heard about New Daleville, it was only a developer's idea, attached to ninety acres of cornfield an hour and a half west of Philadelphia. Over the course of five years, Rybczynski met and talked to everyone involved in the building of this residential subdivision -- from the developers to the township leaders, whose approval they needed, to the home builders and engineers and, ultimately, the first families who moved in.
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The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons
Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward skillfully paints the often scandalous picture of the giants who owned the New York skyline until their empires came crumbling down in the 2008 financial crisis. Based on more than 200 interviews with real estate moguls like Donald Trump, William Zeckendorf, Mort Zuckerman, and David Simon, Liar's Ball is the never-before-told story of the egomaniacal elites of New York City.
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A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market
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The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simmons Launched the Quant Revolution
The unbelievable story of a secretive mathematician—Jim Simons—who pioneered the era of the algorithm–and made $23 billion doing it. Drawing on unprecedented access to Simons and dozens of current and former employees, Zuckerman, a veteran Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, tells the gripping story of how a world-class mathematician and former code breaker mastered the market.
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Other People’s Money: Inside the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made
A veteran New York Times reporter dissects the most spectacular failure in real estate history. Real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of dollars when their much-vaunted purchase of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village in New York City failed to deliver the expected profits. But how did Tishman Speyer walk away from the deal unscathed, while others took the financial hit—and MetLife scored a $3 billion profit?
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The Plaza: The Secret Life of America’s Most Famous Hotel
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Principles: Life and Work
In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. -
Raising the Bar: Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines
Gerald D. Hines stands at the top of the international real estate investment and development world. Raising the Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines tracks one man’s incredible rise, from building small office/warehouses to manifesting Houston icons like The Galleria, One Shell Plaza, and Pennzoil Place to cultivating the national and then global expansion of his company. -
Real Estate Titans: 7 Key Lessons from the World’s Top Real Estate Investors
In Real Estate Titans, Erez Cohen shares the advice and learnings of the world's leading real estate experts to create a guide for becoming a savvier real estate player. Real Estate Titans contains the 7 key lessons distilled from interviews with several of the world’s greatest real estate investors and offers compelling stories and lessons show why real estate is such a wonderful and important business, and it also offers a roadmap for becoming a world class real estate player. -
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
A memoir of leadership and success: The executive chairman of Disney, Time’s 2019 businessperson of the year, shares the ideas and values he embraced during his fifteen years as CEO while reinventing one of the world’s most beloved companies and inspiring the people who bring the magic to life.
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S&L Hell: The People and the Politics Behind the $1 Trillion Savings and Loan Scandal
A Washington Post correspondent's detailed account of the 1980s and 1990s Savings and Loans (S&L) mortgage loan crisis with "damningly documented perspectives" of the players involved (from deregulation, speculation, corruption, fraud, and politics) that cost taxpayers between $130-160 billion.
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Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crisis
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Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
For a decade, Suburban Nation has given voice to a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and replace the last century's automobile-based settlement patterns with a return to more traditional planning. Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of the movement, and even their critics, such as Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, recognized that "Suburban Nation is likely to become this movement's bible." A lively lament about the failures of postwar planning, this is also that rare book that offers solutions.
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That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
In the tradition of Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company-all revealed by co-founder and first CEO Marc Randolph.
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Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System and Themselves
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Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
In this revelatory book, Edward Glaeser, a leading urban economist, declares that cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in both cultural and economic terms) places to live. He travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind.
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The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
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What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence
From Blackstone chairman, CEO, and co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman, a long-awaited book that uses impactful episodes from Schwarzman's life to show readers how to build, transform, and lead thriving organizations. Whether you are a student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, executive, or simply someone looking for ways to maximize your potential, the same lessons apply.
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Why Wall Street Matters
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Zeckendorf: The autobiograpy of the man who played a real-life game of Monopoly and won the largest real estate empire in history
What made Mr. Zeckendorf special was his love of making blockbuster development deals such as the site acquisition for the United Nations, Roosevelt Field Mall, virtually all of Wall Street, Place Ville Marie, Century City, Society Hill to name a few. Bill Zeckendorf was truly a pioneer in real estate finance. His innovation and understanding of complex capital structure enabled him to make deals that others could not (e.g. The Hawaiian Technique). He also knew that great design sells itself. Why else have I.M. Pei and Harry Cobb, two of the world’s most talented architects, on staff?