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Book Reviews Dyman Associates Publishing Inc - In "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith wrote, "The sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods." Truer words have rarely been written, but the remarkable thing about Smith's passage was that it was a throwaway line in what remains to this day one of the most important books on economics ever written. Smith's line about money was throwaway simply because it was a tautology. The world is round, the sun sets in the west, and yes, money's sole purpose is to facilitate exchange. Money is not wealth, it's merely what we use to measure our production so that we can exchange it for that which we don't have, not to mention place a value on investments representing the production of future wealth. Precisely because money is a measure, much like a foot and minute are, it's essential that its value be as stable as possible. Gold has historically been used to define money not because it's nice to look at, but simply because its stability renders it "money, par excellence," in the words of Karl Marx.

How the Media Influences Your Investment Decisions for Better or Worse by Joshua M. Brown and Jeff Macke (McGraw-Hill, 2014) is a book by financial pundits about financial pundits. It alternates between reflections on the financial media (I assume written by Josh Brown) and interviews conducted by Jeff Macke. The interviewees are Jim Rogers, Ben Stein, Karen Finerman, Henry Blodget, Herb Greenberg, James Altucher, Barry Ritholtz, and Jim Cramer. Since both authors are members of the financial media (Brown is author of The Reform Broker blog and a regular contributor to CNBC, Macke is the host of Breakout on Yahoo Finance), the reader can't expect to be told: "just turn off the news." Instead, the authors try to explain which pundits may be worth listening to and which ones are just noise, or worse. For investors who are not intrinsically skeptical and who have no idea of how to separate the wheat from the chaff, the authors offer a few good pointers. For the rest of us-hardened, cynical folk that we are, the interviews offer some good tidbits. The book has a strange subtext, along the lines of "I once was lost but now I'm found." Jeff Macke recounts his career-killing "Car People" episode on the now defunct evening program CNBC Reports and his subsequent emotional descent and recovery. And he interviews three insiders who to a greater or lesser degree faced their own professional crises: Henry Blodget, banned from the securities industry but now the editor and CEO of Business Insider; Jim Cramer, who took a drubbing on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show; and James Altucher, who seems to specialize in failing and bouncing back-and writing about it. Whom do I personally consider worth listening to? First, those who readily admit they don't know the answer. Bob Shiller comes to mind here. Second, those who move markets, such as David Tepper. And third, those who are both

The character and career of Sir Winston Churchill are both so protean that it is not surprising that there have been studies of the great man emphasizing innumerable aspects, running the gamut from military strategist and statesman to painter and gourmand. Certainly, Churchill as a literary figure is a topic also well worth considering. What other British prime minister won the Nobel Prize for literature? (It was awarded to him in the midst of his second premiership in 1953.) Interestingly, although it was widely believed that this accolade came to him because of his magisterial history of World War II, Jonathan Rose, Kenan professor of history at Drew University, informs us that it was the autobiography "My Early Life" that impelled the (neutral in World War II) Swedes. Well-researched and clearly informed by great admiration and attunement to its subject, "The Literary Churchill" is simply crammed with interesting facts like this - and not just about his oeuvre and his accomplishments. We find out about the origins of his writing with his discovery of it as a talent and much-needed boost as an indifferent student, his literary and theatrical tastes and his affinity for melodrama.