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This may be the year for books about Bill Gross. In addition to The Bond King by Mary Childs, which we rank the best overall investing book on our list, the subject himself has released a self-published autobiography titled I’m Still Standing: Bond King Bill Gross and the PIMCO Express.

Childs’ authoritative, engaging book about pioneering bond trader Gross, from the investment management firm PIMCO, portrays him as brilliant and a visionary, who devised a new way to invest by making a market for trading bonds. Yet he also comes across as an egotistical, mercurial boss who was so verbally abusive to his staff that some avoided walking by his office to keep from running into him. After many years, enough staff members quit—including PIMCO’s former co-CEO and co-CIO, economist Mohamed El-Erian, whom Gross had recruited from Harvard Management Co. as his eventual successor—that Gross was forced to resign from the company he built.