Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting
by Thomas H. Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan. Harvard Business Press, Mar. 1, 1991)

If you have ever been frustrated by the apparent mis-information generated by modern accounting, this is the book for you. Johnson and Kaplan paint a chilling picture of how the legal need for internal consistency overwhelmed the managerial need for useful information, and the accounting profession went over to the dark side. It is staggering to realize how much of our modern maco-economic pain, including our current financial crisis, connects back to the use of accounting by lawyers, regulators, and politicians who understand neither the real economics of our economy nor the flaws of the accounting’s systems used to report on that activity.

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, Fourth Edition
by Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart and David Wessels. Wiley, February 25, 2002.

This work sponsored by McKinsey remains the basic reference on approaches to corporate valuation.