The often hilarious and sometimes poignant story behind Dal LaMagna's rise in the beauty industry. By the time LaMagna graduated from the Harvard Business School, his entrepreneurial activities-including operating discotheques in drive-in theaters, working with the 1960s musical teen sensations...

Henry Clay Frick, reviled in his own time, infamous in ours, was blamed for the Johnston Flood as well as the violent Homestead Strike of 1892 and survived multiple assassination attempts, yet at the same time was an ardent philanthropist, giving over $100 million during his own lifetime and...

"Like Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Paul English grew up poor, in working-class Boston, but as Tracy Kidder writes, he had "a mind for the age that was coming." Brilliant, reckless, endlessly energetic, Paul English, after Kayak sold for $2 billion, asked himself: What comes next?...

"Most great figures in American history reveal great contradictions, and Henry Ford is no exception. He championed his workers, offering unprecedented wages, yet crushed their attempts to organize. Virulently anti-Semitic, he never employed fewer than 3,000 Jews. An outspoken pacifist, he made...