The editors at Amazon.com have put together a list of the best books of 2008 in the “Business and Investing” category.

1. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”

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HR Hero Line editor Wendi Watts reviews the book While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, and Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis by Roger Lowenstein. She argues that this book is particularly relevant and important in light of the current economic crisis and how many large companies and public entities are now struggling with promised pensions.

“America is sitting on a retirement time bomb.” That pretty well sums up the reason for reading Roger Lowenstein’s book While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis on the looming pension underfunding disaster in the United States. In case the past two months of global economic upheaval hasn’t overwhelmed you, Lowenstein’s book may be enough to shove you over the edge.

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The following is a list of the bestselling hardcover business books as ranked by the New York Times on December 15.

1. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. hy some people succeed — it has to do with luck and opportunities as well as talent — from the author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

2. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. The life of Warren Buffett.

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President-Elect Barack Obama has chosen former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle as his Secretary of Health and Human Services and health care czar. Daschle lays out his ideas about how to fix the ailing U.S. health care system in his book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, which was published in February 2008.

In Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis, Tom Daschle gives readers an overview of the political journey that health care reform has taken in the United States in the past century and how we got into the mess we’re in now. He also outlines the main issues that have prevented health care reform from happening before now and he gives no one a pass.

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Trying to think of a good stocking stuffer for someone you know (or yourself)? The powers that be at Amazon.com have put together their “Best of 2008″ lists. Here are their editor’s choices for best management and leadership books.

1. The Management Gurus: Lessons from the Best Management Books of All Time by Chris Lauer. Includes summaries of fifteen management classics, distilling thousands of pages about leadership, strategy, crisis management, organizational behavior, and more—perfect for busy executives and students.

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BusinessWeek ranks business books that are the most recent bestsellers and provides a short summary.

1. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. The author is a former Morgan Stanley insurance analyst who had unprecedented access to the legendary investor during her five years of research. The resulting book is a very penetrating and personal portrait. Buffett comes across as an obsessive man who knew what he wanted and how to get there from an early age: his prize possession as a child was a metal coin changer, and he determined in his youth to become a millionaire by age 35. In addition, the volume offers a vivid picture of the Buffett family, including his parents and his two wives.

2. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America by Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times columnist Friedman offers an urgent plea to unleash U.S. creativity—and capitalism—on the challenges of energy, climate change, and world population growth. “I am convinced that the public is ready,” he writes—“they’re ahead of the politicians.”

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Employment law attorney Michael Maslanka discusses Robert Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t.

General counsel are tagged as custodians of their companies’ most crucial, yet most sensitive and volatile asset: its employees. Henry Ford saw them as one big headache, immune from any analgesic’s curative powers: “Why is it that I always end up with a person, when all I really want is a pair of hands?” But, it’s a person you get, and if you believe people are of value, then the question becomes how to go about managing, motivating and inspiring them — and, just as important, learning how to unlock their embedded value. Here’s a guide on the do’s and don’ts to reach that goal.

First, the don’ts. Having practiced employment law for nearly 27 years, I can say with absolute clarity and total conviction that abrupt e-mails, rude comments and angry directives fail — always have, always will. Confirmation of my subjective feelings comes from two business professors, Christine Porath and Amir Erez, whose revealing study of rudeness and its toxic effects is illuminating. They subjected two groups of study participants to varying degrees of rudeness, and they asked a third group to only imagine they were the object of the rudeness.

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