I fault myself for the fact that last month’s issue went to press (and my list of the top ten books of 2009 was published in Financial Advisor) before I’d had a chance to read Brian Wesbury’s brilliant, beautiful It’s Not as Bad as You Think: Why Capitalism Trumps Fear and the Economy Will Thrive (Wiley, 224 pps. $24.95). I particularly regret that I didn’t catch it in time to say what a great holiday gift it would have made. But, heck: give it to ‘em anyway. You must have gotten awfully tired (as I admit even I did) last year, being the one optimistic voice crying in the wilderness of your clients’ benighted lives. And there will be many apocalypses in the jours to come—lunatic deficits, resurgent inflation, wildly increased taxes, the health care boondoggle, the environmental fascism of cap and tax—against which you’ll find that Brian’s clear-eyed long-term optimism will prove very effective (if anything will) at inoculating your clients, and even yourself. It is far too easy to forget that democratic capitalism is a much stronger and more enduring force than collectivist statism (where is the Berlin Wall of yesteryear?). Brian Wesbury—who commands the priceless gift of writing just the way he talks—offers the most accessible, refreshing, insightful and even inspiring reminder which you and your clients are ever likely to see.

I spoke at some length the other day —for the first time in quite a long time—with Darci Hemsley Brown, who has continued to deepen and expand her father Aaron Hemsley’s seminal work in the psychology of prospecting avoidance, and in sound, practical remedies for self-defeating behavior. I came away from that conversation more firmly convinced than ever that Darci’s ten-week behavioral coaching program (which includes both a lot of prior consultation and a year of follow-up) is the only lastingly effective program of its kind. I am generally opposed to coaching of all kinds, and the more complex and expensive the coaching program, the more impracticable I think it is. If you seriously wish to make meaningful improvements in your business, and you don’t have a major prospecting effort in place that you’re joyously pursuing, your goals are disconnected from your behavior. And Darci’s program is the single best investment you can make in your career in 2010. (It is also, as I told her, seriously underpriced.) Darci has three school-age children, and can only coach a maximum of eight people at a time, so you may have to get in the queue. My advice would be to get in the queue. Darci may be reached at ahinfo@aaronhemsley.com.

With just a couple of caveats, I can warmly recommend Gregg Easterbrook’s Sonic Boom (Random House, 243 pps., $26). Mr. Easterbrook’s thesis is that globalization has barely begun, and that as it reorganizes and even revolutionizes the world over the next decade and beyond, it will produce wealth—and spread that wealth farther and wider—than we can yet imagine.

He tells the story of globalization through the lens of a number of different cities, beginning with Shenzen, China—a city that did not exist thirty years ago, and now has far more inhabitants than does New York, much less London or Paris, cities that took centuries to develop. But he also refers to such old and previously-declared-dead cities like Waltham, MA (now a high-tech and venture capital hotbed) and Erie, PA, where GE now produces fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly locomotives, which the world buys as fast as the company can turn them out.

Mr. Easterbrook forcibly reminds us of many important but—in the current catastrophist environment—too easily overlooked verities. Among these are that 85% of economic growth now comes from new ideas (per the American Academy of Sciences). He also points out that in 2007, companies that were seeded by venture capitalists provided nearly ten and a half million jobs, and generated $2.3 trillion in revenues, about equal to the GDP of France.

Remarkably for such a clear and forward-looking thinker, Mr. Easterbrook has entirely imbibed the Kool-Aid of "inequality," and apparently thinks CEOs are overpaid paper pushers who shouldn’t make more than about a million and a half dollars a year. (Really, Mr. E? Wasn’t it a CEO who went against all the "wisdom" of Wall Street analysts and kept that locomotive plant in Erie?) But you’ll be well rewarded for getting past those odd and uncharacteristic lacunae. This book is a gem, and every advisor needs to read it.

As a longtime reader recently observed, I virtually never review books about the more technical aspects of financial planning. He asked why. I replied that there are two reasons: I haven’t kept up with the technical aspects, and I was never that interested in them, anyway. (I always felt that some salaried expert on my firm’s staff, or that of one of its vendors, knew the technical issues not only better than I did, but better than I wanted to.) So I was knocked out, and quite surprised to be knocked out, by Deborah Jacobs’s self-published Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide (DJWorking Unlimited, Inc., 352 pps., $19.95). This is a book for you to own and read, and to give to clients as a basis for discussion of a wide range of planning issues. It is everything its subtitle claims: simplifying complex issues, humanizing them in terms not just of money but of values, and personalizing them with anecdotes about the estate plans of, among others, Paul Newman, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Chief Justice Warren Burger. There are action-oriented to-do lists at the end of each chapter. And thinking ahead to the inevitable changes in law and regulation, Ms. Jacobs will be constantly providing updated chapters that can be downloaded at www.estateplanningsmarts.com. There are volume discounts, and the book can be customized or personalized in a variety of ways. Estate Planning Smarts is really a terrific resource for advisors.

There has been quite a lot of controversy lately—and even more confusion—about long-term equity returns, both absolutely and relative to those of bonds. (Such naysaying of equities has always been, and will most assuredly always be, an indispensable requirement of all truly historic equity market bottoms.) You will find a great deal of lastingly helpful clarification of this issue in Jeremy Siegel’s beautifully argued December 28 essay, "Yes, Stock Data Do Go Back 200 Years." It’s a keeper: the financial/intellectual equivalent of breathing pure oxygen.