By Simon Eskow

Nothing goes better with 18 holes or a dip in the pool than reading a book the size of a boulder. Well, maybe some things do go better with your vacation plans than keeping up with the profession. But here are a few books that might catch your interest without ruining your fun:

In Cookin’ the Book$ (176 pages, Adams Hall Publishing, $15.95), Don Silver, author of several personal financial planning guides, employs the parable form to show how corporations may use accounting tricks to pump up their value. Silver fashions a fictitious chef and restaurateur who divulges sage advice on deceptive business practices. Readers have called Cookin’ the Book$ an easy-to-read story filled with specific examples that illustrate his points. Silver covers basic “recipes for cookin’ the books,” ways that corporations play with revenue and expenses, and how investors can protect themselves.

In a major historical shift from even just a couple decades ago, women today make up more than half of accounting program graduates and account for a comparable percentage of new hires. Nancy Baldiga’s Promoting Your Talent: A Guidebook for Women and Their Firms (94 pages, AICPA, $31.25) recognizes this trend with recommendations for promoting women and their firms in a world once dominated by men. Baldiga interviewed 50 successful women in the profession to help develop tips on divergent topics, from effective networking to balancing work and home life.

Four former employees of Arthur Andersen write about the fall of the one-time Big Five firm in their book Inside Arthur Andersen: Shifting Values, Unexpected Consequences (208 pages, Financial Times Prentice Hall, $24.95). Susan E. Squires, Cynthia Smith, Lorna McDougall and William R. Yeack attempt to describe Andersen’s shift to a “sales-oriented” culture that ended with the Enron scandal.

The Firm of the Future (360 pages, John Wiley & Sons, $45), by Paul Dunn and Ronald Baker, explores a theory of how professionals can organize their firms. The book is meant largely for CPAs and attorneys, and discusses how such professionals can leverage knowledge to grow their firms.