Double Entry by Jane Gleeson-White

JUDGES' COMMENTS

The history of double-entry bookkeeping may sound like unpromising material but Gleeson-White takes the reader on a fascinating journey that begins with a Renaissance mathematician-monk and ends with the high financiers of Wall Street. Gleeson-White deftly weaves her monumental research through a narrative that reads easily and yet explains complex and difficult concepts.

Double Entry is a wide-ranging yet accessible history and analysis of a practice that underpins not only our global economy but arguably our entire way of thinking in the modern world. This is a book about the future as well as the past, and also about possibly the most important thing of all: how we measure value. It therefore seeks to answer a question so difficult we rarely ask it: what are our values?