Herb Greenberg endorses Thornton O'Glove's classic "Quality of Earnings"

If you haven't heard of [Thornton] Oglove, who recently turned 75, that is understandable. He retired from the investment industry in 1990, but not without leaving his mark in the form of a book, "Quality of Earnings: The Investor's Guide to How Much Money a Company Is Really Making." He wrote the book after years of co-authoring the monthly Quality of Earnings Report with Bob Olstein, who now runs Olstein Funds.

The book, which still sells several hundred copies a year, is considered by many to be a bible of forensic accounting. It is "among my favorite investment books," wrote Motley Fool's Tom Gardner in a preface to a 44-page interview he did several years ago with Oglove. Donn Vickrey, a former accounting professor and co-founder of Gradient Analytics, used Oglove's work as a motivation for his graduate dissertation.

"He has a wonderful sense of the history of Wall Street," says Hewitt Heiserman, of earningspower.com and author of "It's Earnings that Count." "He's seen the good times and the bad."

~ Herb Greenberg, "Thornton Oglove on investing," MarketWatch, April 20, 2008