I can't say anything about the other book, but "The Quants" is a good read and dives into the history of these funds.

I also liked the style for what is not there. Usually, people addressing these questions try to make it look like magic and easy. I hate the 5 minute montage in movies with cool music that condenses 5 years of hardship. You can pick it up, read some pages and put it down if you don't like it.

The author seems to have had access to the people he talks about, and had help from the right people (Mandelbrot, Taleb, Ed Thorp, to cite a few). For me, this increases weight and it makes it cool.

An edX course about Discrete Time Signals? That's nice. Finding out that the instructor is Richard Baraniuk knowing that I used a paper of his (an adaptive optimal kernel) [to do time-frequency analysis for multiphase flow pattern recognition]? That's cool!