Books I’ve Read and Enjoyed
February 2012
Economics in One Lesson | Henry Hazlitt
Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.
Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.
January 2012
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement | Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try and improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done.
The story of Alex’s fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt. Eliyahu M. Goldratt is an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems, and acts as an educator to many of the world’s corporations.
December 2011
One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com | Richard L. Brandt
Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”
Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.
Richard Brandt charts Bezos’s rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense.
December 2011
Born to Run | Christopher McDougall
Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.
Born to Run is that rare book that will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that the secret to happiness is right at your feet, and that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.
November 2011
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” | Richard P. Feynman
A series of anecdotes shouldn’t by rights add up to an autobiography, but that’s just one of the many pieces of received wisdom that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) cheerfully ignores in his engagingly eccentric book, a bestseller ever since its initial publication in 1985. Fiercely independent (read the chapter entitled “Judging Books by Their Covers”), intolerant of stupidity even when it comes packaged as high intellectualism (check out “Is Electricity Fire?”), unafraid to offend (see “You Just Ask Them?”), Feynman informs by entertaining. It’s possible to enjoy Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman simply as a bunch of hilarious yarns with the smart-alecky author as know-it-all hero. At some point, however, attentive readers realize that underneath all the merriment simmers a running commentary on what constitutes authentic knowledge: learning by understanding, not by rote; refusal to give up on seemingly insoluble problems; and total disrespect for fancy ideas that have no grounding in the real world. Feynman himself had all these qualities in spades, and they come through with vigor and verve in his no-bull prose. No wonder his students—and readers around the world—adored him.
November 2011
Designing For Emotion | Aarron Walter
Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.
November 2011
The Design of Everyday Things | Donald A. Norman
Anyone who designs anything to be used by humans—from physical objects to computer programs to conceptual tools—must read this book, and it is an equally tremendous read for anyone who has to use anything created by another human. It could forever change how you experience and interact with your physical surroundings, open your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.
November 2011
It is difficult to read the opening pages of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs without feeling melancholic. Jobs retired at the end of August and died about six weeks later. Now, just weeks after his death, you can open the book that bears his name and read about his youth, his promise, and his relentless press to succeed. But the initial sadness in starting the book is soon replaced by something else, which is the intensity of the read—mirroring the intensity of Jobs’s focus and vision for his products. Few in history have transformed their time like Steve Jobs, and one could argue that he stands with the Fords, Edisons, and Gutenbergs of the world. This is a timely and complete portrait that pulls no punches and gives insight into a man whose contradictions were in many ways his greatest strength.
October 2011
The Intelligent Investor | Benjamin Graham
Among the library of investment books promising no-fail strategies for riches, Benjamin Graham’s classic, The Intelligent Investor, offers no guarantees or gimmicks but overflows with the wisdom at the core of all good portfolio management.
The hallmark of Graham’s philosophy is not profit maximization but loss minimization. In this respect, The Intelligent Investor is a book for true investors, not speculators or day traders. He provides, “in a form suitable for the laymen, guidance in adoption and execution of an investment policy.” This policy is inherently for the longer term and requires a commitment of effort. Where the speculator follows market trends, the investor uses discipline, research, and his analytical ability to make unpopular but sound investments in bargains relative to current asset value. Graham coaches the investor to develop a rational plan for buying stocks and bonds, and he argues that this plan must be a bulwark against emotional behavior that will always be tempting during abrupt bull and bear markets.
Since it was first published in 1949, Graham’s investment guide has sold over a million copies and has been praised by such luminaries as Warren E. Buffet as “the best book on investing ever written.”
October 2011
The Old Man and the Sea | Earnest Hemingway
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway’s career, which was foundering under the weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that “no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards”). A half century later, it’s still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway’s favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge.
August 2011
The Gospel of Wealth | Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie began working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh at the age of 12. As an adult, he became the owner of Carnegie Steel Company. After it was sold, the company became U.S. Steel and Carnegie became one of the wealthiest men of his fay. He spent the rest of his life giving his vast wealth to help build libraries throughout the world, and fund other worthwhile social projects.
This classic breakthrough essay by Andrew Carnegie about the responsibilities of those of great means to use their wealth for the good of society first appeared in the North American Review in 1898.
August 2011
Fargo Rock City | Chuck Klosterman
Empirically proving that—no matter where you are—kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman’s hilarious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakota (population: 498). With a voice like Ace Frehley’s guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn’t quite ready to rock—his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet—but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N’ Roses. C’mon and feel his noize.
July 2011
Anything You Want | Derek Sivers
When anyone can start a business (when everyone is running their career like a business), it begs a question. This is your one chance at life, you can have anything you want, what is worth doing?
Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.
They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy.
Anything You Want is a manifesto about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters. It’s most of what fabled entrepreneur Derek Sivers learned in ten years of starting and growing a small business, compacted into something you can read in an hour and a half. A life worth living starts with knowing your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.
July 2011
Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time | Rob Sheffield
Music critic Sheffield’s touching and poignant memoir of love and death will strike a chord in anyone who has used a hand-selected set of songs to try to express something that can’t be put into words. A socially awkward adolescent, Sheffield finds true love as a college student in the late ’80s with Renée, a “hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl.” They’re brought together by their love of music, get married and spend eight years together before Renée suddenly dies of a pulmonary embolism. Sheffield’s delivery is not that of the typical actor/ reader. We come to know Rob as this geeky, lanky guy, and his reading is characteristically a little bit uncoordinated, yet it is tender and heartfelt enough to win us over.
June 2011
Responsive Web Design | Ethan Marcotte
From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting your sites from an increasing array of devices and browsers. Are your designs ready? Learn how to think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs. Ethan Marcotte will explore CSS techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, demonstrating how you can deliver a quality experience to your users no matter how large (or small) their display.
June 2011
A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy | William B. Irvine
One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In A Guide to the Good Life, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in ancient Rome, and shows how its insight and advice are still remarkably applicable to modern lives.
In A Guide to the Good Life, Irvine offers a refreshing presentation of Stoicism, showing how this ancient philosophy can still direct us toward a better life. Using the psychological insights and the practical techniques of the Stoics, Irvine offers a roadmap for anyone seeking to avoid the feelings of chronic dissatisfaction that plague so many of us. Irvine looks at various Stoic techniques for attaining tranquility and shows how to put these techniques to work in our own life. As he does so, he describes his own experiences practicing Stoicism and offers valuable first-hand advice for anyone wishing to live better by following in the footsteps of these ancient philosophers. Readers learn how to minimize worry, how to let go of the past and focus our efforts on the things we can control, and how to deal with insults, grief, old age, and the distracting temptations of fame and fortune. We learn from Marcus Aurelius the importance of prizing only things of true value, and from Epictetus we learn how to be more content with what we have.
Finally, A Guide to the Good Life shows readers how to become thoughtful observers of their own life. If we watch ourselves as we go about our daily business and later reflect on what we saw, we can better identify the sources of distress and eventually avoid that pain in our life. By doing this, the Stoics thought, we can hope to attain a truly joyful life.
May 2011
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life | Alice Schroeder
In this startlingly frank account of Buffett’s life, Schroeder, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley—and hand picked by Buffett to be his biographer—strips away the mystery that has long cloaked the word’s richest man to reveal a life and fortune erected around lucid and inspired business vision and unimaginable personal complexity. In a book that is dominated by unstinting descriptions of Buffett’s appetites—for profit, women (particularly nurturing maternal types), food (Buffett maintained his and his family’s weight by “dangling money”)—it is refreshing that Schroeder keeps her tone free of judgment or awe; Buffett’s plain-speaking suffuses the book and renders his public and private successes and failures wonderfully human and universal. Schroeder’s sections detailing the genesis of Buffett’s investment strategy, his early mentoring by Benjamin Graham (who imparted the memorable “cigar butt” scheme: purchasing discarded stocks and taking a final puff). Inspiring managerial advice abounds and competes with gossipy tidbits (the married Buffett’s very public relationship with Washington Post editor Katherine Graham) in this rich, surprisingly affecting biography.
May 2011
First published in Brazil in 1988 as Turning the Tables, this book was the all-time best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil’s history. Semler, the 34-year-old CEO, or “counselor,” of Semco, a Brazilian manufacturing firm, describes how he turned his successful company into a “natural business” in which employees hire and evaluate their bosses, dress however they want, participate in major decisions, and share in 22 percent of the profits. Semler believes that Semco is different from most companies that have participatory management because employees are given the power to make decisions—even ones, with which the CEO wouldn’t normally agree. Semler claims, “This is not a business book. It is a book about work, and how it can be changed for the better.”
April 2011
Where Good Ideas Come From | Steven Johnson
The figure of the lone genius may captivate us, but we intuit that such geniuses’ creations don’t materialize in a vacuum. Johnson supported the intuition in his biography of eighteenth-century scientist Joseph Priestly (The Invention of Air, 2009) and here explores it from different angles using sets of anecdotes from science and art that underscore some social or informational interaction by an inventor or artist. Assuring readers that he is not engaged in “intellectual tourism,” Johnson recurs to the real-world effects of individuals and organizations operating in a fertile information environment. Citing the development of the Internet and its profusion of applications such as Twitter, the author ascribes its success to “exaptation” and “stacked platforms.” By which he means that curious people used extant stuff or ideas to produce a new bricolage and did so because of their immersion in open networks. With his own lively application of stories about Darwin’s theory of atolls, the failure to thwart 9/11, and musician Miles Davis, Johnson connects with readers promoting hunches and serendipity in themselves and their organizations.
March 2011
Writing with Style | John R. Trimble
“Books on writing tend to be windy, boring, and impractical. I intend this one to be different — short, fun, and genuinely useful.”
Writing with Style is certainly that. In a mere 138 fast-moving pages, John Trimble masterfully equips you with all the essentials you need to be a confident, self-sufficient writer. He takes the mystery out of how skilled writers actually think, explains why the fundamentals are so fundamental, arms you with dozens of practical writing tips, and liberates you from the straitjacket of outmoded sylistic taboos. He even manages to make common sense out of punctuation.
Best of all, Trimble’s style is as fresh as his approach — in fact, is itself a superb example of all that he expounds.
February 2011
Eating Animals | Jonathan Safran Foer
On the eve of becoming a father, Foer takes all the arguments for and against vegetarianism a neurotic step beyond and, to decide how to feed his coming baby, investigates everything from the intelligence level of our most popular meat providers-cattle, pigs, and poultry-to the specious self-justifications (his own included) for eating some meat products and not others. Foer offers a lighthearted counterpoint to his investigation in doting portraits of his loving grandmother, and her meat-and-potatoes comfort food, leaving him to wrestle with the comparative weight of food’s socio-cultural significance and its economic-moral-political meaning. Without pulling any punches-factory farming is given the full expose treatment-Foer combines an array of facts, astutely-written anecdotes, and his furious, inward-spinning energy to make a personal, highly entertaining take on an increasingly visible moral question…
January 2011
The 4-Hour Body | Timothy Ferriss
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss fixated on one life-changing question:
For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
December 2010
Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design | Khoi Vinh
The grid has long been an invaluable tool for creating order out of chaos for designers of all kinds—from city planners to architects to typesetters and graphic artists. In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences.
Ordering Disorder delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web.
December 2010
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again | David Foster Wallace
Like the tennis champs who fascinate him, novelist Wallace makes what he does look effortless and yet inspired. His instinct for the colloquial puts his masters Pynchon and DeLillo to shame, and the humane sobriety that he brings to his subjects-fictional or factual-should serve as a model to anyone writing cultural comment, whether it takes the form of stories or of essays like these. The witty, insightful essays on David Lynch and TV are a reminder of how thoroughly Wallace has internalized the writing-and thinking-habits of Stanley Cavell, the plain-language philosopher at Harvard, Wallace’s alma mater. The reportage (on the Illinois State Fair, the Canadian Open and a Caribbean Cruise) is perhaps best described as post-gonzo: funny, slight and self-conscious without Norman Mailer’s or Hunter Thompson’s braggadocio.
November 2010
The Art of Learning | Josh Waitzkin
Waitzkin’s name may sound familiar—back in 1993, his father wrote about Josh’s early years as a chess prodigy in Searching for Bobby Fischer. Now 31, Waitzkin revisits that story from his own perspective and reveals how the fame that followed the movie based on his father’s book became one of several obstacles to his further development as a chess master. He turned to tai chi to learn how to relax and feel comfortable in his body, but then his instructor suggested a more competitive form of the discipline called “push hands.” Once again, he proved a quick study, and has earned more than a dozen championships in tournament play. Using examples from both his chess and martial arts backgrounds, Waitzkin draws out a series of principles for improving performance in any field.
November 2010
Do More Faster | David Cohen & Brad Feld
TechStars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator with operations in three U.S. cities. Once a year in each city, it funds about ten Internet startups with a small amount of capital and surrounds them with around fifty top Internet entrepreneurs and investors. Historically, about seventy-five percent of the companies that go through TechStars raise a meaningful amount of angel or venture capital. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is a collection of advice that comes from individuals who have passed through, or are part of, this proven program. Each vignette is an exploration of information often heard during the TechStars program and provides practical insights into early stage entrepreneurship.
November 2010
The Laws of Simplicity | John Maeda
In this breezy treatise, graphic designer and computer scientist Maeda proposes ten laws for simplifying complex systems in business and life-but mostly in product design. Maeda’s upbeat explanations usefully break down the power of less-fewer features, fewer buttons and fewer distractions-while providing practical strategies for harnessing that power, such as SHE: “Shrink, Hide, and Embody.” The first three laws, based on principles of reduction, organization and efficiency, form the foundation for increasingly complex and self-referential concepts like the importance of context and the potential for failure in simplification (by the end of the book, Maeda is chiding himself for using too many acronyms). Combined with trust and emotional engagement (laws 7 and 8), Maeda demonstrates how complex systems can become downright lovable…
November 2010
“God, he was a smart kid…”
So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future—a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm—for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer’s book tries to answer. While it doesn’t—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless’s “Alaskan odyssey,” but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner’s writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: “At 18, in a dream, he saw himself … wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams.”
Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book’s end, McCandless isn’t merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was “a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot,” you won’t soon forget Christopher McCandless.
October 2010
The 5 Love Languages | Gary Chapman
Marriage should be based on love, right? But does it seem as though you and your spouse are speaking two different languages? New York Times bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman guides couples in identifying, understanding, and speaking their spouse’s primary love language—quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch.
By learning the five love languages, you and your spouse will discover your unique love languages and learn practical steps in truly loving each other.
September 2010
Applied Imagination | Alex F. Osborn
One of the most influential design educators of the 20th century didn’t teach in an art school. Alex F. Osborn was a Madison Avenue advertising man who invented a collaborative thinking technique called “brainstorming” Today, pretty much anyone involved in creative practice knows how to brainstorm: pose a question and create a big, uncensored list of ideas.
Brainstorming, however is just one of many ideas that Osborn considered in his bestselling 1952 book, Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. Another Osborn technique is known as “Manipulative Verbs,” an exercise that’s used to refine a core idea and then create variations on it. Here’s how: starting with an initial concept, modify your idea by applying different verbs to it, such as magnify, minify, rearrange, alter, modify, substitute, reverse, and combine.
(Description by Ellen Lupton via Austin Kleon)
August 2010
A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway
In the preface to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remarks casually that “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction”—and, indeed, fact or fiction, it doesn’t matter, for his slim memoir of Paris in the 1920s is as enchanting as anything made up and has become the stuff of legend. Paris in the ’20s! Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived happily on $5 a day and still had money for drinks at the Closerie des Lilas, skiing in the Alps, and fishing trips to Spain. On every corner and at every café table, there were the most extraordinary people living wonderful lives and telling fantastic stories. Gertrude Stein invited Hemingway to come every afternoon and sip “fragrant, colorless alcohols” and chat amid her great pictures. He taught Ezra Pound how to box, gossiped with James Joyce, caroused with the fatally insecure Scott Fitzgerald (the acid portraits of him and his wife, Zelda, are notorious). Meanwhile, Hemingway invented a new way of writing based on this simple premise: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
August 2010
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King’s On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work.
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer’s “tool kit”: a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models.
July 2010
Banvard’s Folly | Paul S. Collins
Thirteen wry biographical essays about people, once famous, who have disappeared from memory. In 1903, the French physicist René Blondlot was so eager to follow up the recent discovery of X-rays that he discovered N-rays, which do not exist. In the eighteen-forties, the American painter John Banvard gained international celebrity for his painting of the Mississippi River—a panorama which measured over fifteen thousand square feet. And in the seventeen-nineties, when England was suffering a fit of bardolatry, a London lawyer’s clerk, William Henry Ireland, began “finding” Shakespeare documents. After these forgeries became collectors’ items as forgeries, Ireland met the demand by making forgeries of his forgeries, and every line from his pen remains extremely valuable.
July 2010
Ernest Hemingway on Writing | Larry W. Phillips
Phillips has amassed a slender book’s worth of Hemingway’s reflections on writing, culled from letters, books, interviews, speeches, and an unpublished manuscript. These musings are arranged into topics such as “Advice to Writers,” “Working Habits,” and “Obscenity” (of which there is plenty here). Sometimes ponderous, other times offhand, these thoughts form a portrait of a man driven to create not solely the best writing he could, but the best writing, period.
July 2010
Hackers & Painters | Paul Graham
Paul Graham explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”
The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.
June 2010
This is Water | David Foster Wallace
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in This is Water. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others.
June 2010
On Success | Charles T. Munger
It is often said that life should come with instructions. After all, the question, “how ought one to live?” has occupied humanity since Socrates. The three talks in this volume represent Charlie Munger’s answer to that ancient question. Although not as well-known as his world-famous colleague, Charlie has served as Warren Buffett’s partner in running Berkshire Hathaway for more than 45 years and, in Warrens’ own words, is “both smarter and wiser.”
May 2010
Autobiography and Other Writings | Ben Franklin
Franklin’s writings span a long and distinguished career of literary, scientific, and political inquiry—the work of a man whose life lasted for nearly all of the 18th century, and whose achievements ranged from inventing the lightning rod to publishing Poor Richard’s Almanac to signing the Declaration of Independence.
This volume includes Franklin’s reflections on such diverse issues as reason and religion, social status, electricity, America’s national character and characters, war, and the societal status of women.
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