Being
an authority on how success can be attained, the world's richest man,
Bill Gates, has named some books everyone should read.
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
Bill Gates
While Bill Gates has a schedule that’s planned down to the minute,
the entrepreneur-turned-billionaire-humanitarian still gobbles up about a
book a week.
Aside from a handful of novels, they’re mostly nonfiction books
covering his and his foundation’s broad range of interests. A lot of
them are about transforming systems: how nations can intelligently
develop, how to lead an organization, and how social change can
fruitfully happen.
We went through the past five years of his book criticism to find
the ones that he gave glowing reviews and that changed his perspective.
1. Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 by Carol Loomis
Warren Buffett and Gates have a famously epic bromance, what with
their recommending books to each other and spearheading philanthropic
campaigns together.
So it’s no surprise that Gates enjoyed Tap Dancing to Work, a
collection of articles and essays about and by Buffett, compiled by
Fortune magazine journalist Carol Loomis.
Gates says that anyone who reads the book cover-to-cover will walk away with two main impressions:
First, how Warren’s been incredibly consistent in applying his vision and investment principles over the duration of his career;
[S]econdly, that his analysis and understanding of business and
markets remains unparalleled. I wrote in 1996 that I’d never met anyone
who thought about business in such a clear way. That is certainly still
the case.
Getting into the mind of Buffett is “an extremely worthwhile use of time,” Gates concludes.
2. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization by Vaclav Smil
Gates says his favorite author is Vaclav Smil, an
environmental-sciences professor who writes big histories of things like
energy and innovation.
His latest is Making the Modern World. It got Gates thinking.
“It might seem mundane, but the issue of materials — how much we
use and how much we need — is key to helping the world’s poorest people
improve their lives,” he writes.“Think of the amazing increase in
quality of life that we saw in the United States and other rich
countries in the past 100 years. We want most of that miracle to take
place for all of humanity over the next 50 years.”
To know where we’re going, Gates says, we need to know where we’ve
been — and Smil is one of his favorite sources for learning that.
3. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
It can be easy to forget that our present day is a part of world
history. Gates says that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book
The Sixth Extinction helps correct that.
“Humans are putting down massive amounts of pavement, moving
species around the planet, over-fishing and acidifying the oceans,
changing the chemical composition of rivers, and more,” Gates writes,
echoing a concern that he voices in many of his reviews.
“Natural scientists posit that there have been five extinction
events in the Earth’s history (think of the asteroid that wiped out the
dinosaurs),” he continues, “and Kolbert makes a compelling case that
human activity is leading to the sixth.”
To get a hint of Kolbert’s reporting, check out the series of stories that preceded the book’s publication.
4. Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Tim Geithner
Gates stood at the center of an enormously complex system as CEO of
Microsoft. Timothy Geithner did much the same as U.S. Treasury
secretary — and saw the structure fall down around him during the
financial crisis.
“Geithner paints a compelling human portrait of what it was like to
be fighting a global financial meltdown while at the same time fighting
critics inside and outside the Administration as well as his own severe
guilt over his near-total absence from his family,” Gates says. “The
politics of fighting financial crises will always be ugly. But it helps
if the public knows a little more about the subject.”
Stress Test provides that knowledge.
5. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
In Better Angels, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
branches out into the history of the most contentious of subjects:
violence.
Gates says it’s one of the most important books he’s ever read.
“Pinker presents a tremendous amount of evidence that humans have
gradually become much less violent and much more humane,” he says, in a
trend that started thousands of years ago and continued until this day.
This isn’t just ivory-tower theory. Gates says the book has affected his humanitarian work.
“As I’m someone who’s fairly optimistic in general,” he says, “the
book struck a chord with me and got me to thinking about some of our
foundation’s strategies.”
6. The Man Who Fed the World by Leon Hesser
Even though Gates can get a meeting with almost anyone, he can’t
land a sit-down with Norman Borlaug, the late biologist and humanitarian
who led the “Green Revolution” — a series of innovations that kept a
huge chunk of humanity from starving.
“Although a lot of people have never heard of Borlaug, he probably
saved more lives than anyone else in history,” Gates says. “It’s
estimated that his new seed varieties saved a billion people from
starvation,” many of whom were in India and Pakistan.
Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal for his efforts — and is
one of only seven people to receive that honor.
For Gates, Borlaug is a model in getting important work done in the world.
“Borlaug was one-of-a-kind,” he says, “equally skilled in the
laboratory, mentoring young scientists, and cajoling reluctant
bureaucrats and government officials.”
Hesser’s The Man Who Fed the World lets you peer into the personality that saved a billion lives.
7. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brooks
Back in 1991, Gates asked Buffett what his favorite book was.
To reply, Buffett sent the Microsoft founder his personal copy of
Business Adventures, a collection of New Yorker stories by John Brooks.
Though the anecdotes are from half a century ago, the book remains Gates’ favorite.
Gates says that the book serves as a reminder that the principles for building a winning business stay constant. He writes:
For one thing, there’s an essential human factor in every business
endeavor. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect product, production
plan and marketing pitch; you’ll still need the right people to lead and
implement those plans.
Learning of the affections that Gates and Buffett have for this
title, the business press has fallen similarly in love with the book.
Slate quipped that Business Adventures is “catnip for billionaires.”
8. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Like us, Gates is fascinated by the way Theodore Roosevelt was able
to affect his society: busting trusts, setting up a park system, and
the like.
For this reason, Gates appreciates how Goodwin’s biography uses the presidency as a lens for understanding the shift of society.
“How does social change happen?” Gates asks in his review. “Can it
be driven by a single inspirational leader, or do other factors have to
lay the groundwork first?”
He says that TR shows how many stakeholders need to be involved.
“Although he tried to push through a number of political reforms
earlier in his career,” Gates says, “[Roosevelt] wasn’t really
successful until journalists at ‘McClure’s’ and other publications had
rallied public support for change.”
9. The Rosie Project: A Novel by Graeme Simsion
Gates doesn’t review a lot of fiction, but The Rosie Project, which
came on the recommendation of his wife, Melinda, is an oddly perfect
fit.
“Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the
hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s Syndrome who goes looking
for a wife,” he writes. “(Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts
where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was
right.)”
The book is funny, clever, and moving, Gates says, to the point that he read it in one sitting.
10. On Immunity by Eula Biss
Even though the science all says that vaccines are among the most
important inventions in human history, there’s still a debate about
whether they’re a good idea.
In “On Immunity,” essayist Eula Biss pulls apart that argument.
She “uses the tools of literary analysis, philosophy, and science
to examine the speedy, inaccurate rumors about childhood vaccines that
have proliferated among well-meaning American parents,” Gates writes.
“Biss took up this topic not for academic reasons but because of her new
role as a mom.”
11. How Asia Works by Joe Studwell
Joe Studwell is a business journalist whose central mission is understanding “development.”
The Financial Times said that How Asia Works is “the first book to
offer an Asia-wide deconstruction of success and failure in economic
development.”
Gates says that the book’s thesis goes like this:
All the countries that become development success stories (1)
create conditions for small farmers to thrive, (2) use the proceeds from
agricultural surpluses to build a manufacturing base that is tooled
from the start to produce exports, and (3) nurture both these sectors
with financial institutions closely controlled by the government.
12. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
Published in 1954, How to Lie with Statistics is an introduction to statistics — and a primer on how they can be manipulated.
It’s “more relevant than ever,” Gates says.
“One chapter shows you how visuals can be used to exaggerate trends
and give distorted comparisons,” he says. “It’s a timely reminder,
given how often infographics show up in your Facebook and Twitter feeds
these days.”
13. Epic Measures by Jeremy Smith
Reading this biography was especially meaningful for Gates because
he’s known its subject, a doctor named Chris Murray, for more than a
decade.
According to Gates, the book is a “highly readable account for
anyone who wants to know more about Chris’s work and why it matters.”
That work involves creating the Global Burden of Disease, a public
website that gathers data on the causes of human illness and death from
researchers around the world. The idea is that we can’t begin finding
cures for health issues if we don’t even know what those issues are.
Writes Gates: “As Epic Measures shows, the more we make sure
reliable information gets out there, the better decisions we all can
make, and the more impact we all can have.”
14. Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
If you’re like most people, you use steel razors, glass cups, and
paper notepads every day without thinking much about the materials
they’re made of.
In “Stuff Matters,” Miodownik, a materials scientist, aims to show you why the science behind those materials is so fascinating.
That premise might sound similar to “Making the Modern World,” a
book by Gates’ favorite author Smil, which Gates has also recommended.
But Gates says the two works are “completely different.” While Smil is a
“facts-and-numbers guy,” Miodownik is “heavy on romance and very light
on numbers,” potentially making “Stuff Matters” an easier read.
Gates claims his favorite chapter is the one on carbon, “which
offers insights into one atom’s massive past, present, and future role
in human life.”
15. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
It might be hard to imagine Gates curled up with a book of comic
drawings. But Hyperbole and a Half, based on the blog by the same name,
is more moving and profound than it is silly.
The stories and drawings in the book are based on scenes from Brosh’s life, as well as her imagined misadventures.
“It’s funny and smart as hell,” Gates writes, adding that “Brosh’s stories feel incredibly — and sometimes brutally — real.”
Gates was especially moved by the parts of the book that touch on
Brosh’s struggles with severe depression, including a series of images
about her attempts to leave an appropriate suicide note.
It’s a rare book that can simultaneously make you laugh, cry, and think existential thoughts — but this one seems to do it.
16. What If? by Randall Munroe
Another book based on a blog, What If? is a collection of cartoon-illustrated answers to hypothetical scientific questions.
Those questions range from the dystopian (“What if I took a swim in
a typical spent nuclear fuel pool?”) to the philosophical (“What if
everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in
the world?”) Each question was posed by a different reader, and Munroe, a
former roboticist for NASA, goes to the greatest lengths to answer it
accurately through research and interviews.
Gates writes:
The reason Munroe’s approach is a great way to learn about science
is that he takes ideas that everybody understands in a general way and
then explores what happens when you take those ideas to their limits.
For example, we all know pretty much what gravity is. But what if
Earth’s gravity were twice as strong as it is? What if it were three
times as strong, or a hundred? Looking at the question in that way makes
you start to think about gravity a little differently.
For anyone who’s ever wished there were someone to indulge and
investigate their secret scientific fantasies, this book comes in handy.
17. Should We Eat Meat? by Vaclav Smil
Gates isn’t shy about proclaiming Smil, a professor emeritus at the
University of Manitoba, his favorite author. In fact, he’s recommended
several of Smil’s books before.
As usual, Gates writes, Smil attacks the issue of whether humans
should consume meat from every possible angle. First he tries to define
meat, then he looks at its role in human evolution, as well as how much
meat each country consumes, the health and environmental risks, and the
ethicality of raising animals for slaughter.
Gates, who was a vegetarian for a year during his 20s, is
especially impressed by how Smil uses science to debunk common
misconceptions, like the idea that raising meat for food involves a
tremendous amount of water.
***
Via TIME
When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
