The Top Three
Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson
If you like: Biographies, tech and Silicon Valley, leadership, business lessons
Isaacson’s behemoth bio of Musk clocks in at almost 700 pages, but makes for easy reading nonetheless thanks to relatively short chapters. Featuring close and personal discussions — it would be wrong to call them interviews — with Musk’s vast and varied network, as well as with the man himself, this book is the most transparent look yet at one of the most controversial and impactful figures of our time. Much of the book focuses on the qualities that make Musk who he is, and how they came to be fundamental parts of his personality and worldview. Musk’s unrelenting adherence to constant First Principles questioning of everything, particularly rules and regulations, is the foundation on which most of his achievements are built. We come to see how Musk became the real-life model for Ironman. But also here for the first time, a light is shed on what was going through his head at so many strange moments in the last few years (include the entire Twitter debacle). It is a real, honest and empathetic but critical look at the man behind the constant headlines.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
by Jonathan Rosen
Read it if you like: Mental health mysteries, true crime, coming of age stories, literary discussions
Part memoir, part true crime: Author Jonathan Rosen recalls his life growing up in New Rochelle, New York, with his friend Michael Laudor. Laudor, a brilliant young Jewish boy, born with the aura of a promising future, whizzes through high school and onto Yale and then a first job at Bain consulting. It is there, in the pressure cooker of consulting, that he begins to suffer from the first symptoms of what will become debilitating schizophrenia — believing the secretary there is a clawed, bloody fanged monster sent to destroy him. His friends, including the author himself, look on helplessly as madness drives the once-golden Laudor to an unspeakable crime that reverberates through their small town like a boulder dropped into a puddle. The finished product is an astonishingly clear eyed look at the toll a devastating mental illness took on a one of a kind mind.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
by Piers Paul Read
Read it if you like: Jaw-dropping survival stories, astonishing true adventures, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
The wild, true story of how a rugby team struggles to survive in the remote Andes after their plane crash lands in the middle of the mountains. As my husband can attest, I alternately gasped or yelled ‘YOU HAVE TO READ THIS’ about once every five minutes while making my way through this book. You think it’s going to get better? No no, it gets worse. But what a testament to the will to survive. I have now forced everyone I know into reading this book. Avoid me for the next 6 months unless you want to hear about it. (Bonus: Netflix just released a movie adaptation).
Runners Up:
The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People who Lived Through it
by Nina Siegal
Read it if you like: World War II, Jewish history, oral histories, regular people in extraordinary circumstances
A firsthand look at World War II and the extermination of Jews in the Netherlands, told through the diaries of a group of people who lived through it. The author scoured thousands of personal journals to piece together this book, which focuses on a handful of Dutch people living through the Second World War, including a Jewish diamond cutter, a prominent Jewish journalist, a Nazi housewife and a Dutch police officer on the side of the Germans. It’s shot through with the author’s own personal family history, which sheds light on much of the historical background, as well as an inquiry into the way in which the past is chronicled. Its narrower focus on the Netherlands allows for a very personal history of the period, and the intimate diaries of these people are so transportive as to be disturbing.
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
By Timothy Egan
Read it if you’re interested in: Narrative nonfiction, historical thrillers, America in the 1920s, how the KKK came to be
A jaw dropping account of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in America, the man behind the white mask and the unlikely woman who took them down. What makes this so propulsive is the combination of subject matter and the mind boggling amount of first person accounting: court testimony, letters, diaries and newspapers from the time make it seem like its unfolding before our eyes, resulting in a remarkably lucid account of the KKK’s rise in 1920’s America. The first half of this book is a cult of personality tale about a man named DC Stephenson, who brought the Klan back to life after it was driven underground. Stephenson is a caricature of a villain, a devil incarnate who held “parties that would have shamed Nero” and deployed tactics that would make the mafia blush. Egan rigorously details how Stephenson consolidated power, bringing readers to the brink of despair before introducing the heroes of this story. The second half of this story morphs into a beautiful eulogy for one unlikely woman, a band of journalists and the smattering of Klan defiers who ultimately take down a madman and his obscenely large band of cronies.
This is the best of literature: it casts a shining light on the horrors of the past but pays homage to the better angels of our nature which ultimately win the day. We must understand in order not to repeat. Anyone who thinks the country hasn’t made leaps and bounds to where it is today should take heed.
On the Savage Side
by Tiffany McDaniel
Read it if you’re interested in: The Chillicothe Six, communities coping with addiction, female-centric fiction
Arcade and Daffodil are twins growing up in small town Ohio, in an area besieged by the twin crises of addiction and poverty. As they grow up, women in the community begin to go missing one by one, their bodies appearing days later floating in the Chillicothe River. Arc and Daffy, as they’re called, are impeccably crafted girls with fire red hair, growing up with an aunt and mother undone by their own demons. They look to their grandmother, Mamaw Milkweed, for guidance about what it means to be a female. They age with tales of the river as a woman, encircling the souls of those who are delivered to her by violence. Mamaw Milkweed tells Arc and Daffy the stories of fierce mother earth to bolster them against a world in which out of which no one they love has made it intact. The twins’ lives grind slowly but inescapably toward tragedy, and readers are privileged to bear witness.
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford
Read it if you like: Travelogues, drool-inducing descriptions of food, Italian culture
Acclaimed journalist Bill Buford abandons his day to day in order to train in the kitchen of now-maligned Mario Batali’s New York restaurant, Babbo, and the result is a beautiful marriage of words and food. Buford depicts the beautiful, sweat-drenched culture of the New York restaurant scene (during which we find out in no uncertain terms that all those reports about Batali were true..). Plus, he takes us on a joyride to the far reaches of rural Italy, where he learns the tedious glory of making pasta from a little old lady and becomes an apprentice to a shank toting, opera-singing butcher. Part travelogue, part journalistic inquiry and part soul searching memoir, this book has something to be savored on every page.
The Shell Seekers
by Rosamund Pilcher
Read it if you’re interested in: Family sagas, London during the Blitz, Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, British literature
At the heart of this story is the Keeling family—matriarch Penelope in particular. The timelines straddle London during the Blitz and the English countryside in the 1970s, with a byway through Ibiza (pre-social scene). Penelope is in possession of a painting by her late artist father called the Shell Seekers, which takes pride of place in her home and around which all the family’s affairs coalesce. To call this novel magical would be selling it short. It is, however, certainly enchanting. From her deeply felt characters to its achingly realistic scenes, Pilcher has a knack for choosing just the right word at exactly the right time so as to make you feel as though you’re transported into the room with this beloved cast. The Shell Seekers is what books aspire to be, what they should be. It changes hearts and minds and entertains in the process.
Loved Alive and Fever in the heartland (both I think I got from your previous emails!). Adding Diary Keepers and The Shell Seekers to the list.
Strongly agree on Musk and Alive! I also am super intrigued by The Best Minds. Can't wait to read it this year.