The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster is a nonfiction book published in 2013 by the American journalist Jonathan M. Katz. Katz, a reporter for the Associated Press (AP), gives a detailed, firsthand account of the 2010 earthquake that devastated the Caribbean island nation of Haiti. The book is a journalist's chronicle of the causes and consequences of a natural disaster, how it can... Read The Big Truck That Went By Summary

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) was written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist and former options trader. The book explores the role of unpredictable events in human history. Taleb argues that human beings tend to oversimplify explanations for improbable events in a significant way. From personal and historical anecdotes to philosophical theories, Taleb explores how human society creates narratives to retroactively make sense of seemingly random events.The Black Swan... Read The Black Swan Summary

The Blind Side, written by Michael Lewis, was published in 2006 by W. W. Norton & Company. The nonfiction book combines a discussion of the evolution of strategy in the National Football League (NFL) with elements of memoir through the story of Michael Oher who, after the book’s timeline, went on to have a long career as an NFL left tackle. Folded into these intersecting elements is the story of of Tom Lemming, who became... Read The Blind Side Summary

The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (2017) is a nonfiction popular-psychology book written by Keith Payne, an American professor of psychology and neuroscience. In it, he examines the physical, physiological, psychological, and moral effects of present-day inequality, particularly within the United States. Payne broadly argues that inequality has massively widened over the last 50 years, and that this has had profound implications because inequality harms everyone in society... Read The Broken Ladder Summary

The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership by Sam Walker (published in 2017) is a data-driven sports leadership study that challenges conventional wisdom about what makes teams achieve sustained excellence. Through rigorous analysis of over 1,200 teams across 37 sports categories since the 1880s, Walker, a founding editor of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section, identifies 16 teams that achieved unprecedented dominance and discovers that they share exactly one defining characteristic: the character of... Read The Captain Class Summary

Published by Portfolio/Penguin in 2011, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation is a business and sales book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. It pushes a new approach for business-to-business (B2B) sales called the “Challenger Selling Model,” which leverages tension and insight to challenge the customer’s assumptions about their business and show how the supplier’s solution is suited to address overlooked business needs. The text’s discussion of this approach highlights themes of... Read The Challenger Sale Summary

John Collier (1901-1980) is best known for his short stories, many of which are constructed as fantastic parables of modern day life. He also wrote poetry and screenplays, and was a developer for the television show “The Twilight Zone.” “The Chaser” first appeared in his short story collection Fancies and Goodnights, which won the 1952 Edgar Award and the 1952 International Fantasy Award. It is a cautionary parable of love, capitalism, and the wisdom of... Read The Chaser Summary

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 book by Atul Gawande. The book provides insights into surgical care and the problems that often arise in the field, and offers the checklist as a simple, yet powerfully effective solution. Gawande includes a significant amount of data in the book, some of which is alarming for readers not involved in his profession as a surgeon. He also interviews many professionals from different industries... Read The Checklist Manifesto Summary

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever is a 2016 self-help book by Michael Bungay Stanier. The book proposes using seven questions to foster more meaningful conversations between managers and staff—the result being improved communication and job satisfaction. Bungay Stanier advises that rather than rescue staff members, managers should learn to lead staff toward developing the skills necessary to solve problems on their own. Effectively, the coaching habits... Read The Coaching Habit Summary

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future (2014) is a novella by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Both Oreskes and Conway are historians who specialize in the history of science. The text is set in the year 2300 and is written as a historical essay from the perspective of an unnamed historian living in the fictional country of the Second People’s Republic of China. The historian recaps the progression of climate... Read The Collapse of Western Civilization Summary

The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 is one of the first environmental histories and was published in 1972. It has remained in print since and was reissued in 2003 as a special 30th anniversary edition with a new preface and foreword. This study guide refers to the 2003 Praeger edition of the book.Crosby earned his Ph.D. in history at Boston University and was a professor of geography, history, and American studies at... Read The Columbian Exchange Summary

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman, explores the intersection between technology and society, offering insights into the transformative potential and pitfalls of the rapidly advancing technological landscape. In this 2023 work, Suleyman, the co-founder of artificial intelligence company DeepMind, delivers a thought-provoking analysis of how the newest wave of emerging technologies—led by artificial intelligence and synthetic biology and compounded by quantum computing, clean energy, and robotics—will reshape... Read The Coming Wave Summary

The Competitive Advantage of Nations is a 1990 work of economics by American author Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor and expert in corporate competitive strategy whose influential works are frequently cited in business and economics. In this book, Porter dismantles traditional economic theories about how well a nation fares in global competition (factor costs and macro-economic policy) and proposes a model that focuses on active and malleable factors of business rather than... Read The Competitive Advantage Of Nations Summary

The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success (2010) by Darren Hardy describes how small improvements in a person’s habits generate large results down the line. The book explains how to take responsibility for results, make good habits that last, gain momentum with daily effort, avoid bad influences, and accelerate progress by going beyond the expected. The book has sold over one million copies. Hardy founded Success magazine; he has written four books... Read The Compound Effect Summary

Considered one of the classics of social and political theory, Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is a thought-provoking work based on the author’s personal observations of English society. As the first text of its kind to address the effects of capitalism on workers, it was widely read upon publication, even influencing the theories of Karl Marx, with whom Engels would later write The Communist Manifesto.Employed as a representative of... Read The Condition of the Working Class in England Summary

Published in 2004, The Corporation, by legal scholar Joel Bakan, demonstrates that corporations often misbehave because it is in their nature to do so. The corporate legal mandate, to pursue profit on behalf of shareholders, impels corporations to take any action, including callous, antisocial, and even unlawful behaviors, so long as they generate a profit.  Because corporations are created by governments, they are beholden to the state for their survival, yet they often manage to... Read The Corporation Summary

The Courage to Be Disliked is a 2013 nonfiction self-help and psychology book written by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Structured as a Socratic dialogue between a youth and a philosopher, the book introduces Alfred Adler’s psychological theories, addressing common challenges and points of confusion in the context of real-world application.Kishimi is a Japanese philosopher, psychologist, teacher, and translator who has studied Adlerian psychology and Greek philosophy for decades. Koga, a Japanese writer, encountered Adlerian... Read The Courage to Be Disliked Summary

The Creative Act by Rick Rubin explores the creative process and artistic identity. Rubin, a renowned music producer and advocate of creative expression, explores how “creativity is a fundamental aspect of human existence” (1). Rubin’s collaborations include artists across genres, including Kanye West, Jay-Z, The Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Strokes, Metallica, System of a Down, Johnny Cash, and Adele. Rubin has won numerous awards for his work, including 9 Grammy wins and 18... Read The Creative Act Summary

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin was originally published in 1994. It has been reprinted multiple times, reaching a fifth edition in 2010. The book focuses on the historical origins of the Federal Reserve Bank and the social and political justifications for its creation. Griffin is a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker who pursued a financial education in preparation for writing this book. The book... Read The Creature from Jekyll Island Summary

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living is a 2016 self-help book by American author Ryan Holiday, with translated quotations provided by Stephen Hanselman. In this work, Holiday offers readers a year’s worth of daily devotionals based on works by major Stoic philosophers such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. The author begins each devotional with a quotation, which he further explains and elaborates on in a brief analysis... Read The Daily Stoic Summary