Summer Reading

1. Summer Reading

2. “Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.”—E.B. White “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” —Carl Sagan “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Franz Kafka “A book is a heart that beats in the chest of another.” —Neil Gaiman “You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”—James Baldwin “Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence… a way of being fully human.” —Susan Sontag Quotes compiled from brainpickings.org

3. Books About Work and the Workplace

4. Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elderby Chip Conley Conley, formerly of Airbnb, explores the role of the “modern elder” in today’s workplace. He argues that experience is on the brink of a comeback. While digital skills might have the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget, the human skills that midcareer workers possess—like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and coach—never expire. “This is ultimately a book about how we can develop deeper connections, disrupt how we think about teaching and learning, and make more meaningful contributions in our lives and our careers.”—Brené Brown, author

5. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson The hardest choices are also the most consequential. So why do we know so little about how to get them right? Johnson uncovers powerful tools for honing the important skill of complex decision-making. While you can’t model a once-in-a-lifetime choice, you can model the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers. “Our biggest regrets in life revolve around situations in which we made the wrong predictions about the future. A popular science and history writer illuminates why we’re so vulnerable to poor long-term decision-making.” —Adam Grant, author

6. No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work by Liz Fosslienand Mollie West Duffy Drawing on what they’ve learned from behavioral economics, psychology, and their own experiences at organizations, the authors commit to showing readers how to bring their best (and whole) selves to work every day. Their goal is to teach you how to figure out which emotions to toss, which to keep to yourself, and which to express in order to be both happier and more effective. “A must-read that topples the idea that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, No Hard Feelings offers a path toward a future I want to work in: an emotionally expressive yet respectful (and high-performing!) workplace.” —Susan Cain, author

7. Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team by Simon Sinek2019 NAIS Annual Conference Speaker Whether you’ve just started your first job, are leading a team, or are CEO of your own company, the exercises in this step-by-step book will help guide you on a path to long-term success and fulfillment, for both you and your colleagues.  “I believe fulfillment is a right and not a privilege. We are all entitled to wake up in the morning inspired to go to work, feel safe when we’re there and return home fulfilled at the end of the day. Achieving that fulfillment starts with understanding exactly WHY we do what we do.” —Simon Sinek

8. The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He argues that culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. The book explores the principles of cultural chemistry that transform individuals into teams that can accomplish amazing things together. “If you want to understand how successful groups work—the signals they transmit, the language they speak, the cues that foster creativity—you won’t find a more essential guide than The Culture Code.”—Charles Duhigg, author

9. Books About Leadership, Innovation, and Change

10. Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. Leadership tells the story of how they each collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. “The book is uplifting and informative—and a relatively quick read compared with other similarly smart history books.”—NPR

11. How Change Happens by Cass R. Sunstein Sunstein explores how social change happens and how and when social movements take off. He looks at social norms and their frequent collapse, as well as more gradual change or “nudges” that help produce new and different decisions. • “It’s often said that the only constancy in life is change. Cass Sunstein weaves threads from diverse traditions in behavioral science to explain how big shifts get started.”—Angela Duckworth, author

12. Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industriesby Safi Bahcall Physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about group behavior. Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition. “This book has everything: new ideas, bold insights, entertaining history, and convincing analysis. Not to be missed by anyone who wants to understand how ideas change the world.” —Daniel Kahneman, author

13. The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation by Frans Johansson 2019 NAIS Annual Conference Speaker Why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs. The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory and offers examples of how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations. “[The book’s] assertion that breakthrough principles of creativity occur at novel intersections is an enduring principle of creativity that should guide innovators in every field.” —Clayton M. Christensen

14. Books About Education, Race Relations, Parenting, and Modern Society

15. What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration From Teachers Across America by Ted Dintersmith In 2016, innovation expert Ted Dintersmith visited schools in all 50 states. In this book, he catalogs and shares the many instances he witnessed of teachers in ordinary settings doing extraordinary things, creating innovative classrooms where children learn deeply and joyously as they gain purpose, agency, essential skillsets and mindsets, and real knowledge. “In among the undergrowth, there’s an emergent counterculture of inspirational schools that are rising to the real challenges of educating young people for life in the 21st century. What School Could Be is both a vivid account of this grassroots revolution and a hardheaded analysis of its desperate significance.”—Sir Ken Robinson

16. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover Educated is amemoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family in rural Idaho and goes on to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. It is a coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes and the will to change it. “I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant about. I think education is really just a process of self-discovery—of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of [it] as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”—Tara Westover, interview with Bill Gates

17. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo White fragility—the defensive moves that white people make when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors such as argumentation and silence. These behaviors reinstate white racial equilibrium, reinforcing white dominance in the racial hierarchy and preventing meaningful cross-racial dialogue. “White Fragility is an important launching pad, at once an explication of white people’s complicity in racist systems and an exhortation to do the hard but necessary work of breaking down those systems.”—NPR

18. Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean The 10 women who are the focus of Sharp—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the 20th century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work. “An entertaining and erudite cultural history of selected female thinkers who ‘came up in a world that was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything.’”—Maureen Corrigan, The New York Times

19. These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore These Truths is a compelling, page-turning journey through U.S. history. From 1492 to the 2016 election, Lepore tells the nation’s story—the glory and the guts. The United States was founded on a set of truths that were supposed to be self-evident, but from the beginning, there have been bitter divisions over what those truths really mean. “A nation born in contradiction [slaves and slave owners, immigrants and those who fought immigration] will fight forever over the meaning of its history…. The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. … It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”—Jill Lepore

20. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari In 21 chapters, Harari untangles political, technological, social, and existential issues and offers advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in: How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? “The trick for putting an end to our anxieties, [Harari] suggests, is not to stop worrying. It’s to know which things to worry about, and how much to worry about them.” —The New York Times

21. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark Tegmark, an MIT professor who has participated in mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial, explores important questions related to AI: How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans in the job market and perhaps altogether?Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? “Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at the general public, the book offers a political and philosophical map of the promises and perils of the AI revolution.”—The Guardian

22. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh Smarsh enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood on a Kansas farm but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her: untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would enable the upward mobility that is the American Dream. Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country. “Heartland is a book we need: an observant, affectionate portrait of working-class America that possesses the power to resonate with readers of all classes.” —San Francisco Chronicle

23. The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti Moretti makes the case that there are three Americas (“brain hubs” like San Francisco and Boston, former manufacturing capitals that are rapidly losing jobs and residents, and all the other cities/regions) and that they are rapidly diverging from each other. He believes that dealing with this split—supporting growth in the hubs while arresting the decline elsewhere—is the challenge of the century. • “A timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them—and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere.”—Barack Obama

24. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border by Francisco Cantú Cantú, who worked as a border patrol agent, details hard scenes of drug smuggling, human suffering, and death that unfold daily at the border. He is an empathetic witness to the desperation felt by those driven to cross it. But as an agent, he also knows the fear of those charged with guarding it. “There is a line dividing what we know and do not know.  Some see the world from one shore and some from the other.  Cantú brings the two together to a spiritual whole.”  —Sandra Cisneros, author

25. Additional Recommendations From the NAIS Staff - The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor - Dare to Lead by Brené BrownRECOMMENDED BY: Caroline Grace Blackwell, Vice President, Equity and Justice - The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too) by Gretchen Rubin - Frugal Innovation: How to Do BetterWith Lessby Navi Radjou RECOMMENDED BY: Cheryl Thibideau, Executive Assistant to the President - The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath RECOMMENDED BY: Tim Fish, Chief Innovation Officer - Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,edited by Nancy W. Gleason RECOMMENDED BY: Jefferson Burnett, Senior Vice President, Education Innovation - The Library Book by Susan Orlean RECOMMENDED BY: Zoe Sherlick, Chief Operating Officer - Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs RECOMMENDED BY: Claire Wescott, Director of Project Management and Coordination - Becoming by Michelle Obama RECOMMENDED BY: Tony Hernandez, AIM Program Coordinator

26. Additional Recommendations From the NAIS Staff • - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John CarreyrouRECOMMENDED BY: Debra Wilson, General Counsel • - All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung • RECOMMENDED BY: Amelia Kurtz, Director of Engagement • - This Is How It Always Is: A Novel by Laurie Frankel • RECOMMENDED BY: Kathleen Shea-Porter, Director of Marketing • - Pachinko by Min Jin Lee  • RECOMMENDED BY: Beth Laking, Vice President, Membership, Marketing & Member Support • - The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers • RECOMMENDED BY:Andrew Kurtz, Data Integrity Specialist • Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter • RECOMMENDED BY: Scott Donaldson, Member Engagement Coordinator  • - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande • RECOMMENDED BY: Hilary LaMonte, Senior Vice President, DASL • - Hits and Misses: Stories by Simon RichRECOMMENDED BY: Stephanie Wilkinson, Director of Systems Architecture