Members Share Their Summer Reading Recommendations (Update 7)

We recently surveyed fellow members for their favorite summer reading recommendations. We purposely set no limiting criteria on the choice of books, as the summer months are a wonderful time to read broadly and not necessarily with a specific goal in mind. We hope you’ll enjoy the recommendations featured below. Happy reading!

Investing

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, by Gautam Baid
— recommended by Henrik Andersson, David Emmanuel, and John Mihaljevic

Good Stocks Cheap: Value Investing with Confidence for a Lifetime of Stock Market Outperformance, by Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall
— recommended by Vincent Linz

Business

How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone, by Brian McCullough
— recommended by Elliot Turner (“fantastic history of the Internet, including the key players and the key companies, both successful and unsuccessful; the story starts with the Netscape IPO and runs through the iPhone introduction, with a look at the actual underlying technologies and the various business models”)

Retail Disruptors: The Spectacular Rise and Impact of the Hard Discounters, by Jan-Benedict Steenkamp
— recommended by Paul White

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, by Katherine Eban
— recommended by Rohan Shah (“investigative book about the generic pharma industry; useful for investors in the sector and for users of generic drugs, too”)

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, by Satya Nadella
— recommended by Johan Åkerberg

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur
— recommended by Clinton Madgwick (related article)

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life, by Rory Sutherland
— recommended by Chris Mayer (“The basic premise: There is a logical way to think about the world and what Sutherland calls a ‘pycho-logical’ way to think about the world. We spend most of our time looking for logical explanations, but human behavior often is not logical… The book gets you to ask unconventional questions and look at the world in an unconventional way. That’s what I most value about Sutherland’s thinking generally.”)

Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business, by Anja Shortland
— recommended by Vincent Linz (“a worthy exploration of sophisticated insurance operations and business decision-making”)

Economics

Debt – Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber
— recommended by Mark Kutz (“interesting take from an anthropologist who pushes back on conventional thinking about money and credit”)

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction, by Richard Bookstaber
— recommended by Don Donigan

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition, by Niall Ferguson
— recommended by Domingo Hormaeche (“It deals with the history of money, credit and banking, analyzing the consequences to society and the fundamental role of finance in human development. Conclusions: 1. Money doesn’t cause poverty, a lack of money is the cause; 2. Money magnifies our behavioral tendencies and also magnifies inequality; 3. It is virtually impossible to predict the timing, degree and duration of financial booms and busts.”)

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, by Ludwig Von Mises
— recommended by Juan Huerta de Soto Huarte

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, by Jesús Huerta de Soto
— recommended by Juan Huerta de Soto Huarte

Biographical

Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time, by Ian O’Connor
— recommended by David Emmanuel

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts
— recommended by Robert Grusky

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, by Sebastian Mallaby
— recommended by Christian Billinger (“a great look at how incentives and personality impact decision making; Mallaby’s thesis is that Greenspan had the answers but was reluctant to act because of political/career considerations and a personality that made him avoid confrontations; something that is worth considering when assessing company management teams etc.”)

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story, by Ken Langone
— recommended by Peter O’Keefe

My Life And Work: The Autobiography Of Henry Ford, by Henry Ford
— recommended by Santiago Domingo Cebrián

The Bettencourt Affair: The World’s Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris, by Tom Sancton
— recommended by David Bloch (“a light read that reads like a thriller and has valuable insights on human relationships and the danger of not having total awareness of our personal and financial affairs”)

Multidisciplinary

Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, by Geoffrey West
— recommended by Jack Mohr (“fascinating perspective from a renowned physicist who manages to evidence how organisms, cities and companies are bound by the same universal laws of scalability; if we understand how the natural world — with billions of years of history behind it — scales, we can better predict how nascent cities and companies will scale in the future”)

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
— recommended by Tay Kwong Yuan (“a book of mental models woven together in a narrative fashion”)

The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, by Ben Lindbergh
— recommended by Elliot Turner (“a great look at the evolution of the application of data to baseball team building and player development; the story starts with an interesting premise, highly relevant to investing: teams have gotten similarly sophisticated on crunching the data that made Moneyball so popular, such that the advantages wrought by such an approach have been driven out of existence; consequently, teams have had to evolve; the new, most successful approach has been applying data to analyze and improve a player’s performance; the book talks through these approaches on both the hitting and pitching side and overall organizational philosophies on coaching and managing farm systems”)

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
— recommended by John Butler (“growing up in Michigan, where the economy is ultra-cyclical, I have always subscribed to Mr. Taleb’s views (often before reading them) and have designed my life around being counter-cyclical”)

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling
— recommended by Ola Heldal (“thought provoking and at times funny”) and Craig Bandason (“a wonderful book and, most importantly, the conclusions are data driven; Africa in particular suffers from the same ‘bad forever’ treatment”)

Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, by Ben Reiter
— recommended by Dan Riley

The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection, by John Tyler Bonner
— recommended by Sanjay Voleti

History and Politics

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by Douglas G. Brinkley
— recommended by Ravi Nagarajan (“suited for those who are fascinated by the leadership of President Kennedy and the story of the team of scientists who made the moon landing happen; perhaps more importantly, the reader comes away with a sense of the level of commitment and effort that will likely be required to send humans to Mars and beyond during the twenty-first century”)

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, by Richard McGregor
— recommended by Toby Shute

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947, by Christopher Clark
— recommended by Jean Philippe Tissot (“how Prussia transformed from an insignificant region to the most powerful one within the German lands, and its subsequent disappearance; the reader can find similarities between corporations and kingdoms, managers and monarchs; all that matters is survival”)

The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, by Rick Atkinson
— recommended by Todd Wenning (“balanced and thoughtful read into what set off the American Revolution”)

Where the Wind Leads: A Refugee Family’s Miraculous Story of Loss, Rescue, and Redemption, by Dr. Vinh Chung
— recommended by Paul Johnson (“inspiring story about a Vietnamese refugee family”)

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, by P. W. Singer
— recommended by Mike Hung-Ming Hsieh

Personal Growth

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker
— recommended by Michael Cunningham (“shows the impact reduced sleep has on life expectancy, weight, susceptibility to major illnesses, and cognitive function; perhaps the most compelling argument relies on evolution — when our early ancestors were sleeping they were not consuming food, procreating, and advancing their species and were vulnerable to predators; thus, if sleep were not highly beneficial to the human species we would have evolved out of it; nature is demonstrating that it is a critical element for our wellbeing”)

The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health, by Emeran Mayer
— recommended by Tom Mazza (“not a finance book but it’s an easy read and I guarantee some members will find it extremely helpful as I and others in my family found out”)

Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son, by George Horace Lorimer
— recommended by David Emmanuel

The Laws of Human Nature, by Robert Greene
— recommended by Mike Gorlon

Letters from a Stoic, by Seneca
— recommended by Abdallah Toutoungi

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, by Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen
— recommended by Pedro Zuloaga

Looking for more reading inspiration? Enjoy this article, featuring book recommendations gleaned from numerous MOI Global interviews.