• "Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell," by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle. I understood Bill Campbell was a behind-the-scenes guy in Silicon Valley, but I had no idea just how influential he was. Venture capitalist Bill Gurley of Benchmark noted “I would argue that Bill has had a bigger impact on Silicon Valley than any other single person simply because his reach was so amazingly wide.” That’s a story I want to read.
• "The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World." by Charles C. Mann. When it comes to climate change, there are many possible futures. At one end, things get irreversibly worse; at the opposite end, technology solves climate change just like any other engineering problem. This book looks at that intellectual clash between environmentalists on the one side and the techno-optimists on the other by telling the history of two little-known 20th-century scientists.
• "Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life," by Rory Sutherland. Sutherland is the vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy; he says his “attractively vague job title” gives him the freedom to create a behavioral science practice within the ad agency. This looks intriguing.
• "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid," by Douglas R. Hofstadter. A masterwork from 1979 that focuses on how cognition can emerge via a variety of hidden neurological mechanisms. I always regretted blazing through GEB in college for a class. This is the summer when I finally get to reread it slowly and carefully.
What books do you want to read this summer? Message me at the address below and I might include them in a future books column.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.