The Most Inspiring Books

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr.--history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty--is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a histor

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him h

One of the great fears many of us face is that despite all our effort and striving, we will discover at the end that we have wasted our life. In <em>A Guide to the Good Life</em>, William B. Irvine plumbs the wisdom of Stoic philosophy, one of the most popular and successful schools of thought in an

Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good a

Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin?<br /> <br />Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?<br /> <br />Are you often busy but not productive?<br /> <br />Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?<br /> <br />If you answered yes to a

Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the

<b>The author of <i>The Willpower Instinct</i> delivers a controversial and groundbreaking new book that overturns long-held beliefs about stress. </b><br /> <br />More than forty-four percent of Americans admit to losing sleep over stress. And while most of us do everything we can to reduce it, Sta

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In <i>Empires of Light</i>, historian Jill Jonnes portrays

<b>The Barnes &amp; Noble Review</b><br /> <i>March 1999</i><br /><br /> While Gates, Jobs, and the other big boys of Silicon Valley are basking in the glory of the information age, renowned <i>Los Angeles Times</i> reporter Michael Hiltzik reveals how, back in the early '70s, a group of inventors a

Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much

<b>A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California’s Monterey Peninsula</b><br /><br />To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to red

Robert M. Pirsig's <i>Zen &amp; the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father &amp; his young son.