Browsing Tag

Walter Isaacson

Book Reviews,

Top Ten Books of 2017

To help with your gift list, here are my top ten books of 2017:

The “I need something fun to create bar arguments” goes to Tim Harford for his book Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. Barbed wire? The gramophone? Passports? Curious insights like these fill the book and will create conversation, controversy, and interest.

The “historical fiction that has fascinating characters and everybody is reading these days” award goes to Amor Towles for A Gentleman in Moscow. Set in the first half of the 20th Century, the story of a Russian man …

Book Reviews,

Leonardo da Vinci

A few days ago I was enjoying a brief visit with long time friends. By a warm fire with a glass of wine in my hand, they asked one of my favorite questions: “So Roy, any book suggestions?”

Without hesitation I said they must read Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

Isaacson is one of my favorite biographers because he explains how his subjects — such as Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Steve Jobs — innovate at the intersection of science and art. These are Renaissance thinkers who understood electricity, physics, politics, technology … but also literature, beauty, …

Book Reviews,

The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson

One of the hottest books of the year is The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. After the amazing success (and timing) of his book about Steve Jobs, in this new book Isaacson explains how the process of innovation has commonalities no matter the people, places, institutions or even centuries involved.

It’s a touch of brilliant marketing. Take the hottest field of our era (technology), combine with many of the richest people in the world (Gates etc.), look at a topic of great interest (innovation), and then draft a historical …