Book: The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
Rating: Amazing
Lesson Learned: creativity is key
Florida is an academic and the book is an academic treatise on creativity, the way it works and how it is attracted. I still feel that anyone has the ability to be creative from a janitor to CEO. Therefore, I think it is possible to remake cities into bastions of creativity by changing the citizens and not outsourcing creativity to come in. I want to believe creativity is something everyone has inside of them. For some people it was beaten out due to lack of encouragement or even their own laziness.
Great book and worth reading.
Book: The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About It by Paul Collier
Rating: Good
Lesson Learned: Work it out
There are lots of reasons that plunge countries into financial collapse. Collier is an academic, but writes for everyone. I imagine he is a hoot in class. I had a hard time getting through it all, but it is worth a read.
Book: Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives Compiled and Edited by Peter Orner
Rating: Great
Lesson Learned: Who deserves what?
I was born in America. It had nothing to do with me, my parents; it was purely by the sovereignty of God. This book tells stories of people who weren’t born in America. They come to work in our kitchens, our hotels, and our fields always in fear of being caught and deported. The system is broken and their stories make me sick to think there are those who want to build a fence.
Book: The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz
Rating: Good
Lesson Learned: Sustainable
Novogratz started the Acumen fund, the worlds leading NGO devoted to sustainable economic development for people in the developing world. The book follows how she got where she is and the impact she is making. You need to check out the Acumen Fund website. They are doing amazing things.
Book: We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Phillip Gourevitch
Rating: Amazing and Heart breaking
Lesson Learned: Power of written word
I read this in college and was never the same. This is about the genocide in Rwanda from the 90s and is a hard book to read or to put down. You are left shocked, horrified and ready to act. This is not a book you should read if you are happy with your life just the way it is. I cannot imagine someone reading this and not being mobilized to act on a global scale. I am still trying to process this book four years later and figuring out how I am going to contribute to sustainable peace through economic development around the world.
Book: In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong by Amin Maalouf
Rating: Great
Lesson Learned: Perception of Community
“If men of all countries, of all conditions and faiths can so easily be transformed into butchers, if fanatics of all kinds manage so easily to pass themselves off as defenders of identity, it’s because the ‘tribal’ concept of identity still prevalent all over the world facilitates such a distortion. It’s a concept inherited from the conflicts of the past, and many of us would reject it if we examined it more closely. But we cling to it through habit, from lack of imagination of resignation, thus inadvertently contributing to the tragedies by which, tomorrow, we shall be genuinely shocked.” (Page 29) Why haven’t you read this book yet?
Book: In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa by Daniel Bergner
Rating: Great
Lesson Learned: why?
I have never read a book that helps me understand Africa so I read as much as I can to try and get an accurate picture. I think the reality is that I need to go see and live it to understand it. This is a great narrative of Sierra Leone from several different viewpoints. It is a book worth reading.
Book: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Rating: GREAT
Lesson Learned: First impressions are important
There is something to say about guttural reactions to things we see and the way it makes us behave. There is a lot more to this book, but this is what was most interesting to me.
Book: Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin
Rating: meh
Lesson Learned: it’s the hours you put in
I felt bad for this author because of the unfortunate timing of his book. It came out a little after Outliers by Malcom Gladwell and I assumed it would say something a little different, but it didn’t. It is the same thesis, it takes time to become an expert at something.
Book: Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child by Elva Trevino Hart
Rating: Worth Reading
Lesson Learned: struggles of a migrant
Elva goes to work in the fields very young. Eventually, she is able to get out and make it big. After her success she visits her dying father. He asks how much she is making. She tells him $20 an hour because he wouldn’t be able to comprehend the amount of money she earns. This story sticks out at me. It illustrates our inability to comprehend things foreign to us- whether too lofty or too unjust. The book is very descriptive about the lives children of migrant workers live. In all the books on immigration I have read I still haven’t gotten hold of one that would make me agree with a fence.
