Best Non-Fiction Books of 2019: 42 Picks Recommended by CEOs

David Epstein contrasts Tiger Woods with Roger Federer to argue that broad experience and late specialization beat early focus in unpredictable fields, drawing on scientists, inventors, musicians and athletes. Malcolm Gladwell writes that he loved being told his assumptions were wrong.

Mark Manson’s third book asks why people who are freer, healthier and richer than ever still feel hopeless, and turns to psychology, Plato and Nietzsche to examine religion, politics and emotion. James Clear praises its counterintuitive insights and easy style.

Michael Hyatt defines productivity as doing the right work rather than more of it, with a three-step system for filtering commitments, cutting interruptions and guarding focus. Cal Newport says it shows how to keep executing the work that matters.

Lisa Taddeo spent eight years embedded with three American women in Indiana, North Dakota and the Northeast to report on their sexual and emotional lives. Gwyneth Paltrow found it so absorbing that she lost track of the fact it was reporting.

Jared Diamond compares how six nations, among them Japan, Finland, Chile and postwar Germany, came through national crises, borrowing from the ways individuals handle personal trauma. Bill Gates says its case studies left him more hopeful about solving problems.

Robert Iger looks back on 15 years running Disney, from the 2005 handover through the purchases of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm, and distills principles such as optimism, courage and fairness. Brene Brown calls its stories and lessons leadership gold.

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy argues that people rarely decide by strict logic, and uses Red Bull, train countdown boards and stripy toothpaste to show how behavioral science and branding can solve problems that reason alone cannot. Steven Bartlett recommends it.

Allan N. Schore studies the emotional right brain, how one person manages feelings alone and how two people manage them together, and argues that emotional exchanges in therapy rest on communication between right brains. Andrew Huberman finds it accessible without a background in biology.

Lion tracker Boyd Varty builds a guide to finding purpose around one day spent tracking lions in the South African bush, turning tracking skills into lessons on navigating and staying alert. Tim Ferriss says the short book reached him at the right moment.

Simon Sinek borrows the split between finite and infinite games to business, arguing that leaders who aim to stay in the game build sturdier companies, with Blockbuster against Netflix as a case. Adam Grant calls it Sinek’s biggest idea so far.

John Brockman gathers 25 essays that answer Norbert Wiener’s 1950 warning about machines that learn, with some contributors alarmed by the risks of AI and others far calmer. Gerd Leonhard recommends it as a round table of leading scientific minds.

Edward Snowden’s autobiography moves from a childhood in a military family to postings with the CIA and NSA, explaining how he helped build a mass surveillance system, why he leaked evidence of it in 2013 and what he thinks about privacy.

Bill Bryson’s tour of the human body gives a chapter to each part and two to disease, tracing the discoveries behind current knowledge in his humorous style. Morgan Housel calls it an anatomy textbook written by a great storyteller and among the most practical science books he knows.

Peter Pomerantsev mixes memoir and reporting to follow disinformation campaigns from Russia to the Philippines, linking Kremlin methods to Brexit and the 2016 US election. Garry Kasparov says it shows how dictators use truth itself as a weapon.

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb writes about becoming a patient herself after a breakup, seeing a therapist named Wendell while following four of her own clients through their crises. Arianna Huffington praises how she exposes her own blind spots alongside theirs.

New York Times reporter Mike Isaac follows Uber from UberCab in 2009 to its 2019 public listing, covering its combative culture, the harassment allegations, the fights with taxi unions and the 2017 boardroom coup. John Carreyrou reads it as a parable about founders and power.

Christopher Leonard spent seven years tracing how Koch Industries grew from a regional pipeline firm into a giant private company, through union fights, commodity trading and a long campaign to cast doubt on climate change. William Cohan praises its deep reporting.

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch studies how informal online writing is reshaping English, from LOL against lol to the sarcasm tilde, the passive-aggressive final period and emoji used like hand gestures. Erin McKean calls it a joyful look at the newest wave of English.

James O’Toole revisits two hundred years of British and American founders who wanted firms that paid well and treated workers decently, and finds their worker policies seldom survived the founders once shareholders pushed. Jay Coen Gilbert recommends it to leaders shaping capitalism’s future.

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, turns to resisting distraction with a four-step model that treats time management as pain management and workplace distraction as a problem of company culture. Arianna Huffington calls it the best guide she has read on reclaiming attention.

Physicist Safi Bahcall uses phase transitions to argue that a team’s structure, more than its culture, decides whether wild ideas survive, with cases from Pan Am to Pixar. Daniel Kahneman credits it with new ideas, bold insights and convincing analysis.

Ryan Holiday draws on Stoic and Buddhist thinkers to argue that staying steady amid noise underpins discipline, focus and self-mastery, with portraits of leaders, athletes and artists who practiced it. Peter Attia read it and then read it again.

Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki treats empathy as a skill people can build with effort, using research from his own lab and stories of police officers, a former neo-Nazi and NICU nurses. Angela Duckworth praises its mix of current science and lasting stories.

Melinda Gates pairs stories from two decades of work with the poorest people with data on child marriage, workplace inequity and access to contraceptives, and writes for the first time about her own marriage. Warren Buffett ranks it among the best books he has ever read.

Organizational consultants Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy show how to decide which feelings to express at work and which to keep private, with advice such as selective vulnerability and caring a little less about the job. Adam Grant points to its illustrations and examples.

David Wallace-Wells sketches a near future of climate damage far beyond rising seas, with economic devastation, refugee crises, food shortages and conflict, and asks how warming will reshape politics and capitalism. Shane Parrish uses it to learn how science says lives will change.

Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann collect mental models from psychology, physics and economics into one illustrated guide, from the Eisenhower matrix and the 5 Whys to the sunk cost fallacy. Annie Duke calls it a fast, fun resource for good decisions.

Todd Hewlin and Scott A. Snyder set out six rules for established companies to turn their scale, data and expertise against digital disruptors, with cases from NASA, Cisco, General Motors and Mastercard. Adam Grant calls it full of practical tips for big companies.

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a letter from Little Dog, a Vietnamese American in his late twenties, to his mother Rose, a Hartford nail salon worker who cannot read, about a family history rooted in Vietnam. Dua Lipa says the title alone hooked her and praises its poetic language.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the ways people make sense of strangers are flawed, building on the truth-default theory and on cases running from a Cuban mole to the arrest of Sandra Bland. Ryan Holiday finished it in one sitting.

Charlie Mackesy’s illustrated story follows a lonely boy who meets a mole, a fox and a horse and talks with them about kindness, fear, hope and friendship as they cross rivers and storms. Tim Ferriss says it looks like a children’s book yet holds wisdom for adults.

Pekka Hämäläinen traces the Lakota from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, as they became masters first of the Missouri Valley and then of the high plains, and argues they belong at the center of the American story. Tyler Cowen picked it as a top non-fiction title.

Reshma Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code, holds that girls are raised to be perfect and boys to be brave, and offers practices for making courage a habit, drawing on hundreds of interviews with girls and women. Adam Grant says it shows how to free women from social expectations.

Brian Gunia argues that money makes people negotiate narrowly, and draws on old barter economies, where trading was hard and demanded strategy, to build a better mindset for modern deals. Adam Grant calls his insights on bargaining both novel and useful.

Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness argue that passion drives breakthroughs but also burnout, question the advice to follow a passion, and explain how to build a healthier kind. Adam Grant calls it a readable guide to making passion bring out the best in people.

Lawyer and human rights advocate Shannon Sedgwick Davis recounts how her Bridgeway Foundation teamed up with a Ugandan army unit and a South African military contractor to stop a warlord who abducted children as soldiers. Adam Grant says the memoir moves readers to help.

Austin Kleon offers ten rules for staying creative over a lifetime, treating creative work as a loop built on a daily routine, time offline, walks outdoors and attention to what matters. Todd Henry calls it a great book.

Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph tells how a 1997 commute pitch about renting movies online became a company, from a motel conference room office and launch day server crashes to an offer to sell to Blockbuster. A CEO Library reader listed it among the best of 2019.

Journalist Tommy Tomlinson, at 460 pounds and nearing 50, records his attempt to lose weight through exercise goals, a Fitbit and a new diet, and travels to meet other heavy Americans. A CEO Library reader put it on a list of best books read in 2019.

Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom gathers eight essays on the way American culture regards black women, covering beauty, money, the loss of a child, infant mortality and the politics of recent elections. Roxane Gay calls the collection necessary work.

Poet Bassey Ikpi tells her life in essays shaped by bipolar II and anxiety, from a childhood in Nigeria and Oklahoma to touring with Def Poetry Jam and the breakdown that led to her diagnosis. Tarana Burke praises its many layers.

Leadership coach Amy Jen Su builds her method on Purpose, Process, People, Presence and Peace, aiming to give leaders more energy and impact with less stress. Jim Massey praises how its frameworks fit the tangled problems leaders face.