Frage: Welche fünf Bücher würden Sie jungen Menschen empfehlen, die sich für Ihren Karriereweg interessieren und warum?

Antworten:

• “Niche Down: How to Become Legendary by Being Different”

• Harper Collins’ “instant classic,” “Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets”

• The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker
• The E-Myth, by Michael Gerber
• Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
• Back from the Dead, by Bill Walton
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

The most troubling reading I did on vacation was Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by two sociologists, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, who examine the evidence on what college students actually learn. I was surprised how little data there is on this important question. Even more disturbing, the data cited by the authors indicates that students may not learn very much. In their first two years of college, many U.S. college students advance very little in important skills like critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.

I was really surprised to read that. The data shows that students today spend much less time actually studying, and they take less rigorous courses, most of which don’t require them to do much writing, for example. And yet even so, many students do not complete their degrees. Graduation rates from U.S. colleges are much lower than in many other countries. What’s going on in higher educationis a topic I care a lot about, and I basically agree with the authors’ findings that we have a real problem. I plan to take a deeper dive into this topic with a full review of Academically Adrift, which I’ll post in a few weeks.

Eine zentrischere Version von Flashpoints: Die aufkommende Krise in Europa (oder umgekehrt).

Auf die Frage, welche Bücher er seiner 18-jährigen Tochter Malia empfehlen würde, gab Obama der Times eine Liste mit The Naked and the Dead und One Hundred Years of Solitude. „Ich denke, einige von ihnen waren die üblichen Verdächtigen […] Ich glaube, sie hatte noch nicht gelesen. Dann gab es einige Bücher, die heutzutage nicht mehr auf jedermanns Leseliste stehen, die mir aber als interessant in Erinnerung geblieben sind.“ Hier ist, was er aufgenommen hat:

• Die Nackten und die Toten, Norman Mailer
• Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit, Gabriel García Márquez
• Das goldene Notizbuch, Doris Lessing
• Die Kriegerin, Maxine Hong Kingston

The Age of Migration ist seit seinem ersten Erscheinen im Jahr 1993 das wichtigste Lehrbuch für Migrationsstudien; Ich habe mich darauf sowohl als Ressource für meine eigene Forschung als auch als Text für meine Bachelor- und Master-Kurse zur Einwanderungspolitik in der Oberstufe verlassen. Die fünfte Ausgabe setzt die hervorragende Berichterstattung über Migrationstheorien und -geschichte, Einwanderungspolitik und Themen wie Rasse und ethnische Zugehörigkeit fort und bringt gleichzeitig neues Material zu Themen wie den Auswirkungen des Klimawandels. Die Autoren sind dafür zu loben, dass sie sich mit kritischen Fragen in einer Zeit des globalen Wandels befassen.

Es ist wichtig, dass wir diese Transformation vollziehen, wegen dem, was Clayton Christensen das „Dilemma des Innovators“ nennt, wo Leute, die etwas erfinden, normalerweise die Letzten sind, die darüber hinwegsehen, und wir wollen auf keinen Fall zurückgelassen werden.

Until I read this book, Buzzati's "Il deserto dei tartari" was my favorite novel, perhaps my only novel, the only one I cared to keep re-reading through life. This is, remarkably a very similar story about the antichamber of anticipation (rather than "the antichamber of hope" as I called Buzzati's book), but written in a much finer language, by a real writer (Buzzati was a journalist, which made his prose more functional) ; the style is lapidary with remarkable precision; it has texture, wealth of details, and creates a mesmerizing atmosphere. Once you enter it, you are stuck there. I kept telling myself while reading it: "this is the book". It suddenly replaced the "deserto".

A few caveats/comments. First, I read it in the original French Le Rivage des Syrtes (French Edition), not in this English translation, but I doubt that the translator can mess up such a fine style and the imagery. Second, the blurb says Gracq received the Goncourt prize for it. Julien Gracq REFUSED the Goncourt, he despised the Parisian literary circles and by 1951 decided to stay in the margin. He stuck to his publisher José Corti rather than switch to the fancy Gallimard after his success (as Proust did) (or other publishing houses for the fakes and the selfpromoters). Third, this book came out a few years after Buzzati's "deserto", but before Buzzati was translated into French. I wonder if Gracq had heard of the "deserto"; the coincidence is too strong to be ignored.

Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule. Nor is he the first person to document what it takes to become the best in the world at something.

But his stories are so great as he explains these deep concepts.

How did the Beatles become the best? Why are professional hockey players born in January, February and March?

And so on.