“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make the truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for truth.” – Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

A recent visitor to our den was looking at our bookshelves. She asked about all the books we had, and which I’d recommend reading first. After careful consideration, I compiled a list of 34. This book list focuses on key issues we face in our culture and society.

Leadership. IMHO, leadership is lacking in many organizations and the government. Leadership and management are distinct and focus on different things. Leadership is about building relationships and leading people to a mountain they have never climbed. Leaders have a sense of purpose and accountability to positive core values. 

The Leadership Challenge, Seventh Edition by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.
Learn the five practices of exemplary leadership. Live them and set the example for others.

The Leader’s Compass: A Personal Leadership Philosophy Is Your Key to Success
by Ed Ruggero and Dennis F. Haley
Do you have a religious philosophy, a political philosophy? Do you have a leadership philosophy?

The Road to Character by David Brooks
Are you living your resume or your eulogy? Which is more important to you – success or significance?

Trust. Everything begins with trust. Consider the benefits of trust. Do you trust yourself? Do you trust others, including family, friends, and cohorts? Do you trust strangers, politicians, business leaders, and law enforcement? Do you trust your organization and team’s processes? Do you trust your organization’s and team’s vision? 

The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last by Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner
Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is built, exists, and thrives on seven rules of trust. Imagine what would happen if you incorporated the seven rules of trust into your life and your organization’s life. Imagine the difference in politics if the seven rules of trust were used.

Priorities. Morale, enjoyment, productivity, reduced turnover, safety, and better ROI are priorities and rely on collaboration and cooperation within any commUNITY.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business
by Patrick Lencioni
Your organization’s health determines your competitive advantage.

Setting The Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer
Customer service is a monologue. Hospitality is a dialogue. Learn the art of hospitality.

Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way & Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe.  If I were limited to one grocery store, it would be Trader Joe’s. I feel happy because the staff is happy! The selection is limnited making choosing easy and easy to navigate the store. This book makes me even more of a fan and a loyal customer! Coulombe’s way of running a business is the model for all businesses.

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet And Why It Matters by Priya Parker
Learn to overcome lackluster, unproductive gatherings with a human-centered approach to create meaningful, memorable experiences, whether large or small, for work or play.

Relationships. We have an epidemic of loneliness. These books offer ways to connect.

How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
By David Brooks
Would others say you are interested or interesting, a teller or an asker, a listener or a talker?

Captivate: The Science of Succeeding With People by Vanessa Van Edwards
Learn how to better interact with others.

The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living by Ira Brock, M.D.
Transform relationships before you die by responding to four simple statements.

Eight Dates: Essential Conversations For A Lifetime Of Love by John and Julie Gottman
This book and a coffee shop gift card are our wedding present to the newlyweds.

Conflict. We are a culture who fail at healthy conflict. Healthy conflict requires focusing on the issue, not the individual. It begins with compassion and requires listening to understand, acknowledging what you heard, and asking to share your perspective. 

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
Learn to care personally and challenge directly by overcoming being a pushover, an obnoxious aggressor, an insincere manipulator, and/or a ruinous empathizer.

Power. The only thing we can control is ourselves. These books offer insight into self-awareness, self-management, and empathy for ourselves.

Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away by Annie Duke
Good quitting skills are important to living a good life. Actually, winners quit a lot!

The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins
Practice two mantras, Let Them and Let Me, to focus on what really matters.

How To Want What You Have: Discovering The Magic and Grandeur of Ordinary Existence by Timothy Miller
Learn to practice the three disciplines of compassion, attention, and gratitude to live in the present.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
We spend over 90% of our thinking time in fast mode. Slow thinking requires more energy and more time, and it could be a healthy benefit to yourself and to others.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant
The ability to rethink and unlearn requires overcoming the comfort of conviction and the discomfort of doubt.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life
By Susan David
Emotional Intelligence is more important than IQ (Intelligence Quotient). What is your level of emotional intelligence?

Habits. Habits are the foundation of our lives. Some habits serve us well, while others harm our well-being.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
Our habits, our patterns, our routines, define us. A guide on changing bad habits.

The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brene Brown
A guide to a wholehearted life, beginning with embracing that you are enough.

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lempke, MD
We are living in an age of the relentless pursuit of pleasure from drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, porn, Instagram, tweeting, TikToking… Learn how to overcome compulsive consumption and transform your life.

Mind Over Explicit Matter by Trish Leigh
Pornhub is in the top 10 most visited websites on the Internet. Pornhub had more visits than Netflix, TikTok, and Instagram combined. “Houston, we have a problem.”

How To Do Boring, Tedious, Difficult Necessary Things by Peter Collins
Collins challenges the reader to self-discipline and to discover the art of sucking it up to do the things you hate.

A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps by Stephanie S. Covington
A Man’s Way Through the Twelve Steps by Dan Griffin
We are all addicted to “something”, and that “something” harms our well-being. Working the 12 steps is an opportunity to have person-in-the-mirror moments, face your truth, and live a better life.

The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together by Caverly Morgan
A guide on putting values to action by connecting with the deepest truth of who we are.

Banned Books. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are a part of our history that many of us did not learn. Acknowledge your bias, privilege, and fear. Overcome your ignorance, denial, and shame. 

Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Racism by Debby Irving
If you are a white person, this is required reading.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
By Heather McGhee
Racism is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core of the dysfunction of our democracy, and the spiritual and moral crisis that grips America.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson
There have been three cultures in the world that have imposed a caste system on undesired people: India, the United States, and Nazi Germany. Guess who taught the Nazi’s how to implement a caste system on the Jews?

How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History of Slavery Across America
by Clint Stevens
The legacy of slavery and its imprint on the soul of the United States.

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson
The torture and murder of Emmett Till is an old, deep wound of the “greatest nation on earth.”

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver writes about a new generation of lost boys, leading to empathy for lives that bear little resemblance to our own.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson
This is the Boston College History Professor who teaches me the history of the United States I never got in high school or college.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
This book moved my wife and me to purchase an electric vehicle. Little things add up.

February 24, 2026, follow-up:

Got an email from a close relative and friend who shared his book recommendations!

Renoir, My Father, Jean Renoir. The painter’s life is recounted by his son. Beautifully told about a life lived prior to the Industrial Revolution, which taught me how to look for the light.

The Mountain and the Fathers, Joe Wilkins. Joe’s a friend and his account of growing up poor in Montana’s Big Empty is powerfully written.

Cher Ami and Major Whittlesley, Kathleen Rooney. How can a book about a WW1 carrier pigeon saving the life of a lost battalion be so absorbing? Read it and find out.

Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane. An interesting alternate view of the natural world where land and rivers are presented as living beings worthy of the rights humans alone claim.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer. A series of essays by a Syracuse professor, a botanist, and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, that combines indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge, that includes a complementary approach to Western scientific methodology. You’ll see the world in a new way.

Paradise Brox, Ian Frazier. You know the Bronx as a place name but know nothing about it, and most people don’t. Ian Frazier does. His book covers the Bronx’s history from Colonial times, through the 70s, when it burned continuously, to the birth of hip hop. Incredibly researched piece.

A Fever in the Heartland, Timothy Egan Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time.

Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides. On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Nashville. As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King’s funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five-day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents.

Death Comes for the Archbishop or My Antonia, Willa Cather, is an important early 20th-century woman writer who tells stories that touch the heart.

The Bartender’s Tale, Ivan Doig. Doig is probably my favorite fiction writer and weaves many tales across the Montana prairies from Scottish sheepherders to the present day. A good coming-of-age story.

The House of Sky, Ivan Doig A memoir that begins with the author living with his parents as they herd sheep during Montana summers and carries through to the death of his mother when Doig is 6. He was raised by his father and grandmother in a story that explores family, identity, and the legacy of his upbringing. Doig is a masterful writer.

Anything by John McPhee. McPhee is a longtime New Yorker editor, and you gotta have grown-up taste to engage his thoughtful, intelligent writing, BUT he is my absolute favorite non-fiction writer, very precise with words. If you want to learn about geology and how it can bring wonder into your life, you can try one of his Pulitzer-winning trilogy, but talk to me first.

The House of Spirits, Isabel Allende. She is a great storyteller, unafraid of the world of magical realism, and writes with a deft, often bawdy touch. This is a story of the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of a Chilean family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

Gentlemen from Moscow, by Amor Towles, is my favorite current fiction writer, with an engaging and intelligent mind. In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is found by a Bolshevik tribunal to be an unrepentant aristocrat and sentenced to house arrest at the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him with entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery. Really a good story.

The Overstory, Richard Powers. This is a novel. Robin Kimmerer on steroids. The book follows nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Through interwoven narratives spanning multiple generations, the novel explores themes of environmental activism, the interconnectedness of living things, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind, and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. Meet Anthony Doerr who writes with a sophisticated touch.

Heat & Light, Jennifer Haigh. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now, Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive natural gas deposit. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism, or his wife, Shelby’s, paranoia, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile, his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Haigh’s the outlier in this group, but this is a page-turner.

Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. McBride’s tale of a cross-cultural upbringing plays a big role in this wonderfully complex novel, which is a delight to read.

The Personal Librarian. Marie Benedict & Victoria Murray. Fictionalized telling based on historical figures of the story of the development of the famous JP Morgan Library, in which the librarian’s passing as white plays a major role.