Jared Diamond
Author, Professor, Scientist, Writer
American geographer, ornithologist and UCLA professor who won the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel and also wrote Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee and Upheaval.
Jared Diamond's 14 Book Recommendations
- The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing: “Friedman explains clearly and convincingly, writes engagingly and laces his text with personal examples. ... I’m glad that I resisted my instinct of dismissing the book when I first saw its cover: it’s thought-provoking, and good reading.”
- The Prince: “Machiavelli is a crystal-clear realist who understands the limits and uses of power. ... Every president (and all of us nonpoliticians as well) should read Machiavelli and incorporate his thinking.”
- Complete Sherlock Holmes: “One is “The Complete Sherlock Holmes”: all 1,122 pages, containing four novels and 56 short stories. I read them first as a child and have reread them about every 10 years since then, including reading them to my own sons when they were children.”
- Walden: “The other book is Thoreau’s “Walden,” which I read once when I was young, and which was the single book that has most influenced me. ... Reading Thoreau felt like standing in dazzlingly bright light.”
- Anna Karenina: “What’s the best love story you’ve ever read? Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” — even though the love goes sour and the book has a sad ending.”
- The Tartar Steppe: “Readers might be surprised by another great Italian novel that I have re-read four times. It’s the greatest work by the Italian author Dino Buzzati, called The Tartar Steppe. It’s a beautifully written, slowly unfolding story of a man who lets himself become trapped by circumstances.”
- The Odyssey: “I intend to re-read Homer's Odyssey and Iliad.”
- The Iliad: “I intend to re-read Homer's Odyssey and Iliad.”
- History of the Peloponnesian War
- Why Nations Fail: “It's a great read. Like me, you may succumb to reading it in one go, and then you may come back to it again and again.”
- The Social Conquest of Earth: “Once again, Ed Wilson has written a book combining the qualities that have brought his previous books Pulitzer Prizes and millions of readers: a big but simple question, powerful explanations, magisterial knowledge of the sciences and humanities, and beautiful writing understandable to a wide public.”
- Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds: “This unique book is the autobiography of the daughter of a German missionary linguist couple, who moved when she was a child to live with a Fayu clan in a remote area of swamp forest in Indonesian New Guinea. ... This book gives a view of Western life from a fresh perspective shared by no Westerner.”
- If this is a Man and The Truce: “At one level, Levi’s book is about how as a young Italian Jewish chemist joining the resistance during World War II, he was captured, sent to Auschwitz, and survived. At another level, the book is about our everyday life issues, magnified: the life-and-death consequences of chance, the problem of evil, the impossibility of separating one’s moral code from surrounding circumstances, and the difficulties of maintaining one’s sanity and humanness in the presence of injustice and bad people.”
- Sapiens: “Here is a simple reason why Sapiens has risen explosively to the ranks of an international best-seller. It tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language. You will love it!”