Books recommended by Barack Obama

8 Barack Obama Book Recommendations


Barack Obama

The President gave WIRED a crash course in the books that shaped him - Barack Obama's 8 important books.
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Books from Barack Obama

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers and construction workers, economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India.
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In Dubious Battle

This 1936 novel—set in the California apple country—portrays a strike by migrant workers that metamorphoses from principled defiance into blind fanaticism.
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Books from Barack Obama

Sapiens

**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? This bestselling history challenges everything we know about being human.Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. ‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates ‘Interesting and provocative... It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
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Andy Grove

Any short list of the worldÂ's most admired business people would include Andy Grove, the chairman and CEO of Intel during its years of explosive growth. During GroveÂ's career, Intel became the model for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley became the model for the world. And Grove became TimeÂ's Man of the Year—an icon of the promise of the American life. Born in Hungary in 1936, Grove survived the Holocaust only to face the Soviet invasion. He escaped to New York, penniless, at age twenty, and embraced America, putting himself through college and graduate school. He joined Intel at its founding in 1968, rose to CEO in 1987, then led the company into the stratosphere, with compound annual profit growth at 34 percent for the next eleven years. Despite decades of media scrutiny and six of GroveÂ's own books, there remains a powerful element of mystery about him. This definitive biography, by a Harvard Business School professor with unprecedented access, finally cracks the code of who Andy Grove really is, how his mind works, how he attacks impossible problems, and how he leads others to exceed their own expectations of themselves.
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The Fire Next Time

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Everywhere acknowledged as a modern American classic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, The Power Broker is a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York in the twentieth century.
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Parting the Waters

In volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement.Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War. Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder. Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.
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The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

The collected letters, speeches, etc. written by Abraham Lincoln.
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