Leadership

1959 · Alfred Lansing · 357 pages · Nonfiction / Adventure

Endurance is the survival book every other survival book gets measured against, Alfred Lansing's 1959 reconstruction of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic catastrophe, a ship crushed by pack ice, twenty-eight men adrift on floes for months, an open-boat crossing of the world's worst ocean, and not one life lost. Built from crew diaries and interviews with the survivors themselves, it reads with a momentum modern thrillers envy and a restraint modern nonfiction abandoned. Readers finish it in disbelief and hand it to someone immediately. Six decades on, its standing has only hardened, the genre's one universally agreed masterpiece.

2020 · Erik Larson · 585 pages · Nonfiction / History

The Splendid and the Vile follows Winston Churchill's first year as Prime Minister, the Blitz falling on London while a family and a nation learn what they can withstand, and Erik Larson converts the most chronicled figure of the century into fresh material by narrowing the lens to twelve months and widening it to the whole household. Diaries drive everything, a daughter's dances between air raids, a private secretary's lovesick commute, Mary Churchill's teenage war, and the bombs arrive on schedule while the dinner parties refuse to stop. It's the author's warmest book and among his best received. The familiar terrain runs familiar in stretches. The household makes it new.

2014 · Ed Catmull · 368 pages · Non-Fiction

Creativity, Inc. is the rare business book that works equally well as a management guide and as a behind-the-scenes account of one of the most successful creative companies in history. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, writes about the systems and culture that produced Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and the rest of Pixar's extraordinary run with a candor that most corporate memoirs avoid. The Braintrust concept, where filmmakers receive frank feedback from peers with no authority to demand changes, is one of the most practical and original management ideas published in the last decade. The book occasionally veers into corporate philosophy that feels abstract, and the Steve Jobs sections can feel diplomatically filtered. Those are minor complaints about a book that delivers genuine insight into how creative organizations can protect their ability to produce great work.