What the Goldman Sachs people want you to read this autumn
For the second year in a row, the investment bank has released this list of book recommendations.
Corporations aren’t people, but they are run by people. To prove this, or perhaps just to compete with JP Morgan’s seventeen year old tradition of releasing reading lists, Goldman Sachs has released its 2016 back-to-school list of book recommendations from some of its top executives.
The result, thankfully, isn’t staid leadership or financial reading, but an eclectic list of largely non-fiction books. There are even some pretty good novels in there.
There’s a heavy-duty Churchill biography (Churchill: A Life, by Martin Gilbert), a book about Seinfeld (Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything, by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong), a book about how football tactics have evolved over time, and another one about why predictions fail.
There are compelling war narratives (Dispatches, by Michael Herr) and massive tomes about global history and design (Massive Change, by Bruce Mau and Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond).
Our favourites? Both the fine novels suggested by Sally Boyle – Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. And the excellent memoir Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, chosen by Lisa Opoku. Check out the full list here.