Recent Reads Part 12
Some outstanding nonfiction for you today: two great memoirs about powerhouses in the business world and one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life, an exploration of the often forgotten role women have played in science.
I’ll start with The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger (2019).
The Christmas before last, a good friend gave me a full-access pass to the Masterclasses that you might have seen advertised on social media. How’s that for a wonderful present?
What was surprising to me was that my favorite masterclasses often weren’t the writing ones (although there are some great writing masterclasses there!), but the business ones. To give you a couple of examples, there’s a beauty by Shonda Rhimes and a great one by the advertising team that brought us the “Got milk?” campaign.
One of the best classes I watched was by Robert Iger who has worked his way up through most areas of American media to become the CEO of Disney. It’s largely due to Iger that Disney has become the enormous player in international media and entertainment that it currently is. As I speak, Disney own a huge proportion of the most popular entertainment platforms, including Marvel Studios, 21st Century Fox, Pixar, the Stars Wars franchise, as well as the work originated in the company since Walt Disney started it back in the 1920s.
When I finished the masterclass, I wanted to know more about this man with the ability to look so far ahead like a great chess player. Luckily there was this book to turn to. One of the most impressive things about Iger is his long-term vision and his daring in his pursuit of his goals. As an entrepreneur in a small way (as a writer, I basically run a small business), I found this enormously inspiring. An interesting read and one I suspect that will only become more interesting as Disney’s influence expands.
My next selection this month is another business memoir. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight (2018).
This one is also inspiring, although it’s a very different read to the Iger one. Phil Knight is refreshingly honest about the bumpy journey he took to worldwide success. He doesn’t hide the mistakes he made along the way and there’s a nice touch of humility to this memoir that I very much liked.
In many ways, Knight struck me as an unlikely billionaire and that’s part of his charm. There are also some lovely portraits of the people who went on the ride to success with him, a bunch of eccentrics and obsessives and geniuses who made for fun company along the way. Definitely worth a read!
My last book is one I still think about, although I finished it about a year ago. Given how much I’ve read since the world went mad with Covid, that’s saying something. This one was so moving that I actually cried at the end. It’s rare that nonfiction can move me to the point where I’ve got tears in my eyes but this one achieved that!
Figuring by Maria Popova (2019) is a perfect read for anyone who enjoyed the wonderful film Hidden Figures about the African-American women who helped put a man on the moon. There’s that same freshness and surprise, not to mention anger and regret for how often brilliant women have been written out of history. Until now, when thanks to authors like Maria Popova, they’re starting to get their just deserts.
This is a long book but it reads as easily as a novel. Popova, who is both a scientist and a musician, has a deep understanding of human impulses. All the characters in this book come alive on the page in a way that would make the greatest writer of fiction envious. We learn about the development of science from the Renaissance onwards with a view to the hidden corners of history and the wealth of secret contributors who have been forgotten over the years.
It starts with the great Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer and mathematician. We discover that Kepler was forced to defend his mother against accusations of witchcraft because she was a clever woman in an era and a place that found such a person a threat to the status quo. Not much has changed, some of you will say! This leads to a fascinating discussion on the way superstition and the beginnings of modern science flourished side by side in the 16th century.
The portraits of fascinating and brilliant characters continue for the rest of the book, from a pioneering female American astronomer to a sculptress with a worldwide reputation who was a friend of the Brownings in Florence. My favorite story, and the saddest, is that of Rachel Carson who did so much to awaken the world’s conscience to the environmental dangers of unrestricted use of pesticides. Her story is inspiring and moving and wonderful – and ultimately tragic as cancer takes her from us far too early.
I could rave about this book for pages and pages, but it would be far better if you just took my advice and picked it up and read it. I’m sure, like me, you’ll never forget these stories of courage and genius and perseverance against the greatest of odds. Highly recommended. And I mean highly HIGHLY!!!
Join me next month when I’m taking a break from my copious recent reading to talk about a film!