Taste & recommendation

Which book do you recommend most often to others, and what makes you pass it on?

82 answers answered between 1986 and 2026

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Cory Booker American politician
I have gifted your book a lot. It wasn’t The 4-Hour Workweek . The book of yours that I gifted to anyone was The 4-Hour Body . I just thought there were so many great little hacks in there. Some of them
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 4 June 2018 source ↗
Nick Thompson Chief executive of The Atlantic; former editor in chief of Wired
Oh, that I can answer. So, each of the last two years I’ve given one book to a bunch of people. And this year, it’s a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism is True . And it’s a story about mindfulness and about the science of Buddhism and the current neuroscienc, about how our minds work, making the argument that the things people have said about mindfulness, meditation, and the way it changes your capacity to empathize with other people and to break out of the tribalism that we’re all locked into, the things that Buddhism has said about that turn out to be scientifically correct. And here’s a story about why. Wonderful book. Robert Wright is one of the smartest writers I’ve ever read. His book Nonzero is among my five favorite books of all time. So, that book came out recently, and I gave that to my closest friend and my family. The year before, I gave a book by Larissa MacFarquhar called Strangers Drowning which is a story about people who make extraordinary moral choices like the choice to adopt 23 children and bring them into your lives, who just make crazy choices and why they make those choices. And Larissa is one of the smartest writers at the New Yorker. Everything she writes is absolutely brilliant, and the book is brilliant to get into ten discreet chapters about people who make choices like that. So, I gave Larissa’s book last year and Robert Wright’s book this year. Tim Ferriss: Thank you.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 26 June 2018 source ↗
Lisa Ling American journalist
The book that I have gifted the most often, you would not expect this of me, but it’s called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World .
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 6 October 2019 source ↗

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