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Some books and films that got me into grad school:
1. How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas: I had never heard of social entrepreneurship until I picked up this book, and the people in it were awe-inspiring! This book is what lead me, only a few days after my arrival in DC, to show up at the front desk of Ashoka’s offices asking to introduce myself to the volunteer coordinator. This, in turn, led me to two consecutive internships with Ashoka and meeting some incredible people.
2. Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: One day at work, I received an email from a friend of a friend who knew of my interest of late in international development. He said that I would be interested in attending this book signing event in north Austin. I like books, but I’ve never felt that a signature made a book any better or worse of a read. In this case, it wasn’t about the signature, but about the author’s capacity to tell an incredible story in person, as he did in the book, and as I’m sure he already had hundreds of time on his book tour. Like I am sure has happened to thousands of people around the world, as a result of both hearing John Wood speak about education in developing countries and reading about his story in his book, I fell in love with both Room to Read and the idea of working in international education some day.
3. Small is Beautiful: This one is an oldie, but a goodie. Copyright 1973, this book talks of natural and human capital, in addition to financial capital, and warns that we cannot continue to “treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.”
- “Modern man… talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.”
- “What is ‘enough’?… There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: ‘Halt! We have enough’? There is none.”
- “A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital.
4. WorldChanging: Continuing on the theme of entrepreneurship and new ideas from “How to Change the World,” this book is a compilation of blog posts from www.worldchanging.org on a diverse array of topics including green remodeling, the hidden vitality of slums, biomimicry, movement building, demanding transparency, and creating business value from sustainability. I also had the opportunity to attend a book signing event in Austin, Texas, when this first came out in 2006.
5. Nobelity:
6. Guns, Germs & Steel:
7. Banker to the Poor:
8. The West Wing:
9. Bowling Alone:
Additional Books Include: Making Globalization Work, The White Man’s Burden, The Kite Runner, The End of Poverty, Development as Freedom, High Noon: 20 Global Problems 20 Years to Solve Them, The Greenbelt Movement, The 50 Years War, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
Some books and films that got me through grad school:
- Three Cups of Tea
- Commanding Heights
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma
- Forces for Good
- Oh the Places You’ll Go
- Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
Some books I’m reading post grad school:
- Stones to Schools
- The Lorax
- Mountains Beyond Mountains
- Natural Capitalism
- The Cartoon History of the Modern World (part II)
