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Some of My Fave Authors

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These are the writers I turn to when I want to be challenged, inspired, or just completely swept away. If you’re looking for voices that push boundaries and leave a mark, start here.
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Alain de Botton

Alain is the author of seven non-fiction books that look at the great questions of ordinary life - love, friendship, work, travel, home - in a way that is intellectually rigorous, therapeutic, amusing and always highly readable. His goal is to bring ideas back to where they belong: at the center of our lives.

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Alexander Osterwalder

Alexander Osterwalder (1974) is an entrepreneur, speaker and business model innovator. Together with Professor Yves Pigneur he invented the Business Model Canvas, a practical tool to visualize, challenge and (re-) invent business models. The Canvas is used by leading organizations around the world, like GE, P&G, Ericsson, and 3M. Alexander is a frequent keynote speaker and has held guest lectures in top universities around the world, including Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, IESE and IMD. The Business Model Foundry, his current start-up, is building strategic tools for innovators. Strategyzer.com and the Business Model Toolbox for iPad are the Foundry's first applications. Alexander holds a PhD from HEC Lausanne, Switzerland, and is a founding member of The Constellation, a global not-for-profit organization aiming to make HIV/AIDS and Malaria history.

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Alfred Lansing

Alfred Lansing (July 21, 1921 - 1975) was an American journalist and writer, best known for his book Endurance (1959), an account of Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic explorations.

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Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and been named one of the world's hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and TIME. In his work as a public health researcher, he is Director of Ariadne Labs a joint center for health system innovation. And he is also co-founder and chairman of Lifebox, a global not-for-profit implementing systems and technologies to reduce surgical deaths globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

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Dan Heath

Dan Heath is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of four New York Times bestsellers: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. The Heaths' books have sold over 3 million copies worldwide and been translated into 33 languages. Heath's fifth book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, will be released on March 3, 2020. Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. A graduate of the University of Texas and Harvard Business School, he lives now in Durham, NC.

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Dan Eldon

Daniel Robert "Dan" Eldon (18 September 1970 – 12 July 1993) was a British-Kenyan photojournalist, artist and activist, killed in Somalia while working as a Reuters photojournalist. He left behind a series of journals, which Chronicle Books used to publish four books, among them The Journey Is the Destination, The Art of Life, and Safari as a Way of Life.

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Dan Roam

Dan Roam is the author of the international bestsellers "The Back of the Napkin" (Fast Company's Innovation Book of the Year, The London Time's Creativity Book of the Year, and Amazon's Top 5 business book of 2008) and "Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work." Dan is the founder of The Napkin Academy, the world's first online visual-thinking training program. www.napkinacademy.com Dan has helped leaders at Microsoft, Boeing, eBay, Kraft, Gap, IBM, the US Navy, the United States Senate, and the White House solve complex problems with simple pictures. Dan and his whiteboard have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NPR. Dan's "American Health Care on the Back of a Napkin" was voted by Business Week as the world's best presentation of 2009.

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Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎, born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman. In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Daniel Pink

Daniel H. Pink is the author of six provocative books -- including his newest, WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. WHEN is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly bestseller. Pink's other books include the long-running New York Times bestseller A WHOLE NEW MIND and the #1 New York Times bestsellers DRIVE and TO SELL IS HUMAN. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into 37 languages. Pink lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

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E.B. White

E.B. White, the author of twenty books of prose and poetry, was awarded the 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his children's books, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. This award is now given every three years "to an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have, over a period of years, make a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children." The year 1970 also marked the publication of Mr. White's third book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan, honored by The International Board on Books for Young People as an outstanding example of literature with international importance. In 1973, it received the Sequoyah Award (Oklahoma) and the William Allen White Award (Kansas), voted by the school children of those states as their "favorite book" of the year. Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Mr. White attended public schools there. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1921, worked in New York for a year, then traveled about. After five or six years of trying many sorts of jobs, he joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, then in its infancy. The connection proved a happy one and resulted in a steady output of satirical sketches, poems, essays, and editorials. His essays have also appeared in Harper's Magazine, and his books include One Man's Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. In 1938 Mr. White moved to the country. On his farm in Maine he kept animals, and some of these creatures got into his stories and books. Mr. White said he found writing difficult and bad for one's disposition, but he kept at it. He began Stuart Little in the hope of amusing a six-year-old niece of his, but before he finished it, she had grown up.

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Edward de Bono

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono (born 19 May 1933)[1] is a Maltese physician, psychologist, author, inventor and consultant. He originated the term lateral thinking, wrote the book Six Thinking Hats and is a proponent of the teaching of thinking as a subject in schools.[2]

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Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders, recently optioned by Olivia Coleman. She has also written three works of non-fiction:...

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Gretchen Rubin

I'm the author of THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, HAPPIER AT HOME, BETTER THAN BEFORE, THE FOUR TENDENCIES, OUTER ORDER, INNER CALM, and more. I also have a popular, award-winning podcast, "Happier with Gretchen Rubin" (search in your favorite podcast app) and a blog (GretchenRubin.com), where I write about my daily adventures in happiness and habit-formation. Take my free Four Tendencies quiz here: gretchenrubin.com/quiz. My previous books include a bestselling biography of Winston Churchill, "Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill," and one of John Kennedy, "Forty Ways to Look at JFK." My first book, "Power Money Fame S..: A User's Guide," is social criticism in the guise of a user's manual. "Profane Waste" was a collaboration with artist Dana Hoey. I've also written three dreadful novels that are safely locked away in a drawer. Before turning to writing, I had a career in law. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, I clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. I live in New York City with my husband and two daughters.

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Harold S. Kushner

Harold S. Kushner is Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, where he lives. His books include the huge bestseller When Bad Things Happen To Good People and When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough.

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Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov; circa January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was prolific and wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His books have been published in 9 of the 10 major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification. Asimov wrote hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, beginning with Foundation's Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time.

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J.D. Salinger

Born in New York in 1919, Jerome David Salinger dropped out of several schools before enrolling in a writing class at Columbia University, publishing his first piece ("The Young Folks") in Story magazine. Soon after, the New Yorker picked up the heralded "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and more pieces followed, including "Slight Rebellion off Madison" in 1941, an early Holden Caulfield story. Following a stint in Europe for World War II, Salinger returned to New York and began work on his signature novel, 1951's "The Catcher in the Rye," an immediate bestseller for its iconoclastic hero and forthright use of profanity. Following this success, Salinger retreated to his Cornish, New Hampshire, home where he grew increasingly private, eventually erecting a wall around his property and publishing just three more books: "Nine Stories," "Franny and Zooey," "Raise High the Roof Beam, and Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction." Salinger was married twice and had two children. He died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, in New Hampshire at the age of 91.

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Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Jake Knapp is the author of "Make Time" and the New York Times bestseller "Sprint". Jake spent ten years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the design sprint. He has coached over 150 companies on the process, including teams at Slack, Uber, the New York Times, and LEGO. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons.

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her debut, internationally-bestselling collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was translated into twenty-nine languages. Her first novel, The Namesake, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. Her second collection, Unaccustomed Earth, was a #1 New York Times bestseller; named a best book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others; and the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012.

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John Greene

John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan), and The Fault in Our Stars. His many accolades include the Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and the Edgar Award. John has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. With his brother, Hank, John is one half of the Vlogbrothers (youtube.com/vlogbrothers) and co-created the online educational series CrashCourse (youtube.com/crashcourse). You can join the millions who follow him on Twitter @johngreen and Instagram @johngreenwritesbooks or visit him online at johngreenbooks.com. John lives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is internationally known for his work as a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. He is professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and author of numerous books, including Full Catastrophe Living, Arriving at Your Own Door, and Coming to Our Senses.

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Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand (born May 15, 1967) is an American author of books and magazine articles. Her two best-selling nonfiction books, Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption have sold over 10 million copies, and each was adapted for film. Her writing style is considered to differ from the New Journalism style, dropping verbal pyrotechnics in favor of a stronger focus on the story itself. Both books were written after she fell ill in college, barring her from completing her degree. She told that story in an award-winning essay, A Sudden Illness, which was published in The New Yorker in 2003.

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Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her 2016 TED talk, "How to Gain Control of Your Free Time," has been viewed more than 5 million times. She regularly appears in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and four children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

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Michel de Montaigne

The father of Modern Skepticism, Michel De Montaigne was an influential and key figure of the French Renaissance. He is best known for his essays which are considered to be the best of all times. Montaigne is also associated with establishing the essay as a recognized genre in literature. He was the first person to use the word ‘essay’ to describe his writings. Today, it can be said that Montaigne was the first blogger. His brilliantly written essays are admired for their effortless mix of serious intellectual thoughts and humorous anecdotes. Montaigne’s huge volume of essays, Essais is still considered to be the finest collection of essays which influenced many other famous writers such as René Descartes, Isaac Asimov and William Shakespeare.

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Richard Carlson

During his life, Richard Carlson, Ph.D, was considered one of the foremost experts in happiness and stress reduction in the United States and around the world and was a frequent featured guest on such shows as Oprah, The Today Show, The View, NNC, CNN, Fox, PBS and over 2000 other shows.Don't Sweat the Small Stuff continued to be a publishing phenomenon with over 20 titles in the brand franchise, two of which were co-authored and authored with his beloved wife, Kris. He died of a pulmonary embolism in December 2006, at the age of forty-five. The words "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" have become a part of American Culture thanks to Richard Carlson's book that became a runaway best-seller and made publishing history as the #1 best-selling book in the United States for two consecutive years. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller list and is still considered one of the fastest selling books of all time and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide.

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Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to"a wonderful faraway place. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.The BFG is dedicated to the memory of Roald Dahls eldest daughter, Olivia, who died from measles when she was seven - the same age at which his sister had died (fron appendicitis) over forty years before. Quentin Blake, the first Children's Laureate of the United Kingdom, has illustrated most of Roald Dahl's children's books.

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Roger Fisher , William L. Ury , Bruce Patton

Roger Fisher teaches negotiation at Harvard Law School. He frequently appears on television as a negotiations expert and is the director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

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Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun (@berkun) is the best selling author of six books, including Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared in the The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, The Economist, Forbes Magazine, and other media. He has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC and National Public Radio. His many popular essays and entertaining lectures can be found for free on his blog at http://www.scottberkun.com

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Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of seven books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. His writings have influenced everything from the way political campaigns use the Internet, to cutting-edge ideas in urban planning, to the battle against 21st-century terrorism. In 2010, he was chosen by Prospect magazine as one of the Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future. His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, was a finalist for the 800CEORead award for best business book of 2010, and was ranked as one of the year's best books by The Economist. His book The Ghost Map was one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2006 according to Entertainment Weekly. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Steven has also co-created three influential web sites: the pioneering online magazine FEED, the Webby-Award-winning community site, Plastic.com, and most recently the hyperlocal media site outside.in, which was acquired by AOL in 2011. He serves on the advisory boards of a number of Internet-related companies, including Meetup.com, Betaworks, and Nerve.