Bill Gates is recommending 5 books you must have on your reading list for the summer. The annual summer reading list put out by Bills Gates on his blog has a theme for 2021: “the complicated relationship between humanity and nature." Here is the list-:
1. Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future’: Written by Pulitzer Prize winner writer at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. This is her third book after Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction. Gates in his review of the book states " “I’m glad that smart writers like Elizabeth are reminding us of the risks of trying to intervene in nature. But I wish she had also explored whether the risks are worth taking, or what the alternatives might be."
2. A Promised Land: Gates recommends this book by Barack Obama to everyone not just people sharing the political belief. Encouraging read what is the first of the presidential memoirs Bill Gates says " “A Promised Land is a refreshingly honest book. He isn’t trying to sell himself to you or claim he didn’t make mistakes. It’s a terrific read, no matter what your politics are.” The account goes through Obama’s life through the 2011 operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
3. Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric’: The billionaire recommends this account narrated by Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann as he says it made him realise GE was trying to do too much. “It turns out that culture of making the numbers at all costs gave rise to ‘success theater’ and “chasing earnings,’” Gates writes. “In Gryta and Mann’s words, ‘Problems [were] hidden for the sake of preserving performance, thus allowing small problems to become big problems before they were detected." The fascinating account of the bellwether company makes it a must have on the bookshelf.
4. The Overstory: This Pulitzer Prize winner by Richard Power, explores relationship between humans and nature. The novel is about five trees whose unique life experiences with nine Americans bring them together to address the destruction of forests. “The book made me want to learn more about trees,” Gates writes in his review. “You don’t need any special knowledge to follow the story, but it left me super curious about the subject. There’s a certain elegance to how trees fit into their ecosystems. It’s amazing that they live for so long—the oldest tree in the world is over 4,800 years old!—despite being stationary.”
5. An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Matt Richtel, “An Elegant Defense” is a book about the human immune system. Ritchel tells the story of the immune system via the tales of four real people whose health challenges illustrate the system’s features and bugs.