Young Global Reader
“We are what we read". While it is easy for what we read to conform to what we already know or to confirm what we believe, great books change the way we see the world.
I’m Ed Mayo. In
We will start simply. You can contact me at or mail to if you have recommendations to make and I expect to build interactivity over time. We will post them on this page. It will be fresh, surprising and diverse. You choose what to read and whether to read.
So, start a new habit that is good for you and good for all…and be a young global reader.
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May 2008
After an inspiring course at the Kennedy School, Harvard, with 65 other Young Global Leaders, I have far more suggested books to recommend than months or weeks in the year. But of all the literature and presentations on the course, one did stand out as a 'must read', which is True North by Bill George (Wiley 2007). It is a prompt to find yourself when finding your role in the world around. |
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April 2008
Co-operation. It is a big idea,bigger indeed, as well as more flexible and more entrepreneurial by far than the co-operative movement. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (Allen Lane) is a wonderfully readable guide to the new mutuality emerging online - though you could also chooseother authors such as Rheingold, Leadbeater and Benkler. Compete or co-operate?...you will need to decide. |
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March 2008
Great writers are often political, but politicians are less often great writers. Reconciliation by Benazir Bhutto (Simon and Schuster) is a book of our time and repays reading. It is a politician's book, but her writing like her life justifies the aura and the audience it attracts. |
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February 2008
Have you heard a good theory recently? True theory is rare in the airport shelves of business books, which makes The Modern Firm by John Roberts (Oxford University Press) a real treat. How should firms organise? Alongside intuition, leadership and sheer guesswork, this books offers you the 'why' and not just the 'how'. |
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January 2008
They say the future is here already, just unevenly distributed. You can pick up your share in the form of this invigorating and intelligent thriller, Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan (Houghton Mifflin) - a YGL himself. The book, set in real and virtual worlds in Latin America, weaves together a near future pock-marked with past and present conflicts over corporate power, globalisation and democracy. |
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November 2007
In Ancient Rome, for the day of Saturnalia, the powerful and powerless could switch place. This remarkable and compelling contemporary story allows you to do the same. What is the what by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin) traces the story of one boy's flight from civil war in Sudan. It is memorable, moving ... and a delight to read. |
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October 2007
If you think Skype is neat and the iPhone the future, then you have an appetite for technology. Here then is the main course - The Singularity is Near: when humans transcend biology by Ray Kurzweil (Duckworth). This is a breathless and astonishing dance through the future of technology. As the pace of technological change speeds up around us, the author assures us that the world will never be the same again. And I can honestly say that, having finished it in the contrasting setting of the timeless valleys of France, I will never see the world as the same again.
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September 2007
Motherhood and apple pie make for poor literature, because there is more drama when good things pull people apart. This is true for leaders, when you try to reconcile coming to power with the dreams that got you there. Resolving this will define whether you can hold your head up in the community of those that have. Power and the Idealists: or, The Passion of Joschka Fisher and Its Aftermath is an extended essay by Paul Berman (W W Norton & Co Ltd). It offers a US look at a handful of the most intriguing political leaders of the left in Europe, including Joschka Fisher and Bernard Kouchner. You won't have to share the dream to enjoy the story. |
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August 2007
"Early November. It's nine o'clock . The titmice are banging against the window." These are the first words of a short and atmospheric book by Norway 's Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Vintage Books, Random House). The novel evokes simplicity and loss and innocence through the teenage story and old age memory of one Trond Sander. This is a wonderful book to read if you are going away, or want your imagination to carry you away. |
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July 2007
Like memory, history shapes itself to fit stories and events from the past into patterns we recognise. Time Maps by Eviatar Zerubavel (University of Chicago Press) explores the social shape of the past. All communities call on history to tell our story, such as whether the West Bank belongs to the Arabs or the Jews. Favoured periods loom large, while others are simply forgotten. For some, history is linear. It is about progress or, the opposite, decline. For others, history repeats itself, or rather, as Mark Twain quipped, it rhymes. This is a bold and fascinating short work of non-fiction. Some of the language can be overly academic, but if that is ok, this book will open up to you the way we think about the past. |
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June 2007
We live in a world of endemic conflict and violence, and while war makes for some of the greatest fiction, it can also be the most heartrending of reading. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Harper Perennial) conjures the most colourful of women as characters that entrance the reader as you follow through a landscape, in 1960s Nigeria, falling apart around them. |
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May 2007
Bombay. A big city deserves a big book and this city can boast two of outstanding quality. The first, and this month's recommendation is Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (Headline Review). My thanks to YGL, Sonu Jain for this recommendation. The city comes alive, in this, its best biography. But if you prefer reading fiction, then you might opt instead for Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (Faber and Faber). Either of these big books will leave you with a fascination for Mumbai. |
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April 2007
Are you descended from a slave? or a slave owner? When she stumbled on her own family history, Botlhale Tema, wrote it up as a story of slavery and then freedom in a small valley in South Africa - The People of Welgeval, Botlhale Tema, Zebra Press. This is a book that almost certainly no one you know will have heard of.. until you pick it up to read and pass the word on this treasure. |
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March 2007
We begin with a simply wonderful novel from Jorge Volpi, a Young Global Leader himself. “In Search of Klingsor” (Fourth Estate) plays with the ingredients of physics, mathematics and humanity in a beautifully-told story to unmask the scientific adviser to Adolf Hitler. Set as a detective story, the book echoes as you read the ideas of the great physicists and mathematicians caught up in and around the Second World War. |