Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember.
Christopher B. Nelson / Forbes CONTRIBUTOR / DEC 20, 2015 @ 10:00 AM – I write about leadership lessons from history’s greatest thinkers.
One of the most captivating books to be published in 2015 was The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. On the surface, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s biography of Wilbur and Orville Wright is an electrifying adventure story. These days, when air travel is so common, it’s easy to forget how terrifying — and exhilarating — it must have been to sit in the Wright brothers’ early machine and rise like a bird into the insubstantial ether.
This book captures all of the brothers’ extraordinary gumption: the grit of the labor, the sweat of the engineering and the thrill of the flight. It is a tale of families and how they shape young minds. Yet McCullough, who sifted through hundreds of original Wright letters, diaries and notebooks, also tells the story of human innovation and perseverance. This is the ultimate book for leaders, a decisive lesson in gracefully reworking failures and molding theories into astonishing and world-altering achievements.
Many of the greatest books on leadership, like those that best inform the human condition in general, have been around for centuries. One of the finest ever written, Homer’s Odyssey, has been newly translated by Joe Sachs (tutor emeritus at St. John’s College) and just published this year. Odysseus, the man of twists and turns, the sacker of Troy, beloved of the gods, sets out for home in Ithaca, to return to his kingdom, his son Telemachus, and his wife, Penelope — but the homecoming turns out to be the biggest challenge of his life.
I read every new translation of Homer’s Iliad and his Odyssey; each provides a fresh way into the poem and a fresh interpretation. This version of the Odyssey — and I have reread the book in one version or another perhaps 15 times in my life — has a tell-it-like-it-is directness that sweeps the reader along. In the introduction, Sachs writes that all serious translations convey something of the original. Using them cooperatively, using them to check against one another and against the original, can spark real engagement with the work. Thinking about what a translator has gotten right or wrong draws the reader into interpreting the work, rather than simply letting the words make impressions as they fly past.
Sachs’ fine translation goes into my book bag for the year.
But not everything needs to be a classic of world literature in order to be a great read. Wilder and Sunny: The Adventures of Wilder Good is S. J. Dahlstrom’s recently published third in the Wilder Good series for children. Why am I reading it? Well, I have 16 grandchildren, with whom I love to share the pleasure of reading. I am always looking for something new to share with them — reading the same books as our grandchildren is a wonderful way to bridge the generation gap. Wilder Good is a 12-year-old boy growing up in the mountains of southern Colorado. These are exciting tales, but I mostly appreciate the strong connections Wilder makes with his older family members and other adults. Dahlstrom’s superb writing takes Wilder through those anxiety-producing years between childhood and adulthood, when life’s simplest and most important lessons are learned.
One book that hit the Times best-seller list last year attracted me this year: Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence. With a title like that, how could one not want to read further? In this book, Wilson takes up an ancient quest, largely abandoned in modern times, to explore the possibility of unifying the sciences and the humanities in order to grasp the meaning of life.
Lastly, Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life, published in 2013, has quickly become a classic. It is unbearably sad and exquisitely beautiful — an intimate sharing of the author’s loss and grief over the death of his wife. Reflecting on Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Barnes shares his new perspective on loss:
Yet I had quite underestimated Orfeo, the opera immaculately targeted at the griefstruck; and in that cinema the miraculous trickery of art happened again. Of course Orfeo would turn to look at the pleading Euridice — how could he not? Because while “no one in his senses” would do so, he is quite out of his senses with love and grief and hope. You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circumstances. How could anyone hold to their vow with Euridice’s voice at their back?
Levels of Life is a serious read, both gorgeous and devastating, taking the reader into the deepest and most profound reaches of the soul.
These are some of the best books I read in 2015. What were some of yours?
Christopher B. Nelson is the president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
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