The most recommended Andrew Carnegie books

I strongly believe business leaders and brands must engage with all stakeholders (including society and the planet) to thrive – and this is the essence of John Browne’s message in Connect.

Browne, a former CEO of BP, contrasts positive engagement with traditional corporate social responsibility, which he contends is often more about complying with laws and regulations and looking good rather than doing good. 

The first half of the book provides real world examples of how corporate success is dependent on greater engagement with society.

And the second examines Browne’s four tenets of connected leadership – map your world, define your contribution, apply world class management, engage radically – and how companies can exemplify them going forward and profitably place society at the heart of business.

Think and Grow Rich is one of the best books of all time – a true class for achieving super success and wealth.

Napoleon Hill shows you how to get ahead and build wealth. The idea is that successful, wealthy people found the way and we can too. Hill believes that how you think and use the knowledge and experience you accumulate along your journey drives your success.

He explains the importance of desire and faith and gaining specialized knowledge. He emphasizes organized planning, making decisions and taking action, and sticking with it. Hill shares stories based on his interviews with leaders including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and many other millionaires. 

Practically every page of this book has something fascinating to say about music, and Denk has an appealing, charming, often funny voice that one doesn’t often encounter in books about classical music.

As an amateur pianist I learned more about technique from Denk than I ever expected from a memoir, from how to use my thumb “as a transit system” to rolling chords at different speeds as if I were “unrolling a carpet.”

He teaches us how to listen more acutely to the messages in music, whether it’s Bach, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Chopin, or Philip Glass, and page by page, he shines a new light on the music we think we know and how an artist approaches it.

This book calls itself a novel, but it is deeply intertwined with the author’s own life and experiences as a second-generation immigrant from Pakistan. The chapters often read more like incisive personal essays than segments advancing the plot of a conventional novel, as the author grapples with the economic obsessions and spiritual poverty of contemporary American culture, the experience of everyday racism and the rage it provokes, and the feelings of alienation that many immigrants feel from both their country of origin and their adopted home. 

The central preoccupation of the book is the difficulty of living as a complete, nuanced, self-contradictory individual in a world that forces you to choose—between cultures in conflict with each other, between absolutist world views that permit no ambivalence, between economic success and authenticity. It is a tension that may be especially pronounced in an immigrant’s life, but one that entraps everyone and results… show more.

One of the greatest days of my professional career was when a media outlet called me a “Digital Dale Carnegie.” They had no idea what a fan I am of Carnegie's work. Carnegie passed away (1955) long before I was born but he continues to have a profound impact on my life. My grandfather, and father have both taken Dale Carnegie Courses. While Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People is wonderful and is one of the best-selling books of all time, my favorite is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. 

In our modern world, worry is almost a certainty. We worry as parents, business owners, employees— we never seem to run out of things to worry about. Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living reframed my perspective on the cost of worrying. Eliminating the fear of the unknown is often the first step… show more.

An original, shatteringly beautiful book of stories told from the perspective of animals, all of which are dealing with climate disaster, war, the threat of extinction, or some other existential pain.

To put it simply, this book changed me, and pushed me to consider, in a different light, the mess humankind has made of our planet, that we share with all living beings. It made me think, cry, smile, and feel the greatest tenderness and compassion for the animals—a donkey, a white bear, a dog that tried to protect his friend the rhino from a poacher.

The soft, empathetic writing almost did me in at times: “I don’t understand why the Hunter has done this to me. I was only looking for my brother,” a wolf says after being taken down by a bullet. How could anyone ever respond?

I always felt that those with ADHD were not disordered but rather unique brains that sometimes struggled in the current highly stimulating yet sometimes sedentary modern world we live in. When I came across this book, I felt as if all my ideas had been synthesized into one comprehensive and truly revolutionary piece of literature that outlines the biology, history, and research behind why this is correct.

The author lays out why ADHD should not be considered a form of dysfunction or disorder but rather a subset of people who are “hunters in a farmer’s world.”

This book also helped me understand why some vocational tests, academic expectations, and societal norms do not support the unique ADHD brain and why thinking outside the box and asking what the powerful ADHD brain can offer our society has the potential to benefit us all.  

This book fundamentally reshaped my notion of how biography–especially biographies of women–can be written. Shapland felt intimately connected to McCullers as a person and as a writer and also had an inkling there was more to her personhood than previous biographical treatments suggest.

By inhabiting McCullers’s spaces and putting herself in proximity to the writer’s material past, Shapland demonstrates the ways in which convention has limited both the stories we tell and, thus, the possibilities we can envision for our lives as women. 

Zamora recounts in vivid detail the harrowing three-thousand-mile journey he made in 1999, when he was nine years old, from El Salvador to the US, where he crossed the border illegally to join his parents in California.

The two-month journey, described through the eyes of the author as a child, was fraught with unimaginable hardships, a perilous boat trip, days of hunger and thirst in the desert, arrests, and betrayals; but there were moments of joy as well, for although he traveled with strangers, some in the group helped him survive the ordeal with their kindness and compassion.

Zamora’s poignant memoir is both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

It’s hilarious and cringey at the same time to read this honest look at status anxiety. It’s hilarious to watch others seek status. As for yourself, you hopefully relieve your cringing because you see how status has obsessed people throughout history. 

The author says we seek the love of the world as well as the love of a partner. The quest can ruin an otherwise good life, so he offers solutions. I love his explanation of the original “Bohemians.” They were the hipsters of the 19th century! They created those impressionist paintings we love because they were aching for status.

The author is a famous British philosopher who inherited a fortune. He sees that money does not relieve status anxiety. But he misses the real reason: because we’ve inherited the brain of status-seeking animals (as explained in all of my books).