Summer Reads: Powerful People Edition

By Deb A.

It's summer—time to curl your toes in the sand or unfurl the picnic blanket and while away an afternoon with a good book and some sunshine. This year, we've compiled some hot tips from a former U.S. President, a business leader and philanthropist, and the Queen of All Media for you to find in your local independent bookshop.

Recommended by Barack Obama as "a true classic of world literature."

Adichie is "one of the world's great contemporary writers, according to the former U.S. President.

Bill Gates called this memoir "a heartbreaking, surprisingly funny memoir about faith and coming to grips with your own mortality."

Who wouldn't want to be left with "a greater appreciation of humanity’s place in the universe"? Thanks for the tip, Mr. Gates.

Oprah Winfrey selected the memoir of a man who spent 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit for her summer book club, saying, "over the years I've chosen many great novels—very few memoirs for my book club—but this story reads like an epic novel and it is all true."

Bill Gates loves Leonardo da Vinci. And he loves this book: "Isaacson does the best job I’ve seen of pulling together the different strands of Leonardo’s life and explaining what made him so exceptional."

When Barack Obama says a book is "essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it," it's probably not a bad idea to check it out from your local library.

Obama was not the only one who thought Hisham Matar's memoir was "beautifully written"—it won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

This is the only one of Obama's suggestions that is not a celebration of African culture. But he says this this memoir by his former speechwriter and aide is "one of the smartest reflections I’ve seen as to how we approached foreign policy, and one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen about what it’s actually like to serve the American people for eight years in the White House."

Gates says this is one of the best books he's ever read—"it gives you a breakthrough way of understanding basic truths about the world."

If you weren't excited when this book won the Golden Booker, your interest might be piqued by this part of Bill Gates's description of it: "it’s basically a long conversation among 166 ghosts."

Obama wrote that this examination of the series of events that led to Kenya's independence in 1963 is "a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships."