Looking for gift ideas for the budding global thinker on your list? Want to be as well-informed as FP's top 100? Here are the top 142 books on their shelves, from wonky policy briefs to biographies to children's books to fantasy novels, plus detailed recommendations from some of the smartest people on the planet.
Plus, catch up on your reading with excerpts from some of our Global Thinkers' favorite books:
Helene Gayle recommends economist and fellow FP Global Thinker Nicholas Stern's recent book, The Global Deal, a pragmatic look at how the world can come together to mitigate the effects of climate change: "The cost of action is much lower than the cost of inaction -- in other words, delay would become the anti-growth strategy.
Robert Wright's recommended book, Zachary Karabell's Superfusion, examines America's new relationship with China and what it means for the country's future.
Fareed Zakaria suggests a book on the crucial figure looming over last year's recession, John Maynard Keynes. Robert Skidelsky's 2008 biography, Keynes: The Return of the Master, reveals much about the man who changed the way the world thought about economics.
Willem Buiter and Mohamed El-Erian both recommend a book that delves into the historical record to show how common financial crises are, and how universal the human impulse to find each one scarily new: This Time Is Different, by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
Paul Collier recommends Global Thinker Robert Shiller's book Animal Spirits, coauthored with George A. Akerlof, about how the quirks of human psychology (the tendency to find narrative in random sequences of events, for example) shape world events and economies.
Take a look, and take a page.
1453 by Roger Crowley (Recommended by Robert Zoellick, No. 33 on the FP 100)
The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich (Emily Oster, 99)
After Nature by W.G. Sebald (Paul Collier, 36)
After Tamerlane by John Darwin (Niall Ferguson, 56)
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The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo (Jamais Cascio, 72)
Alliance: How Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill Won a War and Began Another by Jonathan Fenby (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 11: "Fenby reconstructed in a splendid way the daily unfolding of the great debates among the allies in their conduction of the Second World War. Thanks to this book we do have a keen view of the challenges, hesitations, and purposes of the Three Great Powers.")
America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story by Bruce Feiler (Robert Wright, 27)
Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik (Michael Ignatieff, 64: "An absolutely wonderful book about the liberal temperament.")
Angels in my Hair by Lorna Byrne (Tariq Ramadan, 49)
Animal Spirits by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (Paul Collier, 36)
Read an excerpt.
Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Mohamed El-Erian, 16)
The Baha'i Sacred Anthology (Xu Zhiyong, 62)
The Believers by Zoë Heller (Karen Armstrong, 87)
A Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt (Esther Duflo, 41)
The Black Diaries by Roger Casement (Mario Vargas Llosa, 63)
Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim (Ashraf Ghani, 20)
The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier (David Kilcullen, 44)
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (Paul Farmer, 83)
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 48)
Butcher and Bolt by David Loyn (David Petraeus, 8)
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