Sources and Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
There are numerous versions of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War available, including an audiobook, but the confusing thing is that the text described varies significantly depending on how it has been translated. I know from personal experience (of having my books translated into Chinese) that there really is a huge gap between cultures, and books like The Art of War use a lot of idioms and analogies that just don’t work if translated too literally. Anyway, the book was translated into French and published in 1772 by the French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot with the first annotated English translation published by Lionel Giles in 1910. In the introduction, Giles attacks a slightly earlier English translation in 1905 by Everard Ferguson Calthrop, a military man himself, under the title “The Book of War,” saying, “It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none can hope to be wholly exempt. Omissions were frequent; hard passages were willfully distorted or slurred over. Such offenses are less pardonable. They would not be tolerated in any edition of a Latin or Greek classic, and a similar standard of honesty ought to be insisted upon in translations from Chinese.”
Giles himself was a very learned chap who previously had made a detailed study of Confucius and worked at the British Museum. His text is online as part of the Project Gutenberg project that makes historically important texts available to everyone for free.
Did Buffett really say that about reading “500 pages a day”? Indeed, it is well substantiated. The quotation is based on the memory of Todd Combs, who became an employee of Buffett’s at his investment firm and who had enrolled at the Columbia Business School in 2000. He apparently heard Buffett say it circa 2002 as a student there. The quote has been repeated many times, including on October 26, 2010, in the Wall Street Journal, in the article “Buffett Flags a Successor—Fund Manager Named Leading Candidate as Next Investment Chief at Berkshire.”
Larry Ellison’s takeaway about “ignoring anger” is quoted by Reuters in an article titled “Salesforce Drama Steals Show at Oracle Conference,” October 5, 2011, available online at www.reuters.com/article/salesforcecom-oracle-idUKN1E7940ET20111005.
The foreword Marc Benioff wrote was for the edition The Art of War—Spirituality for Conflict by Thomas Huynh, published by Skylight Paths in 2008. This promises to offer detailed explanations and annotations of all the verses.
Mark Cuban’s book How to Win at the Sport of Business was published by First Diversion Books in 2011, and Tom Corley’s book Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals was published by Langdon Street Press in 2011. Finally, Paul Martin’s book Making Happy People was published by HarperCollins in 2005.
CHAPTER 1. MEET THE WILD THINGS
“Obama’s reading list” mentioned here is discussed in an article titled “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years,” an interview with Michiko Kakutani, the book critic for the New York Times, on January 16, 2017, online at www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/transcript-president-obama-on-what-books-mean-to-him.html.
He expands on how he found the writings of two great reforming politicians, Gandhi and Mandela, particularly helpful. These books would be Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (originally written in Gujarati but published in English in 1948 by the Public Affairs Press and reprinted in many new editions) and Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (published by Macdonald Purnell in 1994). Two other great political reads Obama evidently enjoyed are Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings edited by Roy Basler and Carl Sandburg in a book published by De Capo Press, 2001, and Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story originally published in 1958 by Harper & Brothers.
Two of Obama’s own books that the chapter draws on are The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown/Three Rivers Press, 2006) and Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Times Books, 1995).
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1940. Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins’s words, after reading the manuscript, that “if the function of a writer is to reveal reality, no one ever so completely performed it,” are found in a letter of April 24, 1940, recorded in the book The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor by Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman (University of South Carolina Press, 2004).
Richard Gottlieb analyzed Maurice Sendak’s picture book for The Psychologist in 2009. It is now also online at https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-22/edition-10/eye-fiction-where-wild-things-are.
Jane Goodall’s recommended reads are in an article called just that on April 26, 2018, for Radical Reads, online at https://radicalreads.com/jane-goodall-favorite-books.
Goodall’s own classic text In the Shadow of Man was published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin in 1971 and reprinted in many editions. Goodall is the author of fourteen other books, including The Chimpanzees of Gombe (1986), Visions of Caliban (1991), and Reason for Hope (1999). That’s not to mention numerous books specially for children, such as My Life with the Chimpanzees (Alladin, 1991), which starts by explaining how, as a child, Goodall was given a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee, and her fondness for this figure helped start her early love of animals.
Kathryn Reeds’s May 7, 2010, interview for The Harvard Crimson, entitled “15 Questions with Jane Goodall,” is online at www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/5/7/nbsp-fm-jg-people.
PBS offers videos and text about “Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees,” March 3, 1996, online at www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/jane-goodalls-wild-chimpanzees-jane-goodalls-story/1911.
Finally, the 2016 World Books Day interview published by the Jane Goodall Institute is online at https://news.janegoodall.org/2016/04/23/1013/ and has some great images of the books too.
CHAPTER 2. ROLL THE DICE
There are quite a few books about Google, such as Janet Lowe’s Google Speaks: Secrets of the World’s Greatest Billionaire Entrepreneurs (Wiley, 2009) and Ram Shriram’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (Penguin, 2009), but then Google is a very big affair these days. However, Google’s founders are a reclusive pair, and details of what they are really thinking and motivated by are hard to come by. Indeed, Michael Mace’s account, Map the Future, is not really about Google but rather about the elusive ingredients of business success. So it is to articles like “Google Logic: Why Google Does the Things It Does the Way It Does” published in the technology pages of The Guardian (www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/09/google-android-reader-why) and on the website of the Academy of Achievement (www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-page/#interview) that intriguing details must be sought.
Brin’s comments on challenging Microsoft are preserved in a blog by Nicholas Carr called “Rough Type” (online at www.roughtype.com/?p=366) as well as noted in an article in the New York Times, April 13, 2003, by John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary under the title “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” and Asher Hakins’s Forbes piece on penny-pinching billionaires, “The Frugal Billionaires,” was published November 14, 2007. The interview with Barry Diller in The New Yorker was published online under the title “Inside the Googleplex” on October 2, 2009, and Ken Auletta tweaked the curtain on Google again on October 5 in an article called ominously “Searching for Trouble” in the same magazine.
Branson, on the other hand, seems to enjoy a bit of media attention, indeed a lot of media attention. His interview with Danny Baker in the Radio Times, the one where he says he was for a while “very much under the influence of the Dice Man books,” is also recorded in an article by Sherna Noah in The Independent, May 21, 2013, entitled “Dice Man Books ‘Influenced’ Business Tycoon Sir Richard Branson.” It is online at www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/dice-man-books-influenced-business-tycoon-sir-richard-branson-8624831.html.
For the account of the man himself, his autobiography The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership was published by Portfolio in 2014 and (confusingly) also republished under the bolder title Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Crown in 1999. Smart business move!
CHAPTER 3. SAVE THE PLANET—ONE PAGE AT A TIME!
Again, I am indebted to the high-quality journalism of The New Yorker, in this case Philip Hoare’s article (November 3, 2011) “What Moby Dick Means to Me” (online at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/searching-for-trouble#). Marie-Therese Miller’s book, in the Conservation Heroes series, simply titled Rachel Carson (Chelsea House, 2011), recalls Carson’s early forays into writing. Carson’s discovery later at college that biology gave her “something to write about” is recounted in Linda Lear’s autobiography, also called Rachel Carson (1997) on page 80, referencing correspondence by Carson.
Indeed, Lear uses the phrase as the title for her fourth chapter in the autobiography. Carson’s dismissal of pesticides as being as indiscriminate as a “caveman’s club” was made in her book Silent Spring, first published in 1962, on page 297. Louis McLean’s criticisms are recounted in The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement (New Narratives in American History) by Mark Hamilton Lytle, published by Oxford University Press in 2007. Bill Ruckelshaus’s thoughts in the oral history interview with Chuck Elkins are online in a PDF entitled “Behind the Scenes at the Creation of EPA: An Interview with Chuck Elkins,” part of the Environmental Protection Agency records at www.epaalumni.org/userdata/pdf/600A1DB1B9EF1E85.pdf.
Doug McLean’s phrase, a “great herd of readers profess devotion to Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, but novelists especially seem to love saying they love it,” introduces the author David Gilbert’s essay on Moby Dick for The Atlantic (August 2013), part of its By Heart series in which authors discuss their favorite books. It is also online at www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/the-endless-depths-of-i-moby-dick-i-symbolism/278861.
The influential CBS Reports program, with reporter Eric Sevareid, called “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” aired on April 3, 1963.
Frans Lanting’s website is at www.Lanting.com. His 1997 book Eye to Eye was published by Taschen and consists mainly of 140 color photographs, prefaced by his personal introduction. “No one turns animals into art more completely than Frans Lanting,” wrote The New Yorker—at least according to Lanting, see www.nationalgeographic.com/contributors/l/photographer-frans-lanting.
CHAPTER 4. SEARCH FOR LIFE’S PURPOSE
Steve Jobs’s commencement speech for students was given at Stanford on June 12, 2005, and you can read it in full because it is archived online at https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/.
The PBS program entitled “One Last Thing” aired November 2, 2011. YouTube has the show: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_tGxNyLuns. There’s a nice annotated version of Jobs’s Playboy interview with David Sheff on the Genius website: https://genius.com/David-sheff-playboy-interview-steve-jobs-annotated. Walter Isaacson’s autobiography, all 656 pages of it, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011, and David Price’s The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company was published by Penguin Random House in 2009.
If you want to know a bit more about the philosophy of existentialism, neither Be Here Now (published in 1971 by the Lama Foundation) nor Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, first published in English by Routledge in 1956, far less his Critique of Dialectical Reason (published by Gallimard in France in 1960) will really help you, but then it seems that no one understands the term. Perhaps it doesn’t have a fixed domain or meaning; such things happen in philosophy. However, to introduce some of my own books, I have given pointers as to what “existentialism is all about” in Philosophical Tales (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008)—Sartre is one of the strange tales—and Cracking Philosophy (Cassell Illustrated, 2016).
The Gardner Hendrie Oral Project interview with Evelyn Berezin for the Computer History Museum (March 10, 2014) is a rare and invaluable record of this innovator’s life, influences, and experiences. An occasionally slightly inaccurate transcript is at https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/04/102746876-05-01-acc.pdf, and the actual three-hour interview is on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wOWHkX4ilA.
The New York Times tribute to Berezin by Robert McFadden was published on December 10, 2018, under the rather clumpy title “Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor.” It is online at www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/obituaries/evelyn-berezin-dead.html.
Gwyn Headley’s blogpost on Berezin, “Why Is This Woman Not Famous?”(December 20, 2010), is online at http://fotolibrarian.fotolibra.com/?p=466.
As for Astounding Science-Fiction, it is also rather confusingly called Amazing Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction, not to forget its original title of Astounding Stories of Super-Science (no wonder Evelyn got confused!). Under the Analog title, the magazine has a website that includes some of its wonderful early covers. See www.analogsf.com and www.analogsf.com/about-analog/vintage. However, Wikipedia has one of its better pages on the magazine, evidently lovingly put together by aficionados, which additionally points to the site archive.org, which has many of the early magazines in full! See https://archive.org/details/Astounding_Stories_of_Super_Science_1930, for example.
CHAPTER 5. SEE THE WORLD IN THE WIDER SOCIAL CONTEXT
Mike Duffy’s website is https://thecitybase.com/about. “Today” is “in 2018.” His comment for Inc. was part of a longer (but undated) piece called “32 Books Anyone Who Wants to Succeed Should Read” by Christina Des Marais. It is online at www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/32-books-highly-recommended-by-extremely-successful-people.html. Actually, Mike’s choice is only number thirty!
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was first published (as a book) in 1859 in London by Chapman and Hall. Project Gutenberg has the text at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/98.
Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is online courtesy of the University of Virginia at http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html and includes harsh words coming from someone whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. James Russell Lowell’s unkind little poem, actually a segment of a much longer poem satirizing several American authors, is preserved by the James Fenimore Cooper Society website at www.oneonta.edu/~cooper/writings/1848-lowell.html.
Marina Levitina recalls Russia’s fascination with American adventure stories in her book “Russian Americans” in Soviet Film: Cinematic Dialogues between the US and the USSR (Bloomsbury, 2015). Further praise is unearthed in A Study Guide for James Fenimore Cooper’s “Pathfinder” in the Gale, Cengage Learning series.
Robert Hughes’s book is American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Knopf, 1997).
Riis’s biographer Alexander Alland was writing in Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen published by Aperture in 1974. (Yes, the publisher did use the ampersand. Don’t ask me why.)
There is a good selection of Riis’s photographs (with annotations) in a page headed “Jacob Riis: Lighting Up the Slums with Flash Photography,” curated by contemporary photographer Bill Dobbins online at https://onphotography.me/2018/03/03/jacob-riis-lighting-up-the-slums-with-flash-photography.
George Orwell’s book Down and Out in Paris and London was first published by Gollancz in 1933. Animal Farm, by comparison, was published in 1945, and 1984—the dystopia featuring Big Brother—came in 1949.
CHAPTER 6. BE READY TO REINVENT YOURSELF
Henry Ford’s homely advice about enthusiasm can be found all over the Internet, but it seems not to have a true source. Keith Sward gives a careful account of Ford’s life in his book The Legend of Henry Ford and doesn’t include it (Rinehart, 1948). The Literary Digest for January 7, 1928, included a special feature entitled “Henry Ford on His Plans and His Philosophy” in which he explains his philosophy that life is about gaining valuable experience and that this is “all we can get out of life.” However, it is an earlier article, by Charles W. Wood, associate editor of Forbes magazine (January 1928) that provides the fullest account of Ford’s philosophy of “experience.” A book called Going Below the Water’s Edge by Ronald Fehribach (Author House, 2014) contains the full interview too, “master mind” and all.
A rather more practical approach is taken in a scholarly investigation of the production line called The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Simon & Schuster, 1990). David Warsh compares Ford and Adam Smith in an article called “Adam Smith, Theorist” published June 7, 2015, on his site Economic Principles (formerly a newspaper column) online at www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2015.06.07/1753.html.
Richard Bak’s book Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire was published by Wiley in 2003. Ford’s concern that by underpaying workers “we are preparing a generation of underfed children who will be physically and morally undernourished” is discussed in Howard Means’s book Money and Power: The History of Business (Wiley, 2002).
Tim Worstall published an article looking skeptically at Ford’s pay rates called “On Henry Ford and His $5 a Day” for the free-market Adam Smith Institute. The article was published on June 13, 2010, online at www.adamsmith.org/blog/tax-spending/on-henry-ford-and-his-5-a-day.
Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World is one of the most inventive novels published in the twentieth century. It started out as a parody, and Ford apparently became a central figure by chance after Huxley happened upon a copy of Henry Ford’s 1922 manifesto “My Life and Work” while on a boat traveling from Singapore to the Philippines. This fine document is preserved online by Wikisource at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Life_and_Work.
Ford’s interview with German American journalist George Sylvester Viereck was in the August 5, 1928, New York American.
Jimmy Carter, American Moralist by Kenneth Morris was published by the University of Georgia Press (1997). You can actually hear President Carter’s Georgia School of Law address if you go to www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jimmycarterlawday1974.htm. It also gives a transcription. The Irony of American History, the book by Reinhold Niebuhr said to influence Carter, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons (1952). Another Niebuhr text mentioned is The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (University of Chicago Press, 1944).
Actually, there is a trove of the so-called Public Papers of the Presidents that includes all such things. Carter’s records can be accessed online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ppotpus?key=title;page=browse;value=j. More conveniently for most, though, David Swartz “revisits” Jimmy Carter’s truth-telling sermon to Americans in an article called just that for the academic experts’ site The Conversation on July 13, 2018. The piece is online at https://theconversation.com/revisiting-jimmy-carters-truth-telling-sermon-to-americans-97241.
Whittaker Chambers’s cover story for Time was in the March 8, 1948, issue. It was written just months before he testified “against Communism” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, testimony which would ultimately make him famous but also cost him his job at Time.
The University of Pennsylvania has Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” online at www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.
CHAPTER 7. SET YOUR THINKING FREE
Where does Edison say “inventors must be poets so that they may have imagination”? Actually, I’m not quite sure, but it is quoted in Neil Baldwin’s scholarly (542 pages!) account Edison: Inventing the Century (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Professor McCormick discusses this poetry issue for a National Public Radio show called “Thomas Edison: Inventor and Poet” (August 13, 2007), and the transcript is online at www.npr.org/transcripts/12741251?storyId=12741251?storyId=12741251. McCormick adds, “He understood, I think, how poetry can fuel the creative process in ways that just, you know, the basic scientific process.”
The text of Edison’s essay “The Philosophy of Thomas Paine,” written June 7, 1925, is online courtesy of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association at www.thomaspaine.org/aboutpaine/the-philosophy-of-thomas-paine-by-thomas-edison.html.
Thomas Paine’s own great work, The Rights of Man, published in 1791, is available as an e-text at Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org/files/3742/3742-h/3742-h.htm#link2H_4_0006, and the British Library has a nice facsimile of the first edition online at www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item106644.html.
The National Park Service has a website called Where Modern America Was Invented, which looks at Edison’s background, tells you where to actually visit today, and remembers him saying, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me. And I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” It is at www.nps.gov/edis/index.htm.
Edison’s writings on education teaching people how to think are mainly in his journals. The particular quote on “teaching people how to think” is reproduced in Reconstruction and Reform: History of U.S., Book 7 by Joy Hakim (Oxford University Press, 1994).
The Library of Congress website has many Edison resources, including clips from early films: www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/biography. When I say “films,” these are rather modest in length. One features a man waving his hat, for example: www.loc.gov/item/00694118/. Another curiosity is the sound file of his “message to the American people” recorded during World War I: www.loc.gov/item/00694069/.
Bertrand Russell’s saying that “the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubt” is actually a popular misquoting of Russell. In his book Mortals and Others (1931–1935), what Russell actually says is, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” He continues, “Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. This was not always the case.” The book is a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell originally published in the New York Journal-American, and this essay was called “The Triumph of Stupidity” (May 10, 1933).
Walt Whitman’s praise for the “scientific spirit” is preserved by the Walt Whitman Archive in its category of “Disciples”—that is, quotes preserved by his fans: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1/med.00001.37.html. Does that make Kroto a disciple too?
The quote from Confucius, “I seek not the answer—but to understand the question,” is loosely from The Analects, the collection of his sayings compiled by his disciples in the centuries following his death in 479 BCE. I say “loosely,” as translations from Chinese are very subjective.
The passage from Plato imagining particles being transformed in cosmic fires is from The Timaeus of Plato (1888 Tr. R. D. Archer-Hind), specifically section 57a, pages 203–05.
Kroto recalls “the encouraging atmosphere” of Ottawa in his account of his life for the Nobel Prize Committee: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1996/kroto/biographical.
Finally, Ashutosh Jogalekar’s blog post entitled “Ordering the Best Appetizer Platter; Harry Kroto’s Many Passions” (July 1, 2009) is at http://scienceblogs.de/lindaunobel/2009/07/01/ordering-the-best-appetizer-platter-harold-krotos-many-passions.
CHAPTER 8. MAKE A HUGE PROFIT—AND THEN SHARE IT
The details for the “Non-fiction Favorites of CEOs” cited are Winners Never Cheat Even in Difficult Times by Jon M. Huntsman originally published in 2008 by Pearson FT Press.
Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brook is available in reprint edition from Open Road Media, published in 2014; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu was published by Crown in 2012, and One Thousand Ways to Make $1000, a 1936 nonfiction book of personal finance by Frances Minaker, is today online at Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56006. But Buffett’s key source, of course, is The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, first published in 1949 by Harper and Brothers, who are today part of HarperCollins.
Buffett’s own book The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America (edited by Lawrence A. Cunningham) was published by Wiley in 2013. Buffett’s address to Colombia University’s centennial celebrations in 2015 is preserved by Colombia Business School and is online at www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/columbia-business/fast-forward-warren-buffett-51.
Buffett’s comment on why his investment company had bought a large shareholding in the Washington Post newspaper company, which refers to what “we had learned from Ben Graham” and notably “that the key to successful investing was the purchase of shares in good businesses when market prices were at a large discount from underlying business values,” is recorded by Glen Arnold in his book The Great Investors: Lessons on Investing from Master Traders (Pearson, 2011).
Buffett’s annual letter for his company’s investors written in 1987, which notes, “Whenever Charlie and I buy common stocks for Berkshire’s insurance companies (leaving aside arbitrage purchases, discussed) we approach the transaction as if we were buying into a private business,” is online at the finance website Alphavest at www.alphavest.com/an-essay-on-ben-grahams-mr-market-by-warren-buffett.
Buffett acknowledges ruefully that it took five years and more than $400 million in losses to “close up shop” on the complex web of 23,218 derivatives contracts with 884 counterparties that they ended up with after purchasing General Re (General Reinsurance Corporation) in the Berkshire Hathaway 2008 annual report. You can read more of this online at www.jameslau88.com/warren_buffett_on_derivatives.htm.
Buffett’s 2008 op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Buy American. I Am,” in which he says, “Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month—or a year—from now,” is at www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html. His comment that “we should neither try to predict these nor to profit from them. If we can identify businesses similar to those we have purchased in the past, external surprises will have little effect on our long-term results” is again in the Berkshire shareholder address cited above.
Buffett’s comments made after surveying the wreckage of the subprime disaster are online at numerous media, including Forbes (www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2010/09/02/a-plea-for-personal-responsibility -in-the-corner-office/amp), where he is quoted saying, “It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price—one not reimbursable by the companies.”
Buffett can be found disagreeing that “analyzing stocks was useless” in a book called Buffett, Munger Marathon Investing: Passion Investing by Jack Burrow published by Friesen Press in 2017.
Adam Smith’s pioneering work on early economic theory, Wealth of Nations, was first published in 1776 and in many editions since. It is also online as an e-book at Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300.
Buffett’s presentation to Georgetown University students in Washington, DC, at which he compared the US Federal Reserve to a hedge fund, is online in an article headed “Buffett Calls Fed History’s Greatest Hedge Fund,” by Noah Buhayar, published September 20, 2013. Buffett’s views on tax can be found in an article for the New York Times entitled “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning” by Ben Steinnov, published November 26, 2006. Here he says, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Matthias Schwartz’s article called “The Church of Warren Buffett: Faith and Fundamentals in Omaha,” was in Harper’s Magazine in the January 2010 issue. It is online at https://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/the-church-of-warren-buffett.
But on to Rockefeller. At his peak, at the start of the twentieth century, Rockefeller’s net worth was around 1.5 percent of the entire economic output of the United States, records Karl Zinsmeister for the Philanthropy Roundtable in an article online at www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/people/hall-of-fame/detail/john-rockefeller-sr. This is my source for facts such as that, in his lifetime, Rockefeller donated more than $500 million (hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money) to various philanthropic causes.
Rockefeller’s 1909 memoirs are recalled in The Philanthropy Reader by Michael Moody and Beth Breeze (Taylor and Francis, 2016). However, the book that helped guide Rockefeller’s thinking, Extracts from the Diary and Correspondence of the Late Amos Lawrence, was published in 1856. It is now an e-book at Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42522), and there is a nice version at https://archive.org/details/extractsfromdiar00lawrence/page/n7.
John Thomas Flynn’s biography of Rockefeller is God’s Gold: The Story of Rockefeller and His Times and was published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute (2012).
Rockefeller’s saying, “The secret to success is to do the common things uncommonly well,” is in a nice article for the Virgin website on entrepreneurs entitled “The Philosophy of Epic Entrepreneurs: John D. Rockefeller.” It is online at www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/philosophy-epic-entrepreneurs-john-d-rockefeller.
“When a competitor did not want to be bought out, Rockefeller used ruthless means of persuasion.” See, for example, an article by Sam Parr in The Hustle entitled “The Epic Rise of John D. Rockefeller,” published March 9, 2016. It is online at https://thehustle.co/the-history-of-john-d-rockefeller-standard-oil.
The ledger of Rockefeller’s gifts published by himself in 1897 is preserved by Colombia University Libraries Preservation Division and online at https://archive.org/stream/mrrockefellersle00rock/mrrockefellersle00rock_djvu.txt.
The account, purporting to be of Rockefeller’s first meeting with the Indian mystic, as “told by Madame Emma Calvé to Madame Drinette Verdier,” is recalled in the book The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 9, published for example by Advaita Ashrama in 1947.
That one of Rockefeller’s donations was to the University of Chicago is detailed on the beautifully illustrated blog Vivekananda Abroad: A Postcard Pilgrimage Illustrating the Travels of Swami Vivekananda. See http://vivekanandaabroad.blogspot.com.
CHAPTER 9. RECOGNIZE THE POWER OF SYMBOLS
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “as told to Alex Haley,” was originally published in 1965, the year of his assassination, by Grove Press. Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization is a series of books written over decades, from 1935 to 1975, and was published by Simon & Schuster. Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was first published in 1926 also by Simon & Schuster. It is likely that Malcolm X read Nietzsche only via Will Durant’s account, but the phrase that caught his eye, “God is dead,” first appeared in Nietzsche’s 1882 collection The Gay Science. However, it is Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra that is most responsible for making the phrase popular.
Clarence Thomas’s autobiography My Grandfather’s Son was published by Harper in 2007. Jan Crawford Greenburg’s interview with Thomas for ABC News is online at https://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3668863&page=1 under the heading “Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks Out: Jan Crawford Greenburg’s In-depth Interview with Justice Clarence Thomas,” dated October 3, 2007. And Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which contains Thomas’s favorite quote, was published in 1952 by Random House.
Last but not least the “exquisitely crafted” 1,458 words of the Declaration of Independence can be read in their original form (via the wonders of the Internet) at www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/ under the heading “The Declaration of Independence: The Want, Will, and Hopes of the People.”
CHAPTER 10. FOLLOW YOUR PERSONAL LEGEND
A selection of Malala Yousafzai’s BBC blog posts has been collected online and can be read at www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29565738 under the title “Moving Moments from Malala’s BBC Diary.” Yousafzai’s page at the Nobel Prize Institute records her Nobel Lecture in Oslo, December 10, 2014, which includes her saying, “This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education” as well as “I tell my story not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story of many girls.” See www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2014/yousafzai/26074-malala-yousafzai-nobel-lecture-2014.
The full text of her “glorious struggle” address to the United Nations has been preserved by the Independent newspaper under the heading “Malala Yousafzai Delivers Defiant Riposte to Taliban Militants with Speech to the UN General Assembly” (July 22, 2013) and is online at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-full-text-malala-yousafzai-delivers-defiant-riposte-to-taliban-militants-with-speech-to-the-un-8706606.html.
CBS News reported her meeting with President Obama in an article online October 11, 2013, under the heading “Obama Meets Malala at the White House,” www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-meets-malala-at-the-white-house.
Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai’s, interview with PBS is part of his book Let Her Fly published by Ebury in 2018. Paulo Coelho’s determination to protect his book’s authenticity from Warner Bros. is recorded in a summary of milestones in the writer’s life at www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/11/paulocoelho.
Time magazine’s tribute to Winfrey comes in repeated inclusion in its annual lists of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People.” She is listed as an “artist” in the 2010 “Time 100” for example, which is online at http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1984685,00.html.
The Oprah Winfrey Twitter feed has recorded Oprah’s youthful boast “I don’t think I belong here ’cause I know a lot of big words”: https://twitter.com/OWNTV/status/560890271194312704.
Jeff Weiner’s interview with Winfrey on October 15, 2015, is on the Supersoul website, devoted to recording Winfrey’s “supersoul conversations,” at www.supersoul.tv/tag/jeff-weiner.
Gary Zukav’s interview for the Thinking Allowed series is preserved in full and in text at www.intuitionnetwork.org/txt/zukav.htm.
Under the heading “The Book that Inspired Oprah Winfrey’s Business Philosophy Has Nothing to Do with Business,” the online magazine Business Insider has the story (November 5, 2015) about Winfrey discovering the principle of “intention,” online at www.businessinsider.fr/us/oprah-winfrey-talks-about-her-favorite-book-2015-11.
The promise at Skidmore College, “Do not bring me an idea that I cannot find my thread of truth in,” is recorded by Leah Ginsberg in an article called “The One Book that Changed Oprah Winfrey’s Life and Business,” published June 17, 2017, by CNBC, online at www.cnbc.com/2017/06/15/the-one-book-that-changed-oprah-winfreys-life-and-business.html.
Peter Birkenhead’s robust critique of The Secret was published in Salon under the heading “Oprah’s Ugly Secret” on March 3, 2007, and is online at www.salon.com/2007/03/05/the_secret.
In a book review of April 11, 2010, entitled “The Queen of Talk Declined to Speak,” the New York Times has the tale of Vernon Winfrey saying that he needs his daughter’s show “like a hog needs a holiday,” online at www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/books/12book.html.