Book Summaries

Do you want to make a difference in the lives of others? Do you want to change the world? **To do anything meaningful, you’re going to have to work with people.** And if you’re working with people, **you need to know how to lead them.**

_The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership _is a guide to the major principles of leadership. Learn how to connect with and influence people. Learn how to empower others and build an all-star leadership team. And learn how to create a succession plan and leave a legacy.

Mental health disorders affect millions of people and often lead to the tragic loss of life through suicide. The pain and suffering that accompany mental illness are difficult for those unafflicted to understand. Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist living with manic-depressive disorder, has attempted to bring awareness to those experiences in her memoir. By divulging the violent, frenzied, and dangerous aspects of her disease, Jamison hopes to create more understanding about mental illness and more empathy for those who struggle to exist in the normal world.

Defining moments are the small, meaningful moments that make our lives richer and give us fond memories to look back on. But how do you recognize when these moments are happening, and give them the time and attention they deserve?An d how can you engineer more of them?

_The Power of Moments _ teaches you how to elevate moments with delightful and strategic surprise, guide others to transformative truths, multiply your moments of celebration on your journey to a goal, and deepen your connections with the people around you.

Do you feel a calling inside to create or inspire the world? Do you struggle to follow that calling because of doubt, fear, or lack of motivation? _The War of Art _spells out the reason you struggle to reach your dreams and provides strategies to help you overcome the obstacles. Each creative person experiences resistance in the form of fear when they approach their true work. When you understand where that fear comes from, how it manifests in your life, and how a commitment to your work can give you the strength to push forward, you will be successful in living your dreams.

Being a team player who can work effectively with others to achieve a group goal is more important than ever in our interdependent and changing world. However, true team players are surprisingly uncommon, in part because many organizations are unclear on what being a team player means, and as a result, often end up hiring people who undermine teamwork. In _The Ideal Team Player_, Patrick Lencioni defines the model team player as a person who embodies the virtues of humility, hunger or drive, and people skills. He explains how to transform your organization by developing your current employees into team players and making sure you hire team players in the future.

Around 1.5 billion people around the world speak English—roughly 20 percent of the human population. How has our language achieved this global status? How did English evolve over time into the language we speak and write today? What are its unique quirks, strengths, and shortcomings that set it apart from the world’s other languages? _The Mother Tongue _takes us on a journey through the history of the English language, exploring its richness and variety, and pointing the way toward what the future might have in store for it.

_A Brief History of Time_ is an exploration of the forces that govern our universe. At the heart of it all is the search for a theory that explains the history and evolution of our universe—how it began, how it works, and what the future might hold for it. We journey to the vast reaches of the observable universe and inside the very tiniest particles that comprise its building blocks as we explore the nature of time and space, the origins of our universe through the Big Bang, the forces that give rise to phenomena like black holes, and the possibilities of time travel.

_Turn the Ship Around!_ by L. David Marquet is the story of how a captain turned the U.S. Navy’s worst-performing nuclear submarine crew into one of the best. He transformed the demoralized crew into an empowered, motivated fighting force in just a year by replacing the military’s traditional “leader-follower” or command-and-control structure with a “leader-leader” model that gave crew members control over their work. They learned to think and act proactively, determining what needed to be done and the best way to do it, rather than waiting for direction. Any organization can use Marquet’s principles for developing leaders at all levels to create a passionate, high-performing workforce.