Now that you know how my brain works, you won’t be surprised by this. My favorite is In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. It’s about the whaling industry in Nantucket and
I just absolutely find it fascinating. It’s a true story that was the inspiration for Moby Dick. There was a boat full of the young men from the island and they were going out to hopefully catch whale and get the oil from them. Think Deadliest Catch times 10. Their boat was sunk by a sperm whale and they got stranded and they ended up surviving on open water for a year I think. It was something crazy. And just, you know, what it took for them to survive. Angry whale sinks your ship, now you’re stuck at sea and you have to eat your friends.
A couple other books that I really enjoyed.And it kind of goes along with this, this feeling of adventure. I’ve always had a pipe dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail and I was able to find a book of a young guy who did the whole thing with his dog. Check it out. It’s Lost on the Appalachian Trail by Kyle Rohrig. I don’t know if I’d ever have the time to take six months away from friends and family and go walk in the woods. But I just always thought it was neat that you can walk from Georgia to Maine, and all the different adventures that you have.
A book I’m reading now is Leadership in Turbulent Times. It’s by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And it’s about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, and basically, what experiences they had through their life to make them into great leaders. She’s trying to find out if there is a common thread between them. As I get older and get along the ages that some of these people were, I try to imagine what I would do in that situation when faced with that type of adversity. Lincoln, for example, was I think eight when his mom died and his dad left to go find another woman to be his wife. His dad left him for probably like six months or something like that. And it was just Abraham Lincoln and his sister who was like 10. They were alone as kids trying to survive in the wilderness. And they did, but this is the guy that came from nothing. And then, you know, when he’s old enough, he leaves and he goes to one of the major cities, and he goes and starts talking to people and he was just such a magnetic force and such a humble, emphatic, person that the town just fell in love with him. Obviously there’s more in there, but you get the point.