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Michael Lewis

American writer and journalist

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
Oh, yes. In fact, it’s funny, because I’ve just sent a couple of friends a pair of novels, and one of the novels I’ve sent to a dozen people, and it will seem like a random choice to you, but it’s one of these books that, it’s just a miracle of a book. It’s called The Long Ships , and it’s by a Scandinavian historian. It’s a novel by a Scandinavian historian who only wrote one novel. I think his name is Frans Bengtsson, and he was a Viking historian, and he packed everything he knew about the Vikings into this wonderful comic novel. At the end of it, you feel like you were a Viking for 400 pages. It’s a piece of history that he just brings to life in this story. I hand that out all the time, partly because it is just an incredible pleasurable reading experience, and partly just to illustrate a point that you never know where great books are going to come from. There are lots of examples of people, even very late in life, a book just pops out of them, and it was their one book. The other book, my pandemic reading gift I’ve been giving to people, because it’s a perfect pandemic novel, is Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow , and it’s about a Russian aristocrat who, during the Revolution, he’s the kind of guy who was supposed to be shot, but because of certain qualities, he isn’t shot. Instead, they lock him up in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, and he doesn’t leave for the next 50 years. So you were stuck inside this place, and it’s Eloise for Grownups , and just beautifully done, but it makes you, in this moment, it makes you see the possibilities of resourcefulness in a confined space. There are a bunch of books that I give to people, but those are the two that I’ve just recently, in the last week, sent to people.

Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 14 May 2020 source ↗

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Tu Youyou Pharmaceutical chemist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2015
In Ge Hong's A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies (肘后备急方), I noticed one sentence "A handful of Qinghao immersed in two liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all" (青蒿一握, 以水二升渍, 绞取汁, 尽服之) when Qinghao was mentioned for alleviating malaria fevers. Most herbs were typically boiled in water and made into a decoction before taken by the patients. This unique way of using Qinghao gave me the idea that heating during extraction might have destroyed the active components and the high temperature might need to be avoided in order to preserve the herb's activity.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 2015 source ↗
Susan Cain American writer
Oh, I mean, there’s one that I actually gifted to you that I especially love.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 2 April 2022 source ↗
James Cameron Filmmaker and deep-sea explorer
Well, we give a lot of books as presents because we’re always evangelizing and proselytizing for plant-based nutrition, for the environment and sustainability and things like that. Suzy, every year, makes up a gift bag on a theme. But usually, the theme is around sustainability. And there are always some books in there. So we give out a lot of books.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 15 November 2018 source ↗
Debbie Millman Designer; host of Design Matters; founder of the SVA branding programme
Well, a book that has influenced my life and one that I keep going back to over and over is the anthology, The Voice That is
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 26 June 2018 source ↗

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