What is the book you have given most as a gift, and why?
Recorded Rita Levi-Montalcini said elsewhere, not written here
Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1986 source ↗

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David Hare Playwright and screenwriter
The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene.
Recorded Rob McGibbon, The Definite Article, Rob McGibbon, 27 August 2011 source ↗
Satya Nadella Chief executive of Microsoft
And this is where, a couple of years before I had become CEO, I had read this book by Carol Dweck out of Stanford [University] called “Mindset,” which was more in relation to my kids. And the simple concept in that book, which I loved a lot, was it's better to be a learn-it-all even if the know-it-all has more innate capability, because the learn-it-all ultimately will do better. And I said, well, that applies to CEOs. That applies to companies made up of people. And I said: What if we introduce that as the meme to have the cultural dialogue at Microsoft?
Recorded The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (official transcript) source ↗
Richard Ford Novelist and short-story writer
Touchstone books….I don’t know. So Long, See You Tomorrow; The Moviegoer; A Fan’s Notes; Alice Munro’s stories.
Recorded Travis Holland, Interview, Fiction Writers Review, 11 April 2011 source ↗

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? Failure & regret
The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom. My inspiration was a 1934 article by Viktor Hamburger reporting on the effects of limb extirpation in chick embryos. My project had barely started when Giuseppe Levi, who had escaped from Belgium invaded by Nazis, returned to Turin and joined me, thus becoming, to my great pride, my first and only assistant.
Recorded Laureate-written autobiography for Les Prix Nobel, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 December 1986 source ↗

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