That’s sort of pushed Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) into the now number three spot, just ahead probably of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! It’s weird, isn’t it? It says something about us, the books we like to give people, doesn’t it? You thanked Michael Pollan at the end of your interview or maybe it was somewhere in the midst of it, but I thought it was at the end of the interview for writing the book that he did because you said it was the book you wanted to read and that you wish you could have written, but you’re no slouch yourself when it comes to writing books. Is there anything that if Michael hadn’t had done that and you would have been writing that book in addition to all the stuff we’ve talked about today, is there anything else that you would have included in that book that wasn’t included? He’s a tough act to follow.

Over the years, I have found a few resources for developing personal productivity that I love. My top picks include Getting Things Done by David Allen, the classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and Learning How to Learn Barbara Oakley (I recommend the Coursera course). I'm tempted to add Tiny Habits to this list.

Yeah, there’s a number one. I can’t stop talking about it. I’ve read it three times now. I will read it again soon, is Titan , the Ron Chernow book about

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.

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.