You've GOT to Read This Book!: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life - Softcover

Canfield, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060891750 ISBN 13: 9780060891756

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

There's nothing better than a book you can't put down—or better yet, a book you'll never forget. This book puts the power of transformational reading into your hands. Jack Canfield, cocreator of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, and self-actualization pioneer Gay Hendricks have invited notable people to share personal stories of books that changed their lives. What book shaped their outlook and habits? Helped them navigate rough seas? Spurred them to satisfaction and success?

The contributors include Dave Barry, Stephen Covey, Malachy McCourt, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Mark Victor Hansen, John Gray, Christiane Northrup, Bernie Siegel, Craig Newmark, Michael E. Gerber, Lou Holtz, and Pat Williams, to name just a few. Their richly varied stories are poignant, energizing, and entertaining.Author and actor Malachy McCourt tells how a tattered biography of Gandhi, stumbled on in his youth, offered a shining example of true humility—and planted the seeds that would help support his sobriety decades later.

Bestselling author and physician Bernie Siegel, M.D., tells how William Saroyan's The Human Comedy helped him realize that, in order to successfully treat his patients with life-threatening illnesses, "I had to help them live—not just prevent them from dying."

Actress Catherine Oxenberg reveals how, at a life crossroads and struggling with bulimia, a book taught her the transforming difference one person could make in the life of another—and why that person for her was Richard Burton.

Rafe Esquith, the award-winning teacher whose inner-city students have performed Shakespeare all over the world, recounts his deep self-doubt in the midst of his success—and how reading To Kill a Mockingbird strengthened him to continue teaching.

Beloved librarian and bestselling author Nancy Pearl writes how, at age ten, Robert Heinlein's science fiction book Space Cadet impressed on her the meaning of personal integrity and gave her a vision of world peace she'd never imagined possible. Two years later, she marched in her first civil rights demonstration and learned that there's always a way to make "a small contribution to intergalactic harmony."

If you're looking for insight and illumination—or simply for that next great book to read—You've Got to Read This Book! has treasures in store for you.

About this title

About the Author:

Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is the cocreator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers, and coauthor with Gay Hendricks of You've GOT to Read This Book! An internationally renowned corporate trainer, keynote speaker, and popular radio and TV talk show guest, he lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Gay Hendricks is the author and coauthor of more than twenty books that deal with personal growth, including the New York Times bestseller Five Wishes and Conscious Living.

From Publishers Weekly:

Canfield, the brains behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and Hendricks (Conscious Living) stay in the inspirational mode with this collection of dozens of entertainers, sports personalities, businesspeople, writers, environmentalists and activists telling up-by-their-bootstraps stories involving books. Some, like Dave Barry (inspired by humorist Robert Benchley) and Lou Holtz (David Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big) are well known. Other are recognizable for the products they've created: Craigslist founder Craig Newmark praises The Cluetrain Manifesto, which mirrored his own early belief in the power of the Internet. Among the more memorable contributions is that of 21-year-old Farrah Gray, who spent his early childhood on public assistance, read Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success at age 11 and made his first million at 14. Two contributors—motivational speaker Lisa Nichols and eBay COO Maynard Webb—cite Stephen Covey's best-selling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey himself was uplifted by heady reading—Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and E.F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed—both books, he says, affecting everything from his parenting to his teaching. It's a mixed bag, more uplifting than literary, but readers may find the book that turns them on the way these contributors were. (Sept.).
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About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060891750
• ISBN 13: 9780060891756
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304