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by Seth Godin

There are three essential questions for every marketer: 

“What’s you story?” 

“Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?” 

“Is it true?” 

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $125 sneakers make our feet feel better - and look cooler - than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true. 

Great marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story—a story we want to believe, whether it’s factual or not. In a world where most people have an infinite number of choices and no time to make them, every organization is a marketer, and all marketing is about telling stories. 

Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water or the iPod.

But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians. 

It’s time to embrace the power of the story.

“Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it.”

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by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

“Polar Exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

The Worst Journey in the World is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. The youngest member of Scott’s team, the author was later part of the rescue party that eventually found the frozen bodies of Scott and three men who had accompanied Scott on the final push to the Pole. These deaths would haunt Cherry-Garrard for the rest of his life as he questioned the decisions he had made and the actions he had taken in the days leading up to the Polar Party’s demise.

The Worst Journey in the World is filled with details of scientific discovery and anecdotes of human resilience in a harsh environment. Each participant in the Scott expedition is brought fully to life. Cherry-Garrard’s recollections are supported by diary excerpts and accounts from other teammates.

A masterpiece of travel writing, The Worst Journey in the World is the most celebrated and compelling of all the books on Antarctic exploration.

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by Gavin Menzies

On 8 March 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. The ships, some nearly five hundred feet long, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas’ and unite the world in Confucian harmony.

Their journey would last for over two years and take them around the globe but by the time they returned home, China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. And so the great ships were left to rot and the records of their journey were destroyed. And with them, the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook…

The result of fifteen years research, 1421 is Gavin Menzies’ enthralling account of the voyage of the Chinese fleet, the remarkable discoveries he made and the persuasive evidence to support them: ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators as well as the traces the fleet left behind - from sunken junks to the votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, giving thanks to Shao Lin, goddess of the sea.

Already hailed as a classic, this is the story of an extraordinary journey of discovery that not only radically alters our understanding of world exploration but also rewrites history itself.

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by Ezra F. Vogel

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty.

Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.

“Essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the evolution of China to the status it occupies today… a treasure trove of new information.”

- Jonathan Fenby, Times Higher Education

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by Hugh Thomson

In the past, Hugh Thomson has written books of exploration about Peru, Mexico and the Indian Himalaya. Now he returns to explore the most exotic and foreign country of them all: his own.

Traveling from the very centre of England to its outermost edges, The Green Road into the Trees describes a journey made rich by the characters encountered along the way. The paths taken are the old ways, the drover-paths and tracks, the footways and ditches half covered by bramble and tunnelled by alder, beech and oak: the trails that can still be traced by those who know where to look.

Travelling along the Icknield Way, Hugh passes the great prehistoric monuments of Maiden Castle, Stonehenge and Avebury, showing how older, half-forgotten cultures lie much closer to the surface than we may think. In recent years, archaeologists have uncovered remarkable findings about the Celts, Saxons and Vikings that have often yet to reach the wider public. 

A 400 mile journey from coast to coast, through both the sacred and profane landscapes of ancient England, The Green Road into the Trees casts unexpected light - and humour - on the way we live today.

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by Ken Segall

Editor’s Note: Having worked in a senior marketing role at Apple from 2003 to 2011, I was profoundly disappointed with Walter Isaacson’s “official” biography of Steve Jobs. There was nothing factually wrong with the book but it just didn’t do justice to the foolish bravery of the man or the company. Insanely Simple describes the  Apple at which I worked and is the book I recommend when people want to know what it was like to work at one of the most innovative companies of our time.

To Steve Jobs, Simplicity wasn’t just a design principle. It was a religion and a weapon. The obsession with Simplicity is what separates Apple from other technology companies. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on Earth in 2011, and guides the way Apple is organized, how it designs products, and how it connects with customers. It’s by crushing the forces of Complexity that the company remains on its stellar trajectory.

As creative director, Ken Segall played a key role in Apple’s resurrection, helping to create such critical campaigns as “Think Different” and naming the iMac. Insanely Simple is his insider’s view of Jobs’ world. It reveals the ten elements of Simplicity that have driven Apple’s success - which you can use to propel your own organisation. Reading Insanely Simple, you’ll be a fly on the wall inside a conference room with Steve Jobs, and on the receiving end of his midnight phone calls. You’ll understand how his obsession with Simplicity helped Apple perform better and faster.

“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains”

Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998

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by Pearl S. Buck

Read ∙ Love ∙ Share is dedicated to providing a hand-picked selection of the latest and greatest non-fiction ebooks. And yet, sometimes, an exception is required for an truly extraordinary work of “fiction”. The Good Earth is such an exception.

The Good Earth is Pearl Buck’s classic story of Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer, and his wife, O-lan, a former slave. With luck and hard work, the couple’s fortunes improve over the years: They are blessed with sons, and save steadily until one day they can afford to buy property in the House of Wang - the very house in which O-lan used to work. But success brings with it a new set of problems. Wang soon finds himself the target of jealousy, and as good harvests come and go, so does the social order. Will Wang’s family cherish the estate after he’s gone? And can his material success, the bedrock of his life, guarantee anything about his soul?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Award, The Good Earth was an Oprah’s Book Club choice in 2004. A readers’ favourite for generations, this powerful and beautifully written fable resonates with universal themes of hope and family unity.

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