Great Thinkers Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Hawking | 2018 | Buy |
| Einstein | 2018 | Buy |
| Darwin | 2018 | Buy |
| Freud | 2019 | Buy |
| Tesla | 2019 | Buy |
| Genius Inventions | 2019 | Buy |
| Curie | 2020 | Buy |
Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made | 1986 | Buy |
| Kissinger | 1992 | Buy |
| People of the Century: One Hundred Men & Women Who Shaped the Last One Hundred Years | 1999 | Buy |
| Benjamin Franklin: An American Life | 2003 | Buy |
| A Benjamin Franklin Reader | 2005 | Buy |
| Einstein: His Life and Universe | 2007 | Buy |
| Einstein: The Life of a Genius | 2009 | Buy |
| American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane | 2009 | Buy |
| Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness | 2010 | Buy |
| Steve Jobs | 2011 | Buy |
| The Innovators: How a Group ofHackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution | 2014 | Buy |
| Leonardo da Vinci | 2017 | Buy |
| Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos | 2020 | Buy |
| The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race | 2021 | Buy |
| Albert Einstein | 2021 | Buy |
| Elon Musk | 2023 | Buy |
| The Greatest Sentence Ever Written | 2025 | Buy |
Walter Isaacson is one of the most widely read nonfiction writers working today. Born in New Orleans in 1952, he studied at Harvard and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before going into journalism. He became the editor of Time magazine and later the chairman and CEO of CNN, then served as president of the Aspen Institute. He left media management to write full time, and his biographies have since sold millions of copies worldwide.
His approach is rooted in deep access and long interviews. For Steve Jobs, he conducted more than forty sit-downs with Jobs over two years, plus interviews with over a hundred friends, rivals, and colleagues. For Elon Musk, he shadowed his subject for two years as Musk ran Tesla, SpaceX, and took over Twitter. His subjects tend to be people who combined creativity with technical skill, from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks to Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR gene-editing research. His most recent book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (2025), examines the opening of the Declaration of Independence.