Jeff Bezos

1. “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” by Jared Diamond: For the man who owns the Everything Store, here is a theory of everything. Diamond’s book is an argument about how geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world and helped determine which directions different human societies would take.

2. “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” by Yuval Noah Harari: Bezos has the double whammy of Harari’s two big books, both drawing on the worlds of biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics. The first, “Sapiens,” put forth a theory about how our species won out over other humans, and the second, “Homo Deus,” was about the future and what our next evolutionary steps might be.