Thomas Stewart

is an award-winning member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine. His latest book is .

"Books that have made me think"

• Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World
  Actually, anything and everything by Braudel is full of treasures, some very small, some enormous; the pleasure here is not just in the history, which is pleasure enough, but in its ability to make the reader see its ramifications today and perhaps tomorrow.

• Philippe Aries, In the Hour of Our Death
  Am I displaying a predilection for French annales historians? Among the many virtues of Aries' fascinating book is how it demonstrates that attitudes toward something to seeming unaltered as death have, in fact, changed, dramatically over the centuries--among other things, a useful reminder that we should not hastily assume that our forebears thought or should have thought as we do.

• Charles Goldfinger, L'Utile et le futile: l'economie de l'immateriel
  Simply the best book yet on the emergence of a new information economy. Lamentably, not yet translated into English, in part because, even more lamentably, most American publishers don't have editors who can read even French.

• Mark Twain,
  "All right, then, I'll go to hell" : it's still the most powerful line in American literature.

• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
  My wife calls this a "three bus stop book," because, when you're reading it, you get so absorbed that you go three stops beyond where you meant to get off. And, amazingly, that happens when you're reading about agricultural reform.

• William Shakespeare,
  What can one say? It's the only perfect work of literature.

• The Epistles of Paul
  Aside from being wonderfully and tightly reasoned, these make splendid reading, especially when you think of them as being what they are, letters: "It was great to see you in Corinth. Give my best to Ted and Joe and Sam; I hope Bill's flu is better. I've been thinking about some of the stuff we talked about, and I'd like to share some ideas with you...."

• Anything by Peter Drucker
  Members of PEN are asked every year to nominate someone for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and I always and quixotically write in Drucker's name. No one has written better (in terms on quality of thought or quality of prose) about the distinguishing feature of 20th century life, the large organization. He's a management writer, yes, but he's far more than that; I'd put him alongside, say, John Stuart Mill.

• Charlotte Bronte,
  A mesmerizing, claustrophobic, sensual, extraordinary novel in which one is privileged (and somewhat terrified) by the chance to enter the mind of the narrator, Lucy Snow.

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