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This book has 5 recommendations

Winston Ma (Managing Director/China Investment Corporation)

Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)

Related and with equal weight, I want to recommend George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon by Stephen W. Sears (a biography of the talented but utterly delusional General George McClellan), Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne (a biography of the brilliant but manic Stonewall Jackson) and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (an equally brilliant, more accomplished but equally tragic founding father). All these books made me angry, sad, and confused. But they also made me look inward and taught me quite a bit.

John Ciancutti (Co-founder/Tiny Garage Labs)

This is the best book I've read in the last year for entrepreneurship. It's about the greatest startup in the world: America. And how a young immigrant with no resources except hard work and intelligence overcame overwhelming adversity to become a critical founder. Hugely inspiring, with many lessons on leadership, persuasion, human politics and management.

Sergey Sapelnyk (Co-Founder/Society Socks)

A non-business book that’s one of my favourites in the past year is Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Chernow distilled the impact that Alexander Hamilton has had on our world in a fascinating and intriguing manner. Hamilton is a thought-provoking individual, since he had such a tremendous impact on North America during his lifetime. It’s quite inspirational to learn about Alexander Hamilton’s effect on politics and economics, and the manner in which he made this impact.

Fabrice Grinda (Serial Entrepreneur, Investor)

I read books for fun. It just so happens that they often are also insightful, but I would not say any specific book had a huge influence on me. Some biographies like Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow are inspiring, but it’s not as though they changed my career path. I knew I wanted to be an Internet entrepreneur from a very young age.

Amazon description

A New York Times Bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation. In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.”

Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza.

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Winston Ma, Ryan Holiday, John Ciancutti, Sergey Sapelnyk, Fabrice Grinda

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Ron Chernow

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