You've Got to Read This Book: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life

Canfield, the brains behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, and Hendricks (Conscious Living ) stay in the inspirational mode with this collection of dozens of entertainers, sports personalities, businesspeople, writers, environmentalists and activists telling up-by-their-bootstraps stories involving books. Some, like Dave Barry (inspired by humorist Robert Benchley) and Lou Holtz (David Schwartz's The Magic of Thinking Big ) are well known. Other are recognizable for the products they've created: Craigslist founder Craig Newmark praises The Cluetrain Manifesto , which mirrored his own early belief in the power of the Internet. Among the more memorable contributions is that of 21-year-old Farrah Gray, who spent his early childhood on public assistance, read Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success at age 11 and made his first million at 14. Two contributors—motivational speaker Lisa Nichols and eBay COO Maynard Webb—cite Stephen Covey's best-selling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . Covey himself was uplifted by heady reading—Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and E.F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed —both books, he says, affecting everything from his parenting to his teaching. It's a mixed bag, more uplifting than literary, but readers may find the book that turns them on the way these contributors were. (Sept.) .