Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)'s Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School) recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)'s favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

Randall Munroe

4.3

In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words. Explore computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells).

Recommended by Bill Gates and Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School).

Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)

It’s about how to explain things using the simplest terms you possibly can, using only the top 1,000 words in the English language. It’s just ingenious. So many people will try and sound clever by using lots of fancy words, but this is exact opposite. It is being clever by using the most straightforward language you possibly can, without sacrificing accuracy. It’s beautifully drawn and beautifully written, and it makes me smile a lot. [source]

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

Thing Explainer is filled with cool basic knowledge about how the world works. If one of Munroe’s drawings inspires you to go learn more about a subject—including a few extra terms—then he will have done his job. He has written a wonderful guide for curious minds. [source]

The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe

4.4

Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny emapthetic powers, t

Recommended by Richard Branson, Peter Thiel, Anop Anthony, and 3 others.

Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)

This book takes you from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager up to the start of the Apollo programme. It’s before all of the stuff that people would say is the heyday of NASA, like the moon landings and so on. It’s everything that happened before. [source]

Richard Branson

Founder/Virgin Group

Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]

Anop Anthony

The Right Stuff is a marvelously readable book about test pilots and astronauts. [source]

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Human Universe

Professor Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

4.4

Human life is a staggeringly strange thing. On the surface of a ball of rock falling around a nuclear fireball in the blackness of a vacuum the laws of nature conspired to create a naked ape that can look up at the stars and wonder where it came from.

What is a human being? Objectively, nothing of consequence. Particles of dust in an infinite arena, present for an instant in eternity. Clumps of ato

Recommended by Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School).

Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)

His descriptions of the Big Bang are the most lucid I’ve ever read. The book is very beautiful. It’s bang up-to-date, and almost soulful. I listen to it when I’m driving more than I read it. [source]

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

Richard P. Feynman

4.4

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher is a publishing first. This set couples a book containing the six easiest chapters from Richard P. Feynman's landmark work, Lectures on Physics—specifically designed for the general, non-scientist reader—with the actual recordings of the late, great physicist delivering the lectures on which the chapters are based. Nobe

Recommended by Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School).

Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)

Feynman could write about difficult physics and teach it in a way that no one else could. He is widely regarded as one of the best physics teachers of all time. His discussions of Newtonian gravitation and how we came to it, phenomena like tides, and how you can measure the speed of light by observing Jupiter’s moons are described with such humour and clarity. He conveys the excitement of physics [source]

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The Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book

Anton Radevsky & Emma Sanders

4.6

One of the most significant technological wonders of the modern world leaps from the page in 3D pop-up.

Recommended by Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School).

Kate Lee (St Paul's Girls' School)

This book is enormous fun. Anyone can read it. It gets into some pretty technical details about, for example, the superconducting magnets and the structure of the detectors—especially ATLAS, which is the main focus of the book. [source]