When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. For two years, Walter Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. The result is this revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: Are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled THE DOUBLE HELIX on her bed. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology.

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In THE INNOVATORS, Walter Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Doug Engelbart, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Larry Page.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs conducted over two years --- as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues --- Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.

These are the leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Robert Lovett,  John McCloy,  and Charles Bohlen.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, Walter Isaacson's book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk --- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate --- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits and free individuals.