Part 1: I’ve always been fascinated by how smart people got that way. It’s not only a passion of mine, but I’ve spent fourteen years investigating the question. One thing I discovered is that the smartest people did a whole bunch of reading when they were children. Then I started to wonder what kind of books did really smart people read when they were kids? I got even more curious. What kind of books did really smart Black people read when they were kids? Thankfully I have friends in smart places. I talked to Dr. Ron Ferguson, an Economist and the co-founder of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. He’s also my co-author. Lucky for me, he had done some asking around some years ago. And I’m sharing what he told me.
I decided to break the list down in two parts, so you can digest this information first. Tomorrow, come see additional books Harvard students read. And since Christmas is around the corner, why not gift these classics to a future scholar.
