AMA Parent/Guardian Reading List

These five books address issues about learning and education as well as the creative thinking and personalities that many of our AMA students identify with. This suggested reading list may give you more insight into your child.

  • A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

  • Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the Worldby Tony Wagner

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators.

  • Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.
In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.

  • Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them-at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. And in revealing that hidden logic, Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.

  • The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins
    Robbins follows seven real people grappling with the uncertainties of high school social life, including:
  • The Loner, who has withdrawn from classmates since they persuaded her to unwittingly join her own hate club
  • The Popular B****, a cheerleading captain both seduced by and trapped within her clique's perceived prestige
  • The Nerd, whose differences cause students to laugh at him and his mother to needle him for not being "normal"
  • The New Girl, determined to stay positive as classmates harass her for her mannerisms and target her because of her race
  • The Gamer, an underachiever in danger of not graduating, despite his intellect and his yearning to connect with other students
  • The Weird Girl, who battles discrimination and gossipy politics in school but leads a joyous life outside of it
  • The Band Geek, who is alternately branded too serious and too emo, yet annually runs for class president

In the middle of the year, Robbins surprises her subjects with a secret challenge--experiments that force them to change how classmates see them.