The Splendid and the Vile

Erik Larson's 2020 history (Crown) of Winston Churchill's first year as prime minister, May 1940 to May 1941 — the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz, which killed 44,652 Britons, nearly 6,000 of them children. It is built from the diaries and private papers of Churchill's family, aides, and adversaries rather than the official record.

Gates put it on his 2020 holiday list, in the middle of a pandemic, writing: "The result is the kind of page-turner you always want in a history book but rarely get." He singles out Larson's argument that Churchill's leadership was probably the number-one reason the British persevered, and the review itemizes what that leadership consisted of: giving people "a mix of brutal honesty and credible hope"; working around the clock on details while delegating to people who cut through bureaucracy; and visible fearlessness — touring bomb sites in the East End while fires still burned and crews dug bodies out.

For a founder this is the crisis-leadership shelf's best case study in narrative as an instrument of morale. Churchill's speeches made ordinary citizens see themselves as protagonists in a larger story, which is exactly what a company in survival mode needs and cannot buy. And the supporting cast is its own lesson in team assembly: Beaverbrook, a newspaper owner nobody in the military could stand, scaled fighter production past every plan because Churchill put him there; Lindemann, the arrogant scientific adviser, made real contributions and real mistakes. Great crisis leadership, Larson shows, is tempo, truth, and the right difficult people.