In The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (Knopf), by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, one of modern society's foremost visionaries paints a vivid picture of our rapidly approaching, technology-soaked future, and what these radical changes will mean for everyday life, politics, and the global economy.

• Author: Webster, Stephen C.
• Position: OUR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013 - 'Conspiracy Theory in America' and 'I am Malala: The Girl who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban' - Book review

In The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (Knopf), by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, one of modern society's foremost visionaries paints a vivid picture of our rapidly approaching, technology-soaked future, and what these radical changes will mean for everyday life, politics, and the global economy. Schmidt, as the executive chairman of Google, is uniquely qualified to describe how technological evolution will give rise to machines that seemingly understand us and respond to us in ways both natural and profound.

By most accounts, this book's major draw is Schmidt's vision of the fantastical technology just over the horizon. Even so, Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice, also exhibit an unnerving confidence in The New Digital Age that dictates how America's technocratic elite plans to remake the world in its own image, forsaking any vestiges of personal privacy that still remain today. What readers are left with is a sobering view of the mind leading, arguably, the most powerful corporation in history and where he wants to take us--for good or ill.

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (Little Brown and Company) by Malala Yousafzai.

Sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai is a singular soul in the world today by virtue of her unshakable bravery in the face of religious extremism and barbarism. Rarely, if ever, has a young person risen up from such adversity to grab the hearts and minds of the world.

An unabashed advocate for women's rights and the importance of education, Malala fearlessly spoke out against the Pakistani Taliban at the prompting of her father, only to be confronted on a school bus and shot point-blank in the head at age fifteen. Her descriptions of Pakistan's Swat Valley and...