Omniquest
Omniquest is our university-wide program in which provocative and challenging books are selected and the themes of those books are explored throughout the academic year.
As part of the revitalized Omniquest program, we asked the Northwood community to nominate books that support the purpose of the Omniquest program: promoting The Northwood Idea, community building, personal enrichment, leadership, and career readiness.
Each fall our Omniquest selection focuses on facets of The Northwood Idea and each spring our Omniquest selection focuses on personal and professional development. We received numerous nominations from students, faculty, staff and alumni, making the selection process difficult! I would like to thank the Omniquest Selection Committee for their diligence in the selection and recommendation process. They have selected two books that will enrich our coming academic year.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the Omniquest selections for the 2025-2026 academic year:
FALL 2025: Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Art Carden and Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
SPRING 2026: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Current Selection
FALL 2025: Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World
By Art Carden and Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Art Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent.
The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.
SPRING 2026: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J.D. Vance
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.
2008-2009
- The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
- Capitalism At The Crossroads, 2nd Edition by Stuart L. Hart
- Simply Success: How to Start, Build, and Grow a Multimillion-Dollar Business the Old Fashioned Way by Jack Miller
2007-2008
- Where Have All The Leaders Gone? by Lee Iacocca
- The Science of Success by Charles G. Koch
- New Ideas from Dead CEO’s by Todd Buchholz
2006-2007
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths by Glenn Reynolds, 2006, Nelson Current, ISBN: 159555042
2005-2006
- Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
- Cleaning Up by Barry Minkow
- The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
2004-2005
- Good to Great by Jim Collins
- The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw
2003-2004
- Founding Brothers (The Revolutionary Generation) by Joseph J. Ellis
- Homesick by Sela Ward
- Sailing Alone & Around the Room by Billy Collins
2002-2003
- Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management by Blaine McCormick
- The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
- Make It BIG: 49 Secrets for Building a Life of Extreme Success by Frank McKinney with Victoria St. George
2001-2002
- Fish! by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen
- Living a Life That Matters by Harold S. Kushner
- The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
2000-2001
- The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw
- Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
- No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith by Janann Sherman
1999-2000
- Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom
- How Now Shall We Live? by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey
- Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
1998-1999
- Leading with Soul by Lee G. Bolman & Terrence E. Deal
- Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all small stuff by Richard Carlson
- The Northwood Idea: People Helping People
1997-1998
- In Search of Nature by Edward O. Wilson
- Image by Design by Clive Chajet & Tom Shachtman
- Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg
1996-1997
- The Winner Within: A Life Plan for Team Players by Pat Riley
- The Road Ahead by Bill Gates
- The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America by Phillip K. Howard
1995-1996
- Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing the Power of Your Total Work Force by Managing Diversity by R. Roosevelt Thomas
- Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge
1994-1995
- Compassionate Capitalism: People Helping People Help Themselves by Rich DeVos
- Beating the Street by Peter Lynch
- The Choice: A Fable of Free Trade and Protection by Russell D. Roberts
1993-1994
- Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future – Today by George Land and Beth Jarman
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
- Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey
1992-1993
- 2020 Visions: Long View of a Changing World by Richard Carlson and Bruce Goldman
- Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment by Stephan Schmidheiny
- Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise by George Gilder
1991-1992
- Essentials of Business Ethics by Peter Madsen and Jay M. Shafritz, Eds.
- The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele
- The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America – The Stories of Ford, Xerox, and GM by Andrea Gabor
1990-1991
- The New Realities by Peter F. Drucker
- Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition by Harvey Mackay
- Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus
