If you have not read Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington, that is my #1 recommendation. Wonderful advice, and very well, poetically written. I advise reading it in a non-historical and non-racial way, as advice for every person, which is how I was introduced to it. It is the bible for vocational educators. I was stunned when I was in graduate school in education and found there were different opinions about it, (as in highly negative) when taken in historical context. So I would say read it as though it were universal, which it is. It is the first book I would give to the people of Afghanistan, to the barely surviving people throughout the world. And to every person in America. It is the book that is the cornerstone of my library, which also includes the poems of Rudyard Kipling and the Betty Crocker cookbook.   mg