Here are the 3 book recommendations the CEO of $1.7 trillion investment giant PIMCO recommended to a room full of investors

"Educated" by Tara Westover

Tara Westover didn't step foot in a classroom until she was 17.

Her memoir, "Educated," details her life as a member of a fundamentalist family so isolated from mainstream society it didn't educate its children. After one of her brothers made it to college, Westover decided it was time to leave the world she grew up in and seek an education for herself. Her quest took her from the halls of Harvard to the classrooms in Cambridge, where she finally earned a PhD.

Roman called the book "fantastic" and said he recommends it to everyone.

"It's just hard to believe that it happens in the 21st century in America," he said. "It's also a fascinating story about the power of will."

The book has appeared on a number of other high-profile recommendation lists. Bill Gates included it on his roundup of five nonfiction picks, and Barack Obama put it on his annual list of the year's top books.

"Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom" by David Blight

The 2018 biography of escaped slave Frederick Douglass won the Pulitzer Prize for History. The book follows Douglass's journey to become one of America's most noted orators and abolitionists.

Roman called the book a portrait of "a true American hero."

The book was also one of Obama's top picks last year. The former president and his wife said last month that they would develop a feature firm for Netflix based on the biography, among six other projects.

"Churchill: Walking with Destiny" by Andrew Roberts

The 2018 biography on Winston Churchill was a New York Times bestseller. The book catalogues Churchill's journey from child to legacy, and a New York Times reviewer called it "the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written."

Roman said the book was "wonderful and very amusing."

Aryeh Bourkoff, the tech, media, and telecom banker who founded LionTree Advisors, also recommended the book in an end-of-year staff memo, Business Insider reported in December.

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