Anna Gat
Founder: @interintellect_🧭 Building conversation and culture every day · Bio: https://t.co/h6zEGcDxdp · Writing: https://t.co/SIYDK2MdpB · The Good Internet exists
150+ Book Recommendations by Anna Gat
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
🙏🏻 More books like Heart of Darkness, less books like “I’m sad at desk”
The Art of Reading
Jamie Camplin
😍📚📚📚📚📚 @interintellect_ “Art of Reading” salon, book mentions! https://t.co/fsGQ2ELGmm
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.@FreeRangeKids Read “The Luminaries” over the break! It’s so fun
Wild Problems
Russ Roberts
Some incredible @interintellect_ events coming up soon! Come join us... First off, on Sunday, with @EconTalker and @bronwynwilliams - we'll talk about Russ's new book 'Wild Problems': https://t.co/cU5QNyYWYg
How to Be Authentic
Skye C. Cleary
I’m at the fascinating, invigorating, enlightening @interintellect_ salon of @Skye_Cleary ✨ Talking about Skye’s book ‘How to Be Authentic’ — and about Simone de Beauvoir, living for others and expectations, breaking the mould, consistency, women, school, Radiohead, and more! https://t.co/0iQTHuZMM3
The Overstory
Richard Powers
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours--vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.@india_bourke @wwnorton @ObamaFoundation I’m just about to go on my first redwood hike in my life and think about his book every day ❤️ What a mind - and a superb piece!
The Network State
Balaji Srinivasan
Important review in @tabletmag of our friend @balajis’s book The Network State - by @antoniogm 🚀 Features Interintellect’s events and ethos as an important cultural innovation and social novelty. Thanks Antonio! Folks, hope you’ll enjoy: https://t.co/KoNYkqLKpI
The Hypomanic Edge
John D. Gartner
This is the book I was mentioning @one_extra_j @made_in_cosmos — @ByrneHobart and @nickgillespie both recommended it: https://t.co/xiKg5rEMda
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Elizabeth Smart
A classic work of poetic prose recounts the author's love affair with the poet George BarkerThis book is so disturbing (and beautiful) - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept https://t.co/Ab1EvXWNLh
The Hunger Games (Book 1)
Suzanne Collins
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.@vedikaja_in I remember not sleeping for days when I was reading The Hunger Games books around 10 years ago, and simultaneously sweating with suspense and awed by the perfection of its storytelling.
The Neapolitan Novels Boxed Set
Elena Ferrante
In one volume, the New York Times-bestselling epic about hardship and female friendship in postwar Naples that has sold over five million copies. Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante follow Elena and Lila, from their rough-edged upbringing in Naples, Italy, not long after WWII, through the many stages of their lives--and along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse. This volume includes all four novels: My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; and The Story of the Lost Child. "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea of how explosive these works are." --The Australian "Nothing you read about Elena Ferrante's work prepares you for the ferocity of it." --The New York Times "An enduring masterpiece." --The AtlanticMy least controversial opinion is that I loved The Neapolitan Quartet and spent the reading of the last 1.5 books loudly sobbing in the middle of my living room. https://t.co/vtIG0DOibh
The Revelations
Erik Hoel
An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he's offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project--investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be happening all around them. The Revelations, not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive, challenging and disarming. Bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today, The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and its cyclically dreamlike structure pushes the boundaries of literary fiction. Erik Hoel has crafted a stunning debut of rare power--an intense look at cutting-edge science, consciousness, and human connection.This book - an incredible journey into the human mind through crime mystery and all that in what feels like a road movie structure featuring brain scientists!! Warmly recommending it: https://t.co/rTC7mfAviu
Bloodlands
Timothy Snyder
From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.While technically every book is a “must read” you should start with this one: https://t.co/WMDQl7qRSO
Rethinking Sex
Christine Emba
Part searing examination, part call to arms—a bold case against modern sexual ethics, from young Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. For years now, modern-day sexual ethics has held that “anything goes” when it comes to sex—as long as everyone says yes, and does so enthusiastically. So why, even when consent has been ascertained, are so many of our sexual experiences filled with frustration, and disappointment, even shame? The truth is that the rules that make up today’s consent-only sexual code may actually be the cause of our sexual malaise—not the solution. In Rethinking Sex, reporter Christine Emba shows how consent is a good ethical floor but a terrible ceiling. She spells out the cultural, historical, and psychological forces that have warped our idea of sex, what is permitted, and what is considered “safe.” In visiting critical points in recent years—from #MeToo and the Aziz Ansari scandal, to the phenomenal response to “Cat Person”—she reveals how a consent-only view of sex has hijacked our ability to form authentic and long-lasting connections, exposing us further to chronic isolation and resentment. Reaching back to the wisdom of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Andrea Dworkin, and drawing from sociological studies, interviews with college students, and poignant examples from her own life, Emba calls for a more humane philosophy, one that starts with consent but accounts for the very real emotional, mental, social, and political implications of sex—even, she argues, if it means saying no to certain sexual practices or challenging societal expectations altogether. More than a bold reassessment of modern norms, Rethinking Sex invites us to imagine what it means to will the good of others, and in turn, attain greater affirmation, fulfillment, and satisfaction for ourselves.So many thoughts after the wonderful @ChristineEmba’s @interintellect_ SuperSalon hosted by @PlayNiceInst about Christine’s new book ‘Rethinking Sex’! 💘 Thank you @penguinrandom for the gift copies and the opportunity ✨ https://t.co/rOLXqyp29b
The Son Also Rises
Gregory Clark
"How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe! While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique -- tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods -- renowned economic historian Gregory Clark reveals that mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies. The good news is that these patterns are driven by strong inheritance of abilities and lineage does not beget unwarranted advantage. The bad news is that much of our fate is predictable from lineage. Clark argues that since a greater part of our place in the world is predetermined, we must avoid creating winner-take-all societies."--Jacket.This book is quite something. HT @matthewclifford https://t.co/FkH6XVXV27
Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Elliott and Thompson Limited.There’s a reason why @Itwitius’s book Prisoners of Geography starts with Russia. https://t.co/woZ22LcRMb
The Minimalist Entrepreneur
Sahil Lavingia
A new roadmap for building sustainable startups that last beyond the hype. As more and more cracks form in the myth of the VC-funded, IPO-driven billion-dollar company--they're not profitable, and are unethically run to boot--entrepreneurs are seeking an alternative path to building useful, sustainable, and sane businesses. The Minimalist Startup is the manifesto for a new generation of entrepreneurs who would rather build great companies than big ones. In 2011, Sahil Lavingia left his position as the second hire at Pinterest to chase his own dream of founding a billion-dollar company. His startup, Gumroad, was growing quickly and raising venture capital easily. Gumroad, a platform connecting creators with sellers, seemed like it was on the road to unicorn status, with the fancy offices and rapid hiring to match. Until one quarter, when growth faltered, and everything crumbled. But Lavingia rebuilt Gumroad from the ground up. In contrast to the waste and hypergrowth-for-growth's sake mentality that characterized his first attempt, he became a minimalist entrepreneur. Weaving together his own experience at Gumroad with stories of other likeminded companies, he offers a new roadmap for entrepreneurs choosing to grow meaningfully over growing unsustainably. Unicorns are not the best or only path for a startup. The Minimalist Entrepreneur teaches founders how to resist investments that set you up to fail, run a tight ship amid the rise of the gig economy and remote work, develop and release products without failing fast or often, and how to get to profitability and stay there.Some excerpts -- @shl writing about @interintellect_ in The Minimalist Entrepreneur, a book for our times!! https://t.co/UXoTSWUs6c
Abigail (New York Review Books Classics)
Magda Szabo
Fourteen-year-old Gina, the spoiled daughter of a Hungarian general, rails against being sent to boarding school far from Budapest when war breaks out, but finds help in a statue of Abigail and her new "sisters."@erikphoel Abigail is both Szabó’s best book by far (although The Fawn is something special too) and that TV series - made in 1970s Hungary… An unlikely gem but I’m yet to see an equally good miniseries from any country!
The Fifth Discipline
Peter M. Senge
A pioneer in learning organizations offers five disciplines that reveal the link between far-flung causes and immediate effects and that can save organizations from becoming "learning disabled," helping them learn better and faster, in a revised edition of the best-selling business classic. Simultaneous. 20,000 first printing.This is pretty intense https://t.co/F1FAKYWVYM
Letters to a Young Contrarian
Christopher Hitchens
@dvdbllrd Love that book https://t.co/NHsvtRuzFQ
High Conflict
Amanda Ripley
"In the tradition of bestselling explainers like The Tipping Point, [this] book [is] based on cutting edge science that breaks down the idea of extreme conflict--the kind that paralyzes people and places--and then shows how to escape it"--This book came up during convo with @hollyhliu ✨ Pretty good, recommending! https://t.co/DrHj9ezBI0
The Children of the New Forest
Captain Marryat
When Jacob Armitage, a local verderer, hears that Parliamentary soldiers looking for King Charles I are planning to burn down the home of the Beverley orphans he saves the children and rears them as his own grandchildren in a small cottage in the woods. But can aristocratic children, used to being served, learn to survive as simple foresters? This story was one of the first historical novels written for younger readers and has endured until today. Its classic themes of chivalry and bravery and the examples the children set are sure to be enjoyed by readers of all ages. This edition features the gorgeous illustrations of Paul hardy throughout to add extra charm to an already incredible tale.@nerdburn @tallcolemansdad I love that book ❤️
The Mouse and the Motorcycle (Ralph Mouse Book 1)
Beverly Cleary
In this imaginative adventure from Newbery Medal–winning author Beverly Cleary, a young mouse named Ralph is thrown into a world of excitement when a boy and his shiny toy motorcycle check in to the Mountain View Inn. When the ever-curious Ralph spots Keith's red toy motorcycle, he vows to ride it. So when Keith leaves the bike unattended in his room one day, Ralph makes his move. But with all this freedom (and speed!) come a lot of obstacles. Whether dodging a rowdy terrier or keeping his nosy cousins away from his new wheels, Ralph has a lot going on! And with a pal like Keith always looking out for him, there's nothing this little mouse can't handle. This timeless classic now features a foreword written by New York Times bestselling author Kate DiCamillo, as well as an exclusive interview with Beverly Cleary herself. The Mouse and the Motorcycle is perfect for independent reading or for shared reading at home or in a classroom. This fun story is the first of a trilogy, along with Runaway Ralph and Ralph S. Mouse, all inspired by the author's hope to create appealing books for boys and girls—and by the sight of her son playing with toy cars.@nerdburn @tallcolemansdad I love that book ❤️
Our Man
George Packer
"Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.Whoa I forgot about George Packer’s Our Man which was not just one of the best books I’ve read in 2021 but ever. This year was long 😅😅😅 https://t.co/R9Y0WYkfbV
Anxious People
Fredrik Backman
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller A People Book of the Week, Book of the Month Club selection, and Best of Fall in Good Housekeeping, PopSugar, The Washington Post, New York Post, Shondaland, CNN, and more! “[A] quirky, big-hearted novel…Wry, wise, and often laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure.” —People From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove comes a charming, poignant novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined. Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next. Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious times.Gonna read this because of the wonderful @MarielRosic 😊✨ https://t.co/iUFlkUS9FA
The Last of the Wine
Mary Renault
Two young Athenians, Alexias and Lysis compete in the palaestra, take part in the Olympic games, fight in the wars against Sparta, and grow to manhood influenced by the friendship of Alkibiades and the wise guidance of Socrates. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.Reading this next, based on recommendation by the great @bsgallagher: https://t.co/qEZRw5TJgZ
The Information
James Gleick
A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa's talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.I hope so!!! That’s one of the best books I’ve ever read and my favourite from @JamesGleick 🚀 https://t.co/WDQiAc8J4a
Lost in Thought
Zena Hitz
An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.@snigdhar0y Read @zenahitz’s book’s prologue — excellent!!
Lost in Thought
Zena Hitz
An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.Expected good things but had no idea @zenahitz’s book would be so moving and personal ✨ What a joy! https://t.co/Zk9bGRiCEG
How Not to Be Wrong
Jordan Ellenberg
"Using the mathematician's method of analyzing life and exposing the hard-won insights of the academic community to the layman, minus the jargon ... Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need"--@singareddynm @adeets_22 @pamelamishkin Loved the Ellenberg book
The Right to Sex
Amia Srinivasan
Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex. How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted. We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.Oooh will listen with interest! That’s one fabulous book — https://t.co/6xFOrdLFRu
Less Than Zero
Bret Easton Ellis
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, a best-selling novel follows a cast of upper-class, good-looking, oversexed, drug-addled, thrill-seeking, college-age characters on the road to perdition. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.@curious_vii @BretEastonEllis @interintellect_ Less Than Zero is an insanely good book. Unbelievable that he wrote it at 18!!
Reinventing Discovery
Michael Nielsen
In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book--the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today--and why the revolution is just beginning.@generativist @michael_nielsen LOVE that book
Unquiet
Linn Ullmann
A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of the intricacies of family life, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old.Good to remember that ‘Unquiet’ is one of the best books written in the past decade—unique, shattering and somehow the Hungarian translation is even better. Completely ruined my 2018 summer holiday in the best possible way. If you’re thinking about parents today, recommending it! https://t.co/TzVpQvpzSQ
The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel hailed as "a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly."--New York Times Book Review It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, THE LUMINARIES is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.One book I wish all my friends had read is The Luminaries because I’d love to discuss it sooooo much! (Shall I do a Christmas salon on it and hope people will have mastered its 1000 pages by then? So worth it….)
The Complacent Class
Tyler Cowen
. @tylercowen | The Complacent Class As upshaking as I remembered. https://t.co/1TjBjDGCm0
This Is Your Mind on Plants
Michael Pollan
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants -- and the equally powerful taboos Of all the things humans rely on plants for--sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: people around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. We don't usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So then what is a drug? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In THIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs -- opium, caffeine, and mescaline -- and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and such fraught feelings? A unique blend of history, science, memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively -- as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that's one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay written more than 25 years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.New Pollan book 👀 https://t.co/h5PrrRQkC7
Tell Me No Lies
John Pilger
This anthology is a celebration of the very best of investigative journalism and some of the greatest pratictioners of the craft, with articles, broadcasts and book extracts from such journalist as Martha Gellhorn, Seymour Hersh, Wilfrid Burchett, Robert Fisk, and Edward Said.@balajis Recommending the book Tell Me No Lies by John Pilger
A Primate's Memoir
Robert M. Sapolsky
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons. “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.Sapolsky - A Primate’s Memoir Also because it’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read in my entire life. I was choking on my tears throughout 😂 https://t.co/cKrVjnrHsC
Our Man
George Packer
@stephenwertheim That book is incredible!
Arts and Minds
Anton Howes
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--This book is fucking amazing (sorry but there’s no better way to put it) https://t.co/Vql54DvVFo
A Difficult Death
Morten Høi Jensen
While largely unknown today, Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century. Despite his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, Jacobsen became a cult figure to an entire generation and continues to occupy an important place in Scandinavian cultural history. In this book, Morten Høi Jensen gives a moving account of Jacobsen's life, work, and death.--Adapted from book jacket.Finished @MortenHoiJensen’s book yesterday and now I’m mad at myself I didn’t read it earlier 😌 If interested in how Darwin impacted Western literature, that glorious age when science + poetry were friends — but also the tragedy of secularism and how art grew up to balance it, https://t.co/T7P4FEfq9l
Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant)
William Gibson
Hired to investigate a mysterious video collection that has been appearing on the Internet, market research consultant Cayce Pollard realizes that there is more to the assignment when her computer is hacked. Reprint.Let's not forget how good this book is! https://t.co/kLGnE6kRRZ
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.This book is completely mindblowing. https://t.co/uQMOKlDpgl
The Making of Prince of Persia
Jordan Mechner
@verohecko Love this book, and the design = 💘 @tyler_thompson is amazing
The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante
When her husband Mario leaves her, Olga, left to care for two young children, enters a long period of self-doubt and pity, until she acknowledges the truth about her marriage.Oh wow this thing is perfect https://t.co/v3rLFzZ1MS
The Crimson Petal and the White
Michel Faber
in a state of nausea. It’s totally brilliant btw! I don’t know of any other such books... The other for sure is The Crimson Petal and the White. I had some trouble persevering amid all that Victorian “contraception”. Just... no. In any case, an interesting sub-category!
Good Night, and Good Luck.
George Clooney
The only book on the acclaimed movie—here is the complete screenplay, Q&A with the screenwriters, production notes, and a special section on the history behind the broadcast, including an essay by Fred Friendly and an original article written by Joseph Wershba in 1955, appearing in a book for the first time. This fascinating, in-depth companion to one of the most provocative films of the year is essential reading for both film and history buffs.@jposhaughnessy The best! And the writers have a great book about the script and the process https://t.co/70A2Q84cGD
Thinking the Twentieth Century
Tony Judt
Offers a narrative of the United States' intellectual history of the past one hundred years by discussing the ideas and thinkers that helped shape the century.@dbkahn It’s an interview book by @TimothyDSnyder — Judt and Snyder in conversation. I believe Judt was doing too poorly to write himself, and while this was indeed a sad constraint, the result is fantastic
The Big Score
Jacquie McNish
From the windswept Labrador coast, where the massive nickel deposit was discovered, to the boardrooms of Singapore, Toronto, and Vancouver where the giant poker game for Diamond Fields was played out, the story behind Voisey's Bay has enormous economic significance for Canada and international financial markets. One of the most intriguing elements was the takeover battle for Diamond Fields that pitted the conservative management team at the world's largest nickel company, Inco Ltd., against free-wheeling stock promoter Robert Friedland. Also playing key roles in the race for Voisey's Bay were managers from the Bronfman-controlled Edper group, prominent Wall Street and Bay Street investment houses, and leading mutual funds.New @stripepress book - The Big Score - starts well 👀 https://t.co/TNtYM1UpGs
MODELES DEPOSES
RINALDI THOMAS
Fell in love with a book 💘 Where have you been all my life?? cc @jasoncrawford @thisisneer https://t.co/RYz7SXiFKo
Our Man
George Packer
Haven’t enjoyed a book like I’m enjoying “Our Man” in a long long while.
A Primate's Memoir
Robert M. Sapolsky
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons. “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.What is the funniest book you've ever read? Where you kept laughing out loud? (One of my candidates would surely be Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir haha)
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale, Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?"--This is quite wonderful.... https://t.co/4OSwuSy2JG
Arts and Minds
Anton Howes
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--@fortelabs Talk to @antonhowes about how he finished his book!!! (Surprise twists, amazing book)
Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant)
William Gibson
Hired to investigate a mysterious video collection that has been appearing on the Internet, market research consultant Cayce Pollard realizes that there is more to the assignment when her computer is hacked. Reprint.@dlook1 @GreatDismal LOVE that book
The First World War
John Keegan
A history of the Great War chronicles the events of the conflict from early diplomatic efforts to avert war, through the nightmarish campaigns and battles, to the end of the war and its repercussions.@rlj_law https://t.co/6R0C4bH1ks
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Books I’ve read the most times (8+): The Tragedy of the Moon Arcadia One Hundred Years of Solitude https://t.co/MNbsKpUtkq
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.This is a fantastic book of poetry https://t.co/eJUhvyrwE1
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu
The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple award winning phenomenon from China's most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.@0xLEDev @anthilemoon @liu_cixin Wondrous book 🥰
Ideas
Peter Watson
Peter Watson's hugely ambitious and stimulating history of ideas from deep antiquity to the present day—from the invention of writing, mathematics, science, and philosophy to the rise of such concepts as the law, sacrifice, democracy, and the soul—offers an illuminated path to a greater understanding of our world and ourselves.From the book - the history of ideas coming from other ideas: https://t.co/VzqtdZS3mH
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
@ranadesiddhesh Oh that was my favourite book growing up!!! Read it some 8 times 💗
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
Chronicles the Nazi's rise to power, conquest of Europe, and dramatic defeat at the hands of the Allies.@ericbahn Fantastic book!
Lenin
Victor Sebestyen
Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin--the first major biography in English in nearly two decades--is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century but also a fascinating portrait of Lenin the man. Brought up in comfort and with a passion for hunting and fishing, chess, and the English classics, Lenin was radicalized after the execution of his brother in 1887. Sebestyen traces the story from Lenin's early years to his long exile in Europe and return to Petrograd in 1917 to lead the first Communist revolution in history. Uniquely, Sebestyen has discovered that throughout Lenin's life his closest relationships were with his mother, his sisters, his wife, and his mistress. The long-suppressed story told here of the love triangle that Lenin had with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his beautiful, married mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a more complicated character than that of the coldly one-dimensional leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. With Lenin's personal papers and those of other leading political figures now available, Sebestyen gives is new details that bring to life the dramatic and gripping story of how Lenin seized power in a coup and ran his revolutionary state. The product of a violent, tyrannical, and corrupt Russia, he chillingly authorized the deaths of thousands of people and created a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater ideal. An old comrade what had once admired him said that Lenin "desired the good . . . but created evil." This included his invention of Stalin, who would take Lenin's system of the gulag and the secret police to horrifying new heights. In Lenin, Victor Sebestyen has written a brilliant portrait of this dictator as a complex and ruthless figure, and he also brings to light important new revelations about the Russian Revolution, a pivotal point in modern history. (With 16 pages of black-and-white photographs)@KevinBCook Read Sebestyen's book Lenin. The Russian Revolution was a giant mess -- the only reason it succeeded is because the other side was even more unimaginably incompetent!
Purge
Sofi Oksanen
Aliide Truu, an older woman guilty of crimes during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, takes in a young woman, Zara, who is trying to escape a sex-trafficking ring, and as they work through their suspicion, the two rediscover a tragic family history from the past.With all this talk of purges I just wish Sofi Oksanen’s excellent novel ‘Purge’ was trending! https://t.co/7peR9cu5Zg
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
@Apps_RG When I was young and a fatalist my favourite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude which I read 9 times, dropped into a pool, washed into the sea, and spilled multiple dinners and litres of coffee on it — it was an object of use, a tool
The Double Flame
Octavio Paz
A collection of essays examines the themes of love and sex in literature, from Plato to modern fiction@PHurducas @UberEats And I'm reading this now for my History of Love series https://t.co/fqXw5W2ZUk
Rilke's Book of Hours
Anita Barrows
A special anniversary edition featuring the complete English and German texts, this collection of poetry, based on the Book of Hours--psalms and prayers for various times throughout the day--used by monks, offers prayers and songs that address such concerns as spirituality in the modern age and the sufferings of war, poverty, and disease. Reprint.@katrinadlc The Book of Hours is very special to me ---
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.@hrabk @seanphughes99 @WoodardColin Reading These Truths on and off! Actually a very underrated US history book - astonishingly written - is Hugh Brogan's, in case you're looking for something unobvious
American Nations
Colin Woodard
This book is GREAT; thanks @seanphughes99 for the recommendation (and @WoodardColin for writing it) 👏🏼 https://t.co/Vrzw3J84WE
The fawn
MAGDA SZABO
@nixseah Though her most astonishing book are: Abigail (by far - a masterpiece!) https://t.co/ww20tW75OQ And The Fawn https://t.co/pCG2TNfDXM
Abigail (New York Review Books Classics)
Magda Szabo
Fourteen-year-old Gina, the spoiled daughter of a Hungarian general, rails against being sent to boarding school far from Budapest when war breaks out, but finds help in a statue of Abigail and her new "sisters."@nixseah Though her most astonishing book are: Abigail (by far - a masterpiece!) https://t.co/ww20tW75OQ And The Fawn https://t.co/pCG2TNfDXM
These Truths
Jill Lepore
New York Times Bestseller In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—"these truths," Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News. Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism. Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.""To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind." - Love Jill Lepore's These Truths so much. What a book. How rare to find a book like this.
The Goal
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
"Includes case study interviews"--Cover.@nickducoff @rlj_law @m2jr @ShaneAParrish That's a great book!!
Reclaiming Control
Amy McMillen
Beautiful Interintellect fireside chat last night 📚✨ Fellow Interintellects @TheAlexYao and @scottjdavies01 discussing her debut book with the great @amymcmai 💗 You can buy 'Reclaiming Control: Looking Inward to Recalibrate Your Life' here: https://t.co/ZVL6ihCAwI https://t.co/gkpXawT0ah
The Night of Knives
Jon Evans
Moira Kelly has come to Africa to start her life over. Still reeling from her divorce, she is grateful when a handsome stranger invites her on an expedition to visit gorillas in Uganda's wild Impenetrable Forest. But the trip goes desperately wrong when the group of tourists are captured by brutal gunmen, marched into the lawless Congo, and held for ransom. Then one tourist is executed. Their abduction is only the first move in a deadly strategic game that may consume entire nations. Twisting and turning, this brilliant new novel by the rising star of thriller writing will take your breath away.Watch out @rezendi you have a new reader https://t.co/HJZcGoQdww
Arts and Minds
Anton Howes
"For almost 300 years, an organisation has quietly tried to change almost every aspect of life in Britain. That organisation is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, often known simply as the Royal Society of Arts. It has acted as Britain's private national improvement agency, in every way imaginable - essentially, a society for the improvement of everything and anything. This book is its history. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Society has tried to change Britain's art, industry, laws, music, environment, education, and even culture. It has sometimes even succeeded. It has been a prize-fund for innovations, a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, a convenor of disparate interest groups, and the focal point for social movements. There has never been an organisation quite like it, constantly having to reinvent itself to find something new to improve. The book rewrites many of the old official histories of the Society and updates them to the present day, incorporating over half a century of further research into the periods they covered, along with new insights into the organisation's evolution. The book reveals the hidden and often surprising history of how a few public-spirited people tried to make their country better, offering lessons from their triumphs and their failures for all would-be reformers today"--This book is FANTASTIC 🚀🚀🚀 https://t.co/Cd4lX3oxt2
Working in Public
Nadia Eghbal
And if you haven't seen our Interintellect Talks series -- not as conversational as Salons but fascinating deep dives for our community and beyond -- Check out the one with @nayafia about her book Working in Public, a new Bible for all things Open Source: https://t.co/htqRPQcnos
Voices of the Soviet Space Program
S. Gerovitch
In this remarkable oral history, Slava Gerovitch presents interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand. Rather than comprising a "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.@nickarner @_ArnaudS_ @GeffenAvraham This book https://t.co/a940FKW36L
@visakanv @Neats29 Love that book!
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Viktor Pelevin
High class Moscow hooker A. Huli is foxy in more ways than one . . . And when a client goes inexplicably and fatally berserk at the sight of her in his luxury suite she has to employ all of her cunning to escape. But it's not until she places an ad on the internet that trouble really begins to kick off, as the journey she takes catapults her into a world of perverts, former KGB agents, oil tycoons and amorous werewolves.OK I tried and you can't actually do this game with The Scared Book of the Werewolf. However you twist it it's interesting! https://t.co/6oxOEfIkFD
Finite and Infinite Games
James Carse
“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite.” Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything, from how an actress portrays a role to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory, but infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.Last week I told a friend about Finite and Infinite Games, and I realised what a privilege it is to introduce somebody to a potentially life-changing book. So much responsibility in book recommendations - and boy is it rewarding!
Working in Public
Nadia Eghbal
OH MY GOD @nayafia's book is out!!!!!!! One of the most shining minds of our generation, I have been waiting for this moment for years ✨ Congratulations, my friend! Here's to your first book of many to come! 🍾 https://t.co/LDeUif6MOa
Leonardo da Vinci
Walter Isaacson
The #1 New York Times bestseller from Walter Isaacson brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography that is “a study in creativity: how to define it, how to achieve it…Most important, it is a powerful story of an exhilarating mind and life” (The New Yorker). Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson “deftly reveals an intimate Leonardo” (San Francisco Chronicle) in a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy. He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius. In the “luminous” (Daily Beast) Leonardo da Vinci, Isaacson describes how Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance to be imaginative and, like talented rebels in any era, to think different. Here, da Vinci “comes to life in all his remarkable brilliance and oddity in Walter Isaacson’s ambitious new biography…a vigorous, insightful portrait” (The Washington Post).Helplessly into this book 😍 https://t.co/n2BRdZ2GWb
Meredith
David Oliver Doswell
I am ridiculously excited about @david_doswell's first book coming out! https://t.co/1i29yyWf18 "Competent computer hacker, Meredith Sandoval, lives in the conservative Hayes Valley, San Francisco, California section, in the year 2139...
Sex at Dawn
Cacilda Jetha Christopher Ryan
@ssica3003 @LukeRobertMason Very good book 👇👇👇👇👇 https://t.co/vQwvxgnbZU
Personal History
Katharine Graham
The longtime owner of the Washington Post recounts her experiences, including how she rebounded from her husband's suicide to command the Post during Vietnam and Watergate@Apps_RG OMG I love love love love love that book
Mating in Captivity
Esther Perel
One of the world’s most respected voices on erotic intelligence, Esther Perel offers a bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex. Mating in Captivity invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home. Drawing on more than twenty years of experience as a couples therapist, Perel examines the complexities of sustaining desire. Through case studies and lively discussion, Perel demonstrates how more exciting, playful, and even poetic sex is possible in long-term relationships. Wise, witty, and as revelatory as it is straightforward, Mating in Captivity is a sensational book that will transform the way you live and love.This book has changed my mind about like 15 things already and it is so beautiful I also cry around 15 times a day because of it. Definitely a contact sport... Please read it, good people of Twitter. https://t.co/qJ4qIxqtM0
La créativité de la crise (Paradoxe)
Évelyne Grossman
Paradoxe. https://t.co/jPKWES7r7l
The Tragedy of Man
Imre Madach
Reading the Perel book I keep thinking about the last key sentence in a foundational text in my culture: Madách's The Tragedy of Man. In this mid-19th c. play Lucifer takes Adam and Eve on a vision trip through history to show them what's coming: Ancient Rome, Kepler's workshop,
On Classical Economics
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell's many writings on the history of economic thought have appeared in a number of scholarly journals and books, and these writings have been praised, reprinted, and translated in various countries around the world. The classical era in the history of economics is an important part of the history of ideas in general, and its implications reach beyond the bounds of the economics profession. On Classical Economics is a book from which students can learn both history and economics. It is not simply a Cook's tour of colorful personalities of the past but a study of how certain economic concepts and tools of analysis arose, and how their implications were revealed during the controversies that followed. In addition to a general understanding of classical macroeconomics and microeconomics, this book offers special insight into the neglected pioneering work of Sismondi--and why it was neglected--and a detailed look at John Stuart Mill's enigmatic role in the development of economics and the mysteries of Marxian economics. Clear, engaging, and very readable, without being either cute or condescending, On Classical Economics can enable a course on the history of economic thought to make a contribution to students’ understanding of economics in general--whether in price theory, monetary theory, or international trade. In short, it is a book about analysis as well as history.@rivatez Bedside... https://t.co/BYggNtQOCj
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.This book - a book of poetry - exquisite - everybody read this book: https://t.co/Vsvrpy8lnw
Five Little Pigs
Agatha Christie
Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, but just like the nursery rhyme, there were five other “little pigs” who could have done it: Philip Blake (the stockbroker), who went to market; Meredith Blake (the amateur herbalist), who stayed at home; Elsa Greer (the three-time divorcÉe), who had her roast beef; Cecilia Williams (the devoted governess), who had none; and Angela Warren (the disfigured sister), who cried all the way home. Sixteen years later, Caroline’s daughter is determined to prove her mother’s innocence, and Poirot just can’t get that nursery rhyme out of his mind.@five_books @agathachristie Five Little Pigs is a masterpiece!!!
One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I read this book 8 times when I was a teenager, my old Hungarian copy has swimming pool stains, sand, chocolate, and other remnants of staying and traveling smeared into it - it was perhaps the most essential reading of my life. A tableau of Life. https://t.co/nNx2keBIaA
A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit
Explores the phenomenon through which people become resourceful and altruistic after a disaster and communities reflect a shared sense of purpose, analyzing events ranging from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.This has just come up at the @whatstheii Salon - I can't wait to read it! https://t.co/zmR65bFq4U
Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville is sent to investigate charges of heresy against Franciscan monks at a wealthy Italian abbey but finds his mission overshadowed by seven bizarre murders.@fuehrerking @tylercowen Oh la la I couldn't sleep for a month that book is so scary!! And YES please @SethMacFarlane <> @tylercowen 💙
Far From the Tree
Andrew Solomon
The National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon explores the consequences of extreme personal differences between parents and children, describing his own experiences as a gay child of straight parents while evaluating the circumstances of people affected by physical, developmental or cultural factors that divide families. 150,000 first printing.It was a total highlight for me that on my first ever day in San Francisco I got to meet Sam IRL and give him the book 'Far from the Tree' by Andrew Solomon as a way to thank him 💕💕💕 (Thank you, Sam!)
The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolano
OMG this book is incredible why haven't I read this before???? https://t.co/9FqUTdlTBi
The Dao of Capital
Mark Spitznagel
Combing ancient Daoist philosophy with old school Austrian economics, this timely resource presents a singular approach to investing that illuminates the market's natural homeostatic processes.I just buy the books @rivatez tells me to https://t.co/2qzRsSHzVM
Deceit and Self-Deception
Robert Trivers
In this foundational book, Robert Trivers seeks to answer one of the most provocative and consequential questions to face humanity: why do we lie to ourselves? Deception is everywhere in nature. And nowhere more so than in our own species. We humans are especially good at telling others less - or more - than the truth. Why, however, would organisms both seek out information and then act to destroy it? In short, why practice self-deception? To biologists this has long been a mystery. Our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvellously detailed and accurate view of the outside world. So why should natural selection then lead us to systematically distort what we know? After decades of research, Robert Trivers has at last provided the missing theory to answer these questions. What emerges is a picture of deceit and self-deception as, at root, different sides of the same coin. We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others, and thereby reap the advantages. From space and aviation disasters to warfare, politics and religion, and the anxieties of our everyday social lives, Deceit and Self-Deception explains what really underlies a whole host of human problems. But can we correct our own biases? Are we doomed to indulge in fantasies, inflate our egos, and show off? Is it even a good idea to battle self-deception? With his characteristically wry and self-effacing wit, Trivers reveals how he finds self-deception everywhere in his own life, and shows us that while we may not always avoid it, we can now at least hope to understand it.@jasoncrawford @TriversRobert @Gena_I_Gorlin We must do a debate (within ourselves)! https://t.co/1ZLrskxe0m
The Dream Machine
M. Mitchell Waldrop
At a time when computers were a short step removed from mechanical data processors, Licklider was writing treatises on "human-computer symbiosis," "computers as communication devices," and a now not-so-unfamiliar "Intergalactic Network." His ideas became so influential, his passion so contagious, that Waldrop coined him "computing's Johnny Appleseed." In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.@BrianTHeligman https://t.co/aL2LHxOcRe
Personal History
Katharine Graham
The longtime owner of the Washington Post recounts her experiences, including how she rebounded from her husband's suicide to command the Post during Vietnam and Watergate@zck I've finally got myself to forgive its popularity and read Wolf Hall. Much enjoying it! The best nonfiction I read recently was Kay Graham's Personal History, but I think we've discussed that :)
A Primate's Memoir
Robert M. Sapolsky
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons. “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.@visakanv Hahahah man you HAVE to read and live tweet A Primate's Memoir. We'll be dying of laughter!!! It's BRILLIANT.
Kingdom
EMMANUEL CARRÈRE
This guy's book The Kingdom completely messed me up. To everyone who has ever had a crisis of faith of one kind or another - he is a must-read. cc @matthewclifford https://t.co/EvF9dGhlPS
Letters to a Young Contrarian
Christopher Hitchens
Please everyone read Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian if you haven't yet. https://t.co/NHsvtRuzFQ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My most-read books to date: One Hundred Years of Solitude, read it 8x (1998-2003) Arcadia, read it 7x (2014-2018) The Tragedy of the Moon, read it 5x (2011-2019) https://t.co/140tg7LFMA
The Tragedy of the Moon
Isaac Asimov
All essays in this volume are reprinted from the Magazine of fantasy and science fiction.My most-read books to date: One Hundred Years of Solitude, read it 8x (1998-2003) Arcadia, read it 7x (2014-2018) The Tragedy of the Moon, read it 5x (2011-2019) https://t.co/140tg7LFMA
Arcadia (Faber Drama)
Tom Stoppard
Arcadia is a brilliantly inventive play that moves back and forth between centuries, populated by a varied and vastly entertaining cast of characters who discuss such topics as the nature of truth and time, the difference between the classical and the romantic temperament, and the disruptive influence of sex on our orbits in life-according to the author, "the attraction which Newton left out.My most-read books to date: One Hundred Years of Solitude, read it 8x (1998-2003) Arcadia, read it 7x (2014-2018) The Tragedy of the Moon, read it 5x (2011-2019) https://t.co/140tg7LFMA
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of this classic, a new translation of the Nobel Prize winner's story is offered, which includes a huge cast of intriguing characters, including Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his family; Oskar's midget friends Bebra and Roswitha Raguna; and more. Reprint.@drnelk The Tin Drum.
Western Intellectual Tradition
Jacob Bronowski
Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.@carolynz Oh I see! Best "holistic" intro-type books may be Koestler's Sleepwalkers, Bronowski's The Western Intellectual Tradition, Bryson's Home, Ferguson's The Ascent of Money? (The latter two are light - but smart - )
The Ascent of Money
Niall Ferguson
Chronicles the evolution of finance from its origins in Mesopotamia to the modern world's most recent upheavals, covering such topics as the stock market bubble that prompted the French Revolution and the theories behind common investment vehicles.@carolynz Oh I see! Best "holistic" intro-type books may be Koestler's Sleepwalkers, Bronowski's The Western Intellectual Tradition, Bryson's Home, Ferguson's The Ascent of Money? (The latter two are light - but smart - )
The Sleepwalkers
Arthur Koestler
A thought-provoking account of the scientific achievements and lives of cosmologists from Babylonians to Newton.@carolynz Oh I see! Best "holistic" intro-type books may be Koestler's Sleepwalkers, Bronowski's The Western Intellectual Tradition, Bryson's Home, Ferguson's The Ascent of Money? (The latter two are light - but smart - )
At Home
Bill Bryson
Explores the ways in which homes reflect history, from a bathroom's revelations about medicine and hygiene to a kitchen's exposure of the stories of trade and nutrition.@carolynz Oh I see! Best "holistic" intro-type books may be Koestler's Sleepwalkers, Bronowski's The Western Intellectual Tradition, Bryson's Home, Ferguson's The Ascent of Money? (The latter two are light - but smart - )
Journal - volume 1
Sándor Márai
Inédit en France, le Journal du grand écrivain hongrois Sándor Márai éclaire l'homme et l'oeuvre d'une lumière nouvelle. Romancier, chroniqueur, Sándor Márai fut également le témoin et l'acteur d'une époque dont il a consigné les événements dès 1943 dans un Journal qui l'a accompagné jusqu'à la fin de ses jours, devenant un de ses chefs-d'oeuvre. Ce premier volume couvre la période historique la plus riche - la guerre, l'arrivée des Soviétiques, le départ en exil - et dévoile des passages plus personnels de l'oeuvre où se déploient la causticité et la clairvoyance de l'homme de lettres. Sous la direction de la traductrice Catherine Fay, avec la collaboration d'András Kányádi, maître de conférences à l'INALCO, cette édition du Journal apparaît comme la pièce maîtresse de l'oeuvre de Márai : au fil de pages superbes, où le moindre détail prend une ampleur romanesque, on assiste à la pensée en mouvement d'un homme conscient que sa seule façon d'être au monde est l'écriture.♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️ https://t.co/xGMnZa6IPK
The Hatred of Poetry
Ben Lerner
"In his book of literary commentary, The Hatred of Poetry, [Ben] Lerner posits a very different role for art in modernity, one that turns not on the willing suspension of disbelief, but on our “embarrassment” that poems and novels exist at all."
Under the Sign of Saturn
Susan Sontag
A third selection of Sontag's most important critical writings comment on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. Reprint.Sontag's essay On Paul Goodman - my favourite by her - completely shook me when I first read it in her collection Under the Sign of Saturn as a teen. As if I'd known how relevant it would become for me... Rereading it now had the same deep effect. Last night in Oxford we used it
The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Presents an argument for the necessity for art in life. This book is based on the author's enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the philosophy of Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner. It outlines a distinction between two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime.I must admit I'd forgotten The Birth of Tragedy is mostly an enquiry into *pessimism* -- as a cultural constant, underneath all the throbbing beauty, the pomp. Brings me back to my intuitions at @britishmuseum recently https://t.co/GUiR6Pc8CB You never open a book by accident! https://t.co/kFPNMUfqdF
Philosophy in a Time of Terror
Giovanna Borradori
"In her introduction, Borradori contends that philosophy has an invaluable contribution to make to the understanding of terrorism. Just as the traumas produced by colonialism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust wrote the history of the twentieth century, the history of the twenty-first century is already signed by global terrorism. Each dialogue here, accompanied by a critical essay, recognizes the magnitude of this upcoming challenge. Characteristically, Habermas's dialogue is dense, compact, and elegantly traditional. Derrida's, on the other hand, takes the reader on a long, winding, and unpredictable road. Yet unexpected agreements emerge between them: both have a deep suspicion of the concept of "terrorism" and both see the need for a transition from classical international law, premised on the model of nation-states, to a new cosmopolitan order based on continental alliances.".This, ultimately. https://t.co/yGl1gf1esb
At Home
Bill Bryson
Explores the ways in which homes reflect history, from a bathroom's revelations about medicine and hygiene to a kitchen's exposure of the stories of trade and nutrition.@sarthakgh Weirdly, a very enjoyable book about how good work with data, and a scientist approach, changes everyday life for every person and home was Bill Bryson's At Home. It's his underrated masterpiece.
- "A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania."--Provided by publiher.
@schnozking1 I love this part... Miss my 'Technicians of the Sacred' book so much....
The Goal
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
"Includes case study interviews"--Cover.@starsandrobots @david_perell I loved the book The Goal with all its absurdities.... How is the audio version?
On Tyranny
Timothy Snyder
In previous books, Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience."Recommended readings: https://t.co/dyoTCjCdSO https://t.co/YwJDT125UJ https://t.co/0MKNOyX1U9 (And I cannot wait for https://t.co/ybD0ldpnMO) https://t.co/0Zl3IoUZcp
Twilight of Democracy
Anne Applebaum
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor, and historian offers an expert guide to understanding the appeal of the strongman as a leader and an explanation for why authoritarianism is back with a menacing twenty-first century twist. Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule--that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else. People, she argues, are not just ideological, they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunist. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power. Drawing on reporting in Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil; using historical examples including Stalinist central Europe and Nazi Germany; and investigating related phenomena: the modern conspiracy theory, nostalgia for a golden past, political polarization, and meritocracy and its discontents, Anne Applebaum brilliantly illuminates the seduction of totalitarian thinking and the eternal appeal of the one-party state.Recommended readings: https://t.co/dyoTCjCdSO https://t.co/YwJDT125UJ https://t.co/0MKNOyX1U9 (And I cannot wait for https://t.co/ybD0ldpnMO) https://t.co/0Zl3IoUZcp
@venite I much recommend Simonyi Sr's incredible, Whole Earth Catalog style, talmudically intertextual A Cultural History of Physics. Here Freeman Dyson talks about it (with son George commenting) https://t.co/rfF3HOfF5M And here is an EXCERPT (we're so lucky) https://t.co/S6nVvk3jxf
A Cultural History of Physics
Károly Simonyi
While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures." In A Cultural History of Physics, Hungarian scientist and educator Károly Simonyi succeeds in bridging this chasm by describing the experimental methods and theoretical interpretations that created scientific knowledge, from ancient times to the present day, within the cultural environment in which it was formed. Unlike any other work of its kind, Simonyi’s seminal opus explores the interplay of science and the humanities to convey the wonder and excitement of scientific development throughout the ages. These pages contain an abundance of excerpts from original resources, a wide array of clear and straightforward explanations, and an astonishing wealth of insight, revealing the historical progress of science and inviting readers into a dialogue with the great scientific minds that shaped our current understanding of physics. Beautifully illustrated, accurate in its scientific content and broad in its historical and cultural perspective, this book will be a valuable reference for scholars and an inspiration to aspiring scientists and humanists who believe that science is an integral part of our culture.@venite I much recommend Simonyi Sr's incredible, Whole Earth Catalog style, talmudically intertextual A Cultural History of Physics. Here Freeman Dyson talks about it (with son George commenting) https://t.co/rfF3HOfF5M And here is an EXCERPT (we're so lucky) https://t.co/S6nVvk3jxf
Talking Stone
Paul Goldsmith
"This book acts as a visual vehicle to see the rock art of the Coso Range. The Coso Range sits on the edge of the Mojave Desert, just east of the Sierra Nevada. It is located within the 1.2 million acres Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake and contains distinctive and spectacular displays of rock art. This rock art fills the lava gorges of Renegade Canyon, Big Petroglyph Canyon, and Sheep Canyon with images of bighorn sheep, anthropomorphs, abstract geometric figures and shield-like figures. These are pecked into the dark basalt and most appear to be between 1000 to 3000 years old, although some may be older and date to the earliest occupation of the region roughly 13,000 years ago. Both the text and photography are by Paul Goldsmith, an acclaimed cinematographer. This project is highly visual in nature and provides a photographic tour of the canyons and rock art for those that will never have a chance to visit them"--Provided by publisher.@BrianTHeligman @davidsuculum Ah!! Yes...! But have you read The Talking Stone? Such an underrated short story; it is so beautiful. I also tweeted a bunch about The Tragedy of the Moon! My favourite essay collection by Isaac. (Btw I will name all my children Isaac.)
The Tragedy of the Moon
Isaac Asimov
All essays in this volume are reprinted from the Magazine of fantasy and science fiction.@BrianTHeligman @davidsuculum Ah!! Yes...! But have you read The Talking Stone? Such an underrated short story; it is so beautiful. I also tweeted a bunch about The Tragedy of the Moon! My favourite essay collection by Isaac. (Btw I will name all my children Isaac.)
La Carte et Le Territoire (French Edition)
Michel Houellebecq
Si Jed Martin, le personnage principal de ce roman, devait vous en raconter l'histoire, il commencerait par vous parler d'une panne de chauffe-eau. Ou de son père, architecte connu et engagé, avec qui il passa seul de nombreux réveillons de Noël. Il évoquerait Olga, une très jolie Russe rencontrée lors d'une première exposition de son travail photographique à partir de cartes routières Michelin "la carte est plus intéressante que le territoire". C'était avant que le succès mondial n'arrive avec la série des "métiers", portraits de personnalités de tous milieux, dont l'écrivain Michel Houellebecq. Il dirait aussi comment il aida le commissaire Jasselin à élucider une atroce affaire criminelle. L'art, l'argent, l'amour, le rapport au père, la mort, le travail, la France devenue un paradis touristique sont quelques-uns des thèmes de ce roman, résolument classique et ouvertement moderne.@shadihamid Ooooh. I haven't dared read anything by him since La Carte et le Territoire because it was too perfect! Might give this one a try....
Captivity
György Spiró
“Captivity is a complex and fast-paced tale of Jewish life in the early first century, a sort of sword-and-sandals saga as reimagined by Henry Roth. The narrative follows Uri from Rome to Jerusalem and back, from prospectless dreamer to political operative to pogrom survivor—who along the way also happens to dine with Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate and get thrown into a cell with a certain Galilean rabble-rouser. Hungarian György Spiró’s deft combination of philosophical inquiry and page-turning brio should overcome that oft-mentioned American timidity toward books in translation.” —The Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2015 A literary sensation, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew. Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening—but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance. Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God.@_TamaraWinter @qwertyplication Yes. Christianity is incredibly memetic and resilient and Lindy and all that. When you stop to think about it, it's crazy -- how it was built out, how it spread, how it survives... Btw do you follow @C_Harwick @catholickungfu Also recommending Spiro's book Captivity!
I keep saying that the fact that tech people don't read Jauss - he happens to be more wellknown in Central European aesthetics / social sciences - makes no sense. He said a lot of things we're trying to *invent*, and in a concise and practical way, too. https://t.co/ujaoeiPqyp https://t.co/1T40GIcBxu
The Hunger Games (Book 1)
Suzanne Collins
This Special Edition of The Hunger Games includes the most extensive interview Suzanne Collins has given since the publication of The Hunger Games; an absorbing behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the series; and an engaging archival conversation between Suzanne Collins and YA legend Walter Dean Myers on writing about war. The Special Edition answers many questions fans have had over the years, and gives great insight into the creation of this era-defining work. In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister’s place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to death before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Still, if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.@avyfain @vgr I mean this is pretty shite, guys. 50 Shades of Grey ffs. (I applaud both the first The Hunger Games and Larsson books though. Within their genre they're both excellent works.) https://t.co/SN16RM7p6Z
Good Economics for Hard Times
Abhijit V. Banerjee
Two prize-winning economists show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day The experience of the last decade has not been kind to the image of economists: asleep at the wheel (perhaps with the foot on the gas pedal) in the run-up to the great recession, squabbling about how to get out of it, tone-deaf in discussions of the plight of Greece or the Euro area; they seem to have lost the ability to provide reliable guidance on the great problems of the day. In this ambitious, provocative book Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show how traditional western-centric thinking has failed to explain what is happening to people in a newly globalized world: in short Good Economics has been done badly. This precise but accessible book covers many of the most essential issues of our day--including migration, unemployment, growth, free trade, political polarization, and welfare. Banerjee and Duflo will confound and clarify the presumptions of our times, such as: Why migration doesn't follow the law of supply and demand Why trade liberalization can drive unemployment up and wages down Why macroeconomists like to bend the data to fit the model Why nobody can really explain why and when growth happens Why economists' assumption that people don't change their minds has made has made polarization worse Why quite often it doesn't take a village, especially if the villagers aren't that nice In doing so, they seek to reclaim this essential terrain, and to offer readers an economist's view of the great issues of the day--one that is candid about the complexities, the zones of ignorance, and the areas of genuine disagreement.Reading 'Good Economics for Hard Times', and it's all the way as witty as you would think - https://t.co/PV6IiEikCf
The Secret Place
Tana French
@regancodes I have nothing against light fiction when written by genre masters. After JG try Tana French's The Secret Place, which we recently discussed here.
The Firm
John Grisham
A Harvard law graduate finds that the tax firm he's employed by is not what it seems when the FBI approaches him to become an informant.@regancodes Classic Grisham is generally amazing. I don't know his new stuff but when I was a teen I read all of the famous ones - The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client... I mean it's a specific genre but within that amazing works!
The Pelican Brief
John Grisham
When the Supreme Court's most liberal and most conservative justices are gunned down, law student Darby Shaw builds a case against a powerful suspect, whose threats send her underground. By the author of The Firm. 250,000 first printing. $500,000 ad/promo. Tour.@regancodes Classic Grisham is generally amazing. I don't know his new stuff but when I was a teen I read all of the famous ones - The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client... I mean it's a specific genre but within that amazing works!
The Client
John Grisham
@regancodes Classic Grisham is generally amazing. I don't know his new stuff but when I was a teen I read all of the famous ones - The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client... I mean it's a specific genre but within that amazing works!
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick! Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge.Spent last night in major book crush. I was reminded of all the cool accidental orthography revolutions caused by monks like the French -x plural, which happened because they were tired copying in the dark and overcrossed the -s at the bottom 🤗💛✨ Santa rocks! https://t.co/xlsAtwvgBS
Yona Friedman. The Dilution of Architecture
Yona Friedman
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition 'Yona Friedman -- Genesis of a Vision,' which was presented in 2012 at Archizoom, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. ... The first part brings together a large number of projects and proposals by Yona Friedman into a classified anthology, which includes unpublished works. The second part presents an essay by Manuel Orazi that reconstructs the many facets of Freidman's work since his formative years and places it within the political and geographical context of its time"--Last page.Please read this: https://t.co/M1uvy18Ihj I don't think this is "Avantgarde urbanism" -- but it is disruptive, in a good way. Yona Friedman is amazing. And when you go to his exhibitions, you need to climb a lot. Which can only be a good sign.
On Classical Economics
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell's many writings on the history of economic thought have appeared in a number of scholarly journals and books, and these writings have been praised, reprinted, and translated in various countries around the world. The classical era in the history of economics is an important part of the history of ideas in general, and its implications reach beyond the bounds of the economics profession. On Classical Economics is a book from which students can learn both history and economics. It is not simply a Cook's tour of colorful personalities of the past but a study of how certain economic concepts and tools of analysis arose, and how their implications were revealed during the controversies that followed. In addition to a general understanding of classical macroeconomics and microeconomics, this book offers special insight into the neglected pioneering work of Sismondi--and why it was neglected--and a detailed look at John Stuart Mill's enigmatic role in the development of economics and the mysteries of Marxian economics. Clear, engaging, and very readable, without being either cute or condescending, On Classical Economics can enable a course on the history of economic thought to make a contribution to students’ understanding of economics in general--whether in price theory, monetary theory, or international trade. In short, it is a book about analysis as well as history.@tomscrace @ThomasSowell @Andrew_Solomon Hmhm maaaybe https://t.co/rHCljkA6nT
This Business of Music, 10th Edition (This Business of Music
M. William Krasilovsky
A complete and up-to-date guide to the music industry covers such topics as record industry trends, copyright law, sources of publishing income, buying and selling of catalogues, agents and managers, and music videos.In the US, music (copyright) has always been for sale in a v different way than in Europe. Private equity may scale the customs, but doesn't fundamentally change them. Read Shemel, Krasilovsky, Gross "This Business of Music"; very edifying in the matter: https://t.co/mg0hY3avUc https://t.co/hH4RrEiJNt
A Cultural History of Physics
Károly Simonyi
While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures." In A Cultural History of Physics, Hungarian scientist and educator Károly Simonyi succeeds in bridging this chasm by describing the experimental methods and theoretical interpretations that created scientific knowledge, from ancient times to the present day, within the cultural environment in which it was formed. Unlike any other work of its kind, Simonyi’s seminal opus explores the interplay of science and the humanities to convey the wonder and excitement of scientific development throughout the ages. These pages contain an abundance of excerpts from original resources, a wide array of clear and straightforward explanations, and an astonishing wealth of insight, revealing the historical progress of science and inviting readers into a dialogue with the great scientific minds that shaped our current understanding of physics. Beautifully illustrated, accurate in its scientific content and broad in its historical and cultural perspective, this book will be a valuable reference for scholars and an inspiration to aspiring scientists and humanists who believe that science is an integral part of our culture.Or the regal A Cultural History of Physics, also tamudically hypertextual, a pre-internet internet in its vast maps -- its entire topography of knowledge unique, brilliant, infinite...! MUST be reprinted. By Simony Sr. Read Freeman Dyson's introduction: https://t.co/rfF3HOfF5M https://t.co/o3yEF0zaWU
The Ascent of Money
Niall Ferguson
Chronicles the evolution of finance from its origins in Mesopotamia to the modern world's most recent upheavals, covering such topics as the stock market bubble that prompted the French Revolution and the theories behind common investment vehicles.@jasoncrawford @kevin2kelly The second one of from The Pattern on the Stone. The third from The Ascent of Money.
The Pattern On The Stone
W. Daniel Hillis
@jasoncrawford @kevin2kelly The second one of from The Pattern on the Stone. The third from The Ascent of Money.
The Summer of Black Widows
Sherman Alexie
Collection of poems revealing the spirit of North American Indian attitudes on life, love, and other experiences.@BrianTHeligman His poetry book The Summer of Black Widows is incredible.
The Dragons of Eden
Carl Sagan
The well-known astronomer and astrobiologist surveys current knowledge of the development of intelligence on Earth in various forms of life and explains his persuasion that intelligence must have developed along similar lines throughout the universe@made_in_cosmos Sagan: The Dragons of Eden.
Negotiating with the Dead
Margaret Atwood
The author offers a feminine perspective on writing in a collection of essays that examines her development as a poet and bestselling novelist, and includes references to the works of Virgil, Isak Dinesen, and Robertson Davies.This reminds me both of Sandor Weores's essay on how writers are and Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead where she tries to figure out what is one way in which all writers are the same and concludes: lonely childhood, time spent alone, thinking, books (cf world building) https://t.co/Wp2xvNsaf6
At Home
Bill Bryson
Explores the ways in which homes reflect history, from a bathroom's revelations about medicine and hygiene to a kitchen's exposure of the stories of trade and nutrition.@jnymnz Also, much recommending Bryson's At Home which imo is even better!! (If that's possible)
The Happiness Hypothesis
Jonathan Haidt
@JimmyRis I think most people should read this book ASAP - though, personally, I feel I read both this and The Righteous Mind "too late" (not that this makes them any less great).
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
Presents a groundbreaking investigation into the origins of morality at the core of religion and politics, offering scholarly insight into the motivations behind cultural clashes that are polarizing America.@JimmyRis I think most people should read this book ASAP - though, personally, I feel I read both this and The Righteous Mind "too late" (not that this makes them any less great).
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Penguin Classics)
Heinrich Böll
Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll's powerful novel about a woman terrorized by the media In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance. A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence.People of Twitter, you should read this book 👇 https://t.co/ojngVvsBnr