Quentin Hardy
Head of Editorial, Google Cloud. Formerly New York Times, Forbes, Wall Street Journal. Views & comments are mine, not Google's.
20+ Book Recommendations by Quentin Hardy
The Institutional Revolution
Douglas W. Allen
@tonyannett @delong I look forward to reading @delong, but this book was underappreciated. https://t.co/cFr2BGmvJV
The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges
Includes the stories The Congress, Undr, The Mirror and the Mask, August 25, 1983, Blue Tigers, The Rose of Paracelsus and Shakespeare's Memory.Reading "The Book of Sand" on what turns out to be Borges' 123rd birthday. When I first read it as a young man, it was impossible to understand how much it was an old man's book, and how very dark it is. He wore his courage so lightly.
The Photographs of Esther Bubley
Melissa Fay Greene
Following the publication in September 2008 of the first three books featuring The Library of Congress' internationally renowned collection of Farm Security Adminstration and Office of War information photographs, the series will continue with images choNice sale of short WPA photo books at @libraryofcongre . The Esther Bubley is excellent, others look good too. Nice writers on the forewards https://t.co/8uIb4oRrdh https://t.co/h2H6r0n5PM
The Power Law
Sebastian Mallaby
@MartyManley @stewartbrand @JamesFallows @markoff @moritzKBE His professional life is rather fully covered in @scmallaby 's new book on venture capital, which I am just finishing. It is excellent. https://t.co/J8hiWvp1kR
The Testaments
Margaret Atwood
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood's classic, The Handmaid's Tale. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways. With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.@_sonyadunne "Testament" is one of the most searing books written.
The Secret Garden (HarperClassics)
Frances Hodgson Burnett
"One of th' gardens is locked up. No one has been in it for ten years." When orphaned Mary Lennox comes to live at her uncle's great house on the Yorkshire Moors, she finds it full of mysterious secrets. There are nearly one hundred rooms, most of which are locked, and the house is filled with creepy old portraits and suits of armor. Mary rarely sees her uncle, and perhaps most unsettling of all is that at night she hears the sound of someone crying down one of the long corridors. The gardens surrounding the odd property are Mary's escape and she explores every inch of them—all except for the mysterious walled-in, locked garden. Then one day, Mary discovers a key. Could it open the door to the garden?I reread “The Secret Garden,” a book I loved as a child. Towards the end, I realized all three children were the right age to later serve in World War I. Really brought home what an end of an era that war was.
Saturday Night
Susan Orlean
Here is a new edition of Orlean's first book, a quirky classic about Saturday night in America that launched the career of the author of "The Orchid Thief."@loracorkelley "Saturday Night" was a brilliant book idea.
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@ilan_peer @Reza_Zadeh An excellent explicator. This book by Brian Arthur, an engineer now practicing economics, is equally indispensible: https://t.co/qaG18pP6sl
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
Steve Brusatte
The Times Science Book of the Year A Sunday Times Bestseller 'Thrilling . . . the best book on the subject written for the general reader since the 1980s.' The Sunday Times 66 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years. The world of the dinosaurs has fascinated on book and screen for decades – from early science fiction classics like The Lost World, to Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Tokyo, and the monsters of Jurassic Park. But what if we got it wrong? In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, top dinosaur expert Brusatte, tells the real story of how dinosaurs rose to dominate the planet. Using the fossil clues that have been gathered using state of the art technology, Brusatte follows these magnificent creatures from their beginnings in the Early Triassic period, through the Jurassic period to their final days in the Cretaceous and the legacy that they left behind. Along the way, Brusatte introduces us to modern day dinosaur hunters and gives an insight into what it’s like to be a paleontologist. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is full of thrilling accounts of some of his personal discoveries, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs, monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex, and feathered raptor dinosaurs preserved in lava from China. At a time when Homo sapiens has existed for less than 200,000 years and we are already talking about planetary extinction, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a timely reminder of what humans can learn from the magnificent creatures who ruled the earth before us.@kfury The new extinct guys are really great. I loved this book: https://t.co/Lg6Nc1Kjb0 One of the author's great points: Birds are not descended from dinosaurs: They ARE dinosaurs, full of dinosaur features.
War Comes to Long An, Updated and Expanded
Jeffrey Race
This landmark study of the Vietnamese conflict, examined through the lens of the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements in the rural province of Long An up until American intervention in the area, offers a human, balanced, penetrating account of war. Two new forewords by Robert K. Brigham of Vassar College and Jeffrey Record of the Air War College explore the book's enduring influence. A new end chapter offers previously unpublished scholarship on the conflict.One of the most important books about Vietnam was "War Comes to Long An." Published in 1972, it was a deep look at the war from the rural Vietnamese perspective. Too much media had been in the cities, near elites & the U.S. Army, for this perspective. https://t.co/yizvp0EWvz
Reign of Terror
Spencer Ackerman
Introduction: Neither peace nor victory -- Prologue : the worst terrorist attack in American history -- 9/11 And the security state -- 9/11 And the right -- Liberal complicity in the war on terror -- Obama, the security state, and the "sustainable" war on terror -- The right vs. Obama's war on terror -- The left vs. Obama's war on terror -- The decadent phase of the war on terror, the security state, and the rise of Trump -- Making the war on terror great again -- The invisible enemy.The @attackerman book is very good. Unusually for books of this sort it has a justified emotional pitch that brings home the tragedy of it all. https://t.co/YHF7Db2w9Y
A Biography of the Pixel (Leonardo)
Alvy Ray Smith
"The co-founder of Pixar explains the history and development of computer animation"--Steve Jobs, necessary egomaniac. From the @harrymccracken interview with Pixar's cofounder, who has a very interesting book on the Pixel (you're soaking in it.) https://t.co/N7OEDMeyCE https://t.co/oOIy8mj0Mv
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
Nicole Perlroth
From The New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, the untold story of the cyberweapons market-the most secretive, invisible, government-sponsored market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare. Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world's computer networks invisibly until discovered. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to tap into any iPhone, dismantle safety controls at a chemical plant, and shut down the power in an entire nation-just ask the Ukraine. Zero days are the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation states, defense contractors, cybercriminals, and security defenders alike. In this market, governments aren't regulators; they are clients-paying huge sums to hackers willing to turn over gaps in the Internet, and stay silent about them. For decades, the United States was the only player in this market. Now, it is just the biggest. Our primary adversaries are now in this market too, each with its own incentive to exploit the Internet's vast security holes for their own spy operations, or all-out cyberwar. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth's discovery, unpacked. A intrepid journalist unravels an opaque, code-driven market from the outside in-encountering spies, hackers, arms dealers, mercenaries, and a few unsung heroes along the way. As the stakes get higher and higher in the rush to push the world's critical infrastructure online, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is the urgent and alarming discovery of one of the world's most extreme threats.Another shout to @nicoleperlroth, with the FT's lead tech book of the summer. Damn right. https://t.co/xCCIRUqZLX
Icebound
Andrea Pitzer
In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice, a riveting and cinematic tale of Dutch polar explorer William Barents and his three harrowing Arctic expeditions—the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival. The human story has always been one of perseverance—often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing hunger, and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the great Age of Exploration—a time of hope, adventure, and seemingly unlimited geographic frontiers. At the story’s center is William Barents, one of the 16th century’s greatest navigators whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to chart a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Journalist Pitzer did extensive research, learning how to use four-hundred-year-old navigation equipment, setting out on three Arctic expeditions to retrace Barents’s steps, and visiting replicas of Barents’s ship and cabin. “A visceral, thrilling account full of tantalizing surprises” (Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal ), Pitzer’s reenactment of Barents’s ill-fated journey shows us how the human body can function at twenty degrees below, the history of mutiny, the art of celestial navigation, and the intricacies of building shelters. But above all, it gives us a first-hand glimpse into the true nature of human courage.Midway through, excellent read buy it https://t.co/wN7swkcK8y https://t.co/EgnNdcDkk9
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
Nicole Perlroth
From The New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, the untold story of the cyberweapons market-the most secretive, invisible, government-sponsored market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare. Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world's computer networks invisibly until discovered. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to tap into any iPhone, dismantle safety controls at a chemical plant, and shut down the power in an entire nation-just ask the Ukraine. Zero days are the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation states, defense contractors, cybercriminals, and security defenders alike. In this market, governments aren't regulators; they are clients-paying huge sums to hackers willing to turn over gaps in the Internet, and stay silent about them. For decades, the United States was the only player in this market. Now, it is just the biggest. Our primary adversaries are now in this market too, each with its own incentive to exploit the Internet's vast security holes for their own spy operations, or all-out cyberwar. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth's discovery, unpacked. A intrepid journalist unravels an opaque, code-driven market from the outside in-encountering spies, hackers, arms dealers, mercenaries, and a few unsung heroes along the way. As the stakes get higher and higher in the rush to push the world's critical infrastructure online, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is the urgent and alarming discovery of one of the world's most extreme threats.I tore through @nicoleperlroth's brilliant and chilling book, you should preorder it and she should be proud. https://t.co/ROh4zbV0wr https://t.co/bRbbSdUqAa
The Body of Il Duce
Sergio Luzzatto
An exploration of the history and legacy of Italian fascism as reflected by the body of Benito Mussolini discusses how the dictator's brutal execution, the graphic display of his corpse, and his body's subsequent burial, exhuming, theft, concealment, and eventual enshrinement reflected the nation's struggle to become a republic. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.@sbisson @tadethompson @Hugo_Book_Club So many. These among them. https://t.co/YvpdmhPnWe
Whistleblower
Susan Fowler
In 2017, twenty-five-year-old Susan Fowler published a blog post detailing the sexual harassment and retaliation she'd experienced as an entry-level engineer at Uber. The post went viral, leading not only to the ouster of Uber's CEO and twenty other employees, but 'starting a bonfire on creepy sexual behaviour in Silicon Valley that... spread to Hollywood and engulfed Harvey Weinstein' (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times). The moving story of a woman's lifelong fight to do what she loves - despite repeatedly being told no or treated as less-than - Whistleblower is both a riveting read and a source of inspiration for anyone seeking to stand up against inequality in their own workplace.@sbisson @tadethompson @Hugo_Book_Club So many. These among them. https://t.co/YvpdmhPnWe
Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
The non-fiction work of the great Latin American poet and writer is collected here with essays, reviews, lectures, and political commentary on everything from Ellery Queen to the Kabbalah. Reprint.@sbisson @tadethompson @Hugo_Book_Club So many. These among them. https://t.co/YvpdmhPnWe
The Body of Il Duce
Sergio Luzzatto
An exploration of the history and legacy of Italian fascism as reflected by the body of Benito Mussolini discusses how the dictator's brutal execution, the graphic display of his corpse, and his body's subsequent burial, exhuming, theft, concealment, and eventual enshrinement reflected the nation's struggle to become a republic. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.Good book. https://t.co/LbB06TmiLH
Ask the Dust
John Fante
@mj_hyland @mtaeckens A fine book.
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
@ambernoelle "Naked Lunch" programmed me to dream its ending, two days before I finished the book. That was intriguing.