Amazon link I liked the talk by Peter Schwartz that I went to, so when I saw his most well-known book at the used book store for $3, I picked it up. A pretty quick read detailing the idea of scenario planning, a management strategy involving coming up with several detailed future possibilities for the […]
Category: nonfiction
Small Things Considered, by Henry Petroski
Amazon link Subtitled Why There Is No Perfect Design, this book by an engineer describes the compromises necessary in any design. This was recommended as a book-of-the-month by Joel Spolsky – scroll down for his snippet on this book. I was intrigued enough to toss it into my latest Amazon order, and read it while […]
Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore
Amazon link This is one of those standard high-tech marketing books that everybody refers to in the technology business sector. I had never gotten around to reading it, but after our marketing folks started mentioning the chasm in every presentation recently, I figured it was time to skim through it, just to find out what […]
Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens
Amazon link I read a brief excerpt from this book several months ago in NewsScan, and was intrigued enough by the concept of a “contrarian” to add it to my Amazon wish list, but never got around to buying it. A few weeks ago, I was at a friend’s house for dinner, and noticed that […]
Language in Thought and Action, by S.I. Hayakawa
Amazon link (originally posted on 8/17/03, link fixed on 11/17/03) I found this book in a roundabout way. In Conscientious Objections, Neal Postman reviewed the book Science and Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski, calling it one of the most important books of the last century. Korzybski developed the field of general semantics, a system of thinking […]
The Transparent Society, by David Brin
Amazon link Like The Humane Interface, I picked this up when a friend was giving it away. I read most of it last month, and then finally finished it over Thanksgiving weekend. Brin is asking an interesting question: is privacy a lost cause? And, if so, what is the proper way to respond? His suggestion […]
Quantum Psychology, by Robert Anton Wilson
I saw this book while looking around on Amazon for books related to Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (much like how I found Hayakawa’s book). I picked it up because I’ve read two of Wilson’s sci-fi trilogies, the Illuminatus trilogy and the Schrodinger’s Trilogy. I liked them, but they were very weird, so I was surprised […]
The Humane Interface, by Jef Raskin
Jef Raskin was one of the primary designers of the Apple Macintosh, and has been respected in the human-computer interaction field ever since. I’d been meaning to pick up this book ever since I first read about it in the Good Experience newsletter. So when a friend was giving his copy away, I grabbed it. […]
The Tummy Trilogy, by Calvin Trillin
Trillin wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker over the course of 15 years called “U.S. Journal”. As part of that, every now and then he’d throw in an article about eating, as he tasted some outstanding local cuisine someplace. Mind you, he’s not necessarily talking about fancy haute cuisine, something which he […]
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale, ed. by James B. South
As a fairly rabid devotee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and as somebody who likes thinking about deeper issues on occasion, this book was irresistible: a collection of articles by philosophy professors and students discussing how various philosophical theories are exemplified by Buffy. It’s interesting how many different ways the same episodes can be viewed. […]
