When I was in high school and college, Orson Scott Card was one of my favorite writers. Several of his books are still among my most cherished re-reads. And one of the main reasons for that was his powerful characterization. He made characters that I identified with and cared about. So when I happened across […]
Category: nonfiction
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, by George Woodcock
I picked this book up at the used book store because I’ve always been interested in anarchism as a political theory but didn’t know much about its history or philosophy. Plus the book was only a couple bucks. It was a decent overview of the writings of several of the prominent anarchist philosophers from William […]
Conscientious Objections, by Neil Postman
Subtitled “Stirring up trouble about language, technology, and education”, this book is a collection of essays by Neil Postman. Postman’s best known work is “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, a book describing how television is destroying American’s ability to think critically. Postman’s main interests include semantics (the study of meaning and language) and education and culture. […]
The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida
I can’t remember who recommended this to me, but it’s an interesting book. Richard Florida is a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He loves the Pittsburgh area, and was dismayed to find that high tech companies such as Lycos were moving away from Pittsburgh to other locations such as Boston […]
Real Change Leaders, by Jon Katzenbach and the RCL team
Picked this up while browsing through the management section of the local library. It’s the result of a team at McKinsey researching (to quote the book jacket) “why some companies were able to change and grow to higher performance levels while most others got bogged down. Their extensive research led to a surprising conclusion: the […]
Smart Business: How Knowledge Communities Can Revolutionize Your Company, by Dr. Jim Botkin
I got this from the library, because I’m interested in communities and how they might relate to business, but it turned out to be incredibly lame. I can’t really say that I read it – I just skimmed through it because it was so badly written that I couldn’t take it. It seems to be […]
21 Dog Years, by Mike Daisey
Mike Daisey’s website Subtitled “doing time @ amazon.com”, this is a memoir of Daisey’s two years at Amazon. It’s an entertaining account, starting with his being interviewed at Amazon because he fit their profile of being a freak (or as he more charitably describes himself, a dilettante). He suffers through life in customer service, figuring […]
Gearheads, by Brad Stone
Subtitled “The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports”, this book takes a look at the rise of Robot Wars, Battlebots, and the several other TV shows associated with robotic warfare. It’s interesting to me as somebody who watched a lot of these things develop from afar, from being a fan of SRL to cheering my friends […]
How The Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, a professor in the cognitive science department at MIT, is best known for his theories of language acquisition, as described in his book The Language Instinct. In this book, he takes a swing at the larger problem of how the mind works. His thesis, in his words: “The mind is a system of […]
Managing in a time of great change, by Peter F. Drucker
Drucker is generally considered to be the foremost expert on the art and science of management, and he was heavily cited as the primary influence on the authors of What Management Is, which I liked, so I figured it was time to see what he had to say. This was a collection of essays published […]
