For Foreign Policy, he named ten books to learn how technology shapes the world. One book on the list:Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass SunsteinRead about the other nine books on the list.
It's the most optimistic (and direct) of Cass Sunstein's writings about the Web. It's an important book that added much-needed nuance to the powerful (but often overblown) arguments that Sunstein expressed in his other writings on the subject.
Gerald Imber is an internationally known plastic surgeon and has written numerous scientific papers, several books, and lectured widely on prevention and correction of facial aging."On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin (John Murray, 1859).Read about the other four books on Imber's list.
No, I have never read it cover to cover. Still, this book is always worth going back to. It inspires with its thoroughness and open-minded vision and with the way it helps usto understand the world. (And no, I do not want to get into the heated discussions about evolution swirling around us nearly 150 years later.) For the plastic surgeon, there is a simple lesson here, about cosmetic surgery and the survival of the fittest. The juxtaposition is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Two equally qualified people seek a position. The more attractive person usually prevails. Vital individuals at the top of their skills are perceived as ineffective because of signs of aging. Survival of the fittest on a micro-scale looms everywhere. Cosmetic surgery answers some of these needs. It is not the be-all and end-all, but in its proper place, and applied with common sense, it can enhance our lives.
Brian Schofield has been a journalist since 1998, and has worked as executive editor on GQ Active magazine, and as editor of the Sunday Times Travel Magazine. His writing has appeared in the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, The Daily Telegraph, Conde Nast Traveller, GQ and FHM.I never thought of myself as an angry man. More easy-going, even-handed, with roughly the same temperament as the BBC editorial guidelines. Then I wrote a book and the critics put me straight. The chap from the Times said I was 'quietly furious', while the Seattle Times reviewer called me 'relentlessly and scornfully scolding'. Turns out, I'm a ball of rage. And looking afresh at myRead about the other nine titles on the list.bookshelves, they have a point – because I love angry books. I'm surrounded by furious, indignant works, howls against injustice or screams at the system, the type of books you can't read in bed, because you'll be too fired-up to sleep. It's a miracle I'm not typing this with one eyelid, following a crippling, book-induced aneurysm. So here's 10 books that make you boil with rage.
* * *
The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
An urbane, hilarious rant against the toxic architecture of sprawl and sameness that blights modern America – which our own town planners all appear to have read, but sadly as a guidebook.
One title on the list:Happens Every DayRead about all ten books on the list.
by Isabel Gillies
272 pages; Scribner
Josiah Robinson (not his real name) falls in love with Isabel Gillies (her real name) when he is 7. Fifteen years later, they remeet. This time Isabel reciprocates. Josiah, a beautiful poet ("Heathcliff with an earring"), says: "I will call you at 2:30 and if you aren't there I'll try every minute after until you are." Reader, she marries him. She abandons her New York acting career and follows him to a teaching post in Ohio.
"I missed any signs of trouble," Isabel writes in Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story. The reader won't. Isabel throws Josiah into her new best friend Sylvia's path over and over. She makes the thing happen she is most afraid of happening.
If Gillies weren't so plucky, she would break your heart. When the blow comes, it's her sons she is most devastated for. They are blessed to have her kind of love. It's the same kind of love Isabel got growing up, mother-lode mother love.
"I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good e-mails," Gillies says. I bet.
—Patricia Volk
The End of the Affair by Graham GreeneRead about the other nine novels on Mullan's list.
Maurice Bendrix, the sour narrator of Greene's tale of doomed, obsessive love, is a novelist as well as a lover. Bendrix, who is used to making his characters do what he wants, finds himself a character in a story he passionately resents. Sarah, his lover, turns away from him to religion. "We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention."
One work of nonfiction on the list:Woof!Read about the other six books on the list.
by Lee Montgomery
256 pages; Viking
Another book about dogs? More slobber and soulfulness and uncurbed enthusiasm? Yes, because Woof!, edited by Lee Montgomery, is an especially fetching collection of essays (including two, by Abigail Thomas and Jim Shepard, first published in O) that proves you can't have too many lessons in ferocious devotion. Wolf down Anna Keesey's growling "Let's Go, My Love" and Chris Adrian's "A Good Creature"—as soulful as they come. — Cathleen Medwick
One title on the list:PninRead about the other four books on Kaminski's list.
by Vladimir Nabokov
Doubleday, 1957
Timofey Pnin, the 52-year-old with “a glossy bald head” who teaches Russian at “somewhat provincial” Waindell College, is lost. Train schedules, the proper use of articles in English and the habits of the natives routinely stump him. His is a common immigrant’s plight. Yet there’s no one quite like Pnin in literature, or life. Among Nabokov’s creations, he’s the anti-Humbert Humbert—that is, a man very different from the wayward narrator of “Lolita,” also a foreigner in America. Pnin, Nabokov once explained, is “a man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity and integrity.” He is also a comically tragic, absent-minded and endearing character—an intellectual cast adrift in America and nostalgic for a lost world. In Pnin’s case, as in Nabokov’s, the lost world is that of pre-Revolutionary Russia.
A few years ago he named his five favorite show-biz biographies for the Wall Street Journal. One book on the list:"Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" by Nick Tosches (Doubleday, 1992).Read about the other four biographies on Schickel's list.
The writer doesn't just report the wised up lingo of low-biz, he uses it, sometimes to almost poetic effect, to tell the story of Dino Crocetti, a k a Dean Martin, rising from Steubenville, Ohio, lounge lizard to superstardom. The man had impeccable timing, as his decade-long run as Jerry Lewis's straight man proved, and he could be a very effective screen actor (as "Rio Bravo" showed). But the public nice guy's emotional detachment was radical and he came to a sad, silent, isolated ending. Mr. Tosches overwrites, but his rhythms are as seductive as the dialogue in a Martin Scorsese gangster epic. And he also has a gift for recounting the social history of anti-social people. In the end, he makes Martin's story a powerful parable about the high cost of living in America's fast, stupid lane.
Back in 2002 he named a best books list for The Week. One title on the list:Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Bantam Books, $5).Read about the other five books on Buckley's list.
I know, I know: It’s way overwritten, and why should we care about some nutball amputee captain, and the whale parts are so much yadda blubber yadda, but it never fails to raise the hairs on my arm and even make me chuckle or say Wow.
For the Guardian, he named his top ten books from cold climes. One novel on the list:White Fang by Jack LondonRead about the other nine books on Sedgwick's list.
Although he is better known for The Call of the Wild, I prefer this story (an inversion of the other) in which London describes the adventures of a wild wolf dog, a half-breed who is eventually tamed and brought to civilisation. Set against the Klondike Gold Rush at the close of the 19th century, much of the book was based on London's own experiences in the Yukon, and remains fascinating reading for that alone.
"The thing about postmodernism is it's impossible to pin down exactly what might make a book postmodern," Kellogg acknowledges. Some of the attributes of the texts on the list include: "the author is a character, fiction and reality are blurred, the text includes fictional artifacts, such as letters, lyrics, even whole other books, and so on."Hopscotch by Julio CortázarRead about the other books on the list.
One title to make the grade:The First Men in the MoonRead about the other five titles to make Gioia's list.
(1901)
by H.G. Wells
Jules Verne ridiculed this novel for its flippant disregard of Newton's laws. The propulsion device H.G. Wells uses to get to the moon is reminiscent of "Flubber" from Walt Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor.
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox FordRead about all ten failed couplings on Mullan's list.
"Leisured American" John Dowell elopes with the fascinating Florence. On their wedding day they set sail for Europe "in a great gale of wind – the gale that affected her heart". Her doctor suggests that "I had better refrain from manifestations of affection". But Dowell discovers she has been carrying on a vigorous affair with his friend.
For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of insider accounts of the Apollo moon landings. One title on his list:Carrying the FireRead about the other four books on the list.
by Michael Collins
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974
“I have been places and done things you simply would not believe,” writes Apollo 11 astronaut Mike Collins near the end of “Carrying the Fire.” That observation reflects my own memories of exploring the moon’s Valley of Taurus-Littrow. Forty years ago, Collins spent the day alone in lunar orbit as the command-module pilot while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the moon’s surface. Collins ultimately gave us arguably the best personal story by an astronaut, capturing all the hard work, family interactions and excitement of being in the group of men who would be the public face of Apollo. They and all with whom they worked believed, correctly, that this was the most important contribution they could make with their lives.
One book on the list:GREAT EXPECTATIONS BY CHARLES DICKENSLearn about the other nine literary tear jerkers on the list.
This list is more than usually personal and subjective, and with that in mind I should immediately confess my immunity to Austen and the Brontes. Wuthering Heights always struck me as far too mad to be moving, a very strange book indeed. This list will also shows up certain shameful gap in my reading. Anna Karenina, for example, or The Mill on the Floss, or a lot of recent fiction that I've yet to catch up with.
I have, however, read Great Expectations at least ten times, and am always struck by how genuinely moving it is, and largely free of that comic grotesquerie that can sometimes try the patience. In his big emotional scenes, Dickens walks a fine line between mawkish and affecting; "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing," as Oscar Wilde put it. But Great Expectations is much better than that, and the scene between Pip and the dying Magwitch is a beauty. Dickens loved a good death scene, see also Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Nancy in Oliver Twist, Joe in Bleak House but this is the finest.
Read about the other four books on Underhill's list."FutureShop" by Daniel Nissanoff (Penguin, 2006).
I was not prepared to like "Futureshop" by Daniel Nissanoff. Books about e-commerce tend to be like uninspired sex: a convenient shortcut to a nap. But this one is like the jolt of a double espresso. Who knew that secondary markets could be so interesting? In Daniel's view, eBay is creating an "auction culture" that is transforming the way we shop on- and offline. After all, when a used car is transformed into a "preowned" Lexus, secondhand status has lost all its stigma. Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, is quoted as having no concerns about the threat of Target, but eBay keeps him up at night.
One novel on his list:A Maze of Death by Philip K DickRead about the other nine novels on Deaver's list.
I don't write science fiction, though I read much of it growing up. No top 10 of computer-oriented novels would be complete without something by Dick, as the devices figure in one way or another in all of his stories. His Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for the movie Blade Runner) and Ubik are more frequently mentioned, but Maze is my favorite. It's less relentlessly bleak than some (that is a compliment, by the way) and it speeds along like a classic thriller. A disparate group of colonists end up on a distant planet and are forced to fend for themselves in a world where reality and perception blur. I consider this a computer novel because of the mysterious "tenches," part oracle, part circuitry, part Jell-O.
Read about the other smokes on the list.Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Once upon a time, the smell of cigar smoke was thought to be delicious, arousing. In the proposal scene of Brontë's novel, Jane catches the whiff of Rochester's cigar - "I know it well" - in the garden at Thornfield. It mingles with "sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose". With the heroine giddy on these blended scents, only one outcome is possible.
One title on the list:The Odyssey by Homer.Read about the other five books on Dodd's list.
Homer created the Western imagination. The story of human life as a journey and the mythological element of the story reminds us that we are not alone in the universe. Now that I have two children, Odysseus’ longing for home—what the Greeks called nostos and we call nostalgia—adds a new resonance to this undying story.
Rose Tremain’s novels include Music and Silence and The Colour. Her most recent work, The Road Home, has just been released in paperback.The CrossingRead about the other four books on Tremain's list.
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 1994
Cormac McCarthy is America’s greatest contemporary poet of the wild. His fictional journeys have strange beginnings and desolate endings, confirming man’s smallness ina world where “God sits and conspires in the destruction of what he has been at such pains to create,” as McCarthy writes in “The Crossing.” Here, 16-year-old Billy Parham, son of a rancher, rescues a she-wolf from a trap one winter’s morning and decides to light out from home, dragging the wolf behind his horse across the border into Mexico. Billy’s intention is to release the wolf into the inaccessible mountains from which she strayed, but by crossing a geographical and temporal border, he enters a world of anarchy and violence. Piece by inevitable piece, he is stripped of everything that gives his life sustenance and meaning. Billy’s courage in the face of pain, loss, hunger and bereavement, no less than his unsentimental understanding of the lives of animals, makes him a remarkable and timeless hero. This heroism is, in its turn, heroically served by McCarthy’s dark unraveling sentences that gather like storm clouds and break in freakish thunder.
The list is thinner on crime novels than one might have guessed. Nevertheless, it includes:The Lady in the Lake - Raymond ChandlerRead about all fifty books.
Private eye Philip Marlowe travels from Los Angeles into the mountains in pursuit of a rich man's missing wife. The hard-boiled narration - and the corpse in the water - don't entirely negate the beauty of the surroundings.
The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
Ripley's first outing takes him to the Italian Riviera, where he learns his trade by stepping into the shoes of a glamorous young socialite.
Catherine Crier is a former district court judge turned television personality. She is also the author of several non-fiction books, including Contempt: How the Right Is Wronging American Justice."Les Misérables" by Victor Hugo.Read about all five books on Crier's list.Never mind the kitsch Broadway version: Victor Hugo's epic novel of the struggle between Jean Valjean and his nemesis, Inspector Javert, delivers a moving commentary on injustice, oppression and rehabilitation. Valjean is sentenced to prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. He is released only to commit a second minor crime. Javert vows that the act shall not go unpunished, and the chase is on. This grand drama, much of which is set against the political tumult of the French Revolution, is an exciting read that transcends its time. Hugo's words deliver valuable lessons about the inequities that shape so many lives today and the longing for liberty that we all share.
One title on the list: Roughing It by Mark TwainRead about all ten tales on Hannan's list.
A young Mark Twain left Missouri in 1861, crossed the continent by stagecoach, and got his first job as a journalist in the biggest, roughest mining town on the western frontier. He wrote it all up in this travel book; the miners and sharpers and gunslingers he met and drank with, and the greed and fantasising that drove everyone on the frontier, himself included.
One title on the list:"Dog Friendly Dog Training" by Andrea Arden (Howell Book House, 1999).Read about the other four books on the list.
There is so much advice about dogs out there that it can be confusing (and, unfortunately, conflicting). Andrea Arden's book is clear, fun, easy to read and packed with valuable instruction. Learn how even a child can position a 100-pound dog with the help of a piece of kibble. Learn, too, the significance of the truth that training takes place all the time--and why, instead of correcting a dog only when he's doing something wrong, it's so important to reinforce him when he's doing something right.
One novel on the list:The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony TrollopeRead about all ten jewels on Mullan's list.
The priceless jewels of the title come into the possession of the adventuress Lizzie Greystock after the death of her nasty husband, Sir Florian. They do not properly belong to her, but she is determined to keep them. Thieves eventually succeed in taking them, and in the course of the subsequent police investigation, Lizzie is revealed as an inveterate liar and disgraced.
Walter Isaacson is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (April 2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986)."Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps" by Peter Galison (Norton, 2003).Read about all five books on Isaacson's list.
We've seen much hoopla in 2005 regarding the centennial of Albert Einstein's miracle year, when he published seminal papers on special relativity and the quantum nature of light. Several smart books on Einstein were also published, adding to the growing library of works on this endlessly fascinating man. One particularly interestingapproach of writers over the years has been to consider Einstein in tandem with another great genius and compare how their minds worked. Among the best of these is "Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps" and the four others that follow here. Henri Poincaré, the great polymath, hit on many elements of relativity just before Einstein did, but he did not make the full leap. Mr. Galison describes how Poincaré's study of time zones and Einstein's work in the Swiss patent office examining devices to synchronize clocks may have influenced their scientific thinking. Some scholars feel Mr. Galison goes too far. But this intriguing book provokes us all to wrestle with our own approach to ideas: How do various influences, conscious or not, flow together to produce a new concept?
One title on the list:Kidnapped by Robert Louis StevensonRead about all ten shipwrecks on the list.
Young David Balfour is kidnapped at the behest of his miserly uncle who knows he is the rightful heir to his estate. He finds himself on a ship, bound for slavery in the Carolinas. But the ship strikes a reef and David is washed ashore, returning to claim his birthright.
One title on his list:"The Boys of Summer" by Roger Kahn (Harper & Row, 1972).Read about all five titles on McCarver's list.
This is a memoir focused on the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, a team that Roger Kahn covered as a sportswriter. He brings the whole era back in marvelous detail, with sketches of the players who were the life of that team. They included Jackie Robinson, of course. What I didn't know until I had read the book was the pivotal role played by Pee Wee Reese, a white Southerner and captain of the Dodgers, in easing Robinson's transition to the big leagues. Looking back now it is mind-boggling to think of what it took to establish Robinson and break the race barrier--which has to be considered one of the central events in American history.
Books from independent publishers have been an extreme rarity on Oprah's recommended summer reading lists. Until this year.One D.O.A., One on the WayRead more about the indie books on Oprah's list.
By Mary Robison
Counterpoint, 2009
to earn a place on this list, we're talking about:
* Books by prominent international policymakers that put you to sleep;
* Books that were influential in some way but also spectacularly wrong, leading to malign consequences.
One title on the list:Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies.Read about all ten books on Drezner's list.
Plenty of management consultants have tried to write the Very Big Book. And plenty of authors have predicted the demise of the nation-state in their books. Ohmae encapsulates both of these trends. Still, there's something extra that puts him on this list -- over 90% of the footnotes in this book are to... other works by Kenichi Ohmae. It's the most blatant use of the footnote as a marketing strategy that I have ever seen.
One book on the list:Union Street by Pat BarkerRead about all ten stories on Hogan's list.
A brilliant, and quite correctly disturbing book. Of Union Street's women, the story of Kelly Brown – a victim of rape – made the biggest mark on me. Barker's take on the care and oppression of communities is complex and thoughtful. "You can get used to anything," Kelly says, ominously, at the start of the book.
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