Here are 100 books that Acid West fans have personally recommended if you like
Acid West.
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I was born in Santa Fe to families with long histories in the southern region of the state. It was my grandfather, Louis Whitlock, a state senator, who headed the legislation that landed Carlsbad this monument of folly.
My childhood was shaped by the reality and beauty of the state. The books I’ve chosen are dear to me because they reflect familial lore. It is a state I love, a state I hope every American visits at least once. Yet much of its reality is obscured by pottery and rugs, Lucchese boots and impressive architecture. These books, I hope, offer a counterbalance, so that anybody touring the state can appreciate its complex culture and history.
By now, McCarthy is well known for his books on the Southwest. Cities of the Plain is painfully overlooked.
I read it in college as a precocious creative writing major and fell in love because the towns mentioned (Belén, where my grandmother was born, as example) were familiar to me and yet I had no idea these nowhere places of my youth were known to anybody else in the world, to say nothing about their value to any artistic form.
Unlike All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain has zero romanticism to it: it’s a contemporary, hard-driven tale of ranching in the badlands of New Mexico. McCarthy focuses on the pumpjacks and the stench of creosote that encapsulate the southern part of the state.
There’s also a gruesomely funny passage about an Oldsmobile and dozens of jackrabbits.
First published in 1994. Environmental issues present a daunting challenge to the international system. The destruction of the tropical rainforest, the Chernobyl explosion and the ozone layer 'hole' all underline the transnational nature of environmental threats and the need for states to act together in order to tackle them. How have such environmental issues entered political agendas in different parts of the world and how has that affected national positions? Can governments ever reconcile their own national interests with the international cooperation needed to deal with transboundary issues such as climate change?
This book traces the history of international environmental…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I was born in Santa Fe to families with long histories in the southern region of the state. It was my grandfather, Louis Whitlock, a state senator, who headed the legislation that landed Carlsbad this monument of folly.
My childhood was shaped by the reality and beauty of the state. The books I’ve chosen are dear to me because they reflect familial lore. It is a state I love, a state I hope every American visits at least once. Yet much of its reality is obscured by pottery and rugs, Lucchese boots and impressive architecture. These books, I hope, offer a counterbalance, so that anybody touring the state can appreciate its complex culture and history.
I first read Baca at a time when, for whatever reason, I hated memoirs. Me-me-oirs, a fiction professor once called them. A Place to Stand changed my mind.
At age twenty-one, Baca was an illiterate prison inmate. He emerged from lockup as a poet—and a damned good one. Born in Santa Fe, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir is, to my mind, a must-read for anybody who intends to visit The City Different: before hitting the slopes, the art galleries, and jewelry stores; before donning your best Pendleton sweater, read A Place to Stand. It’s a compelling and personal look at how life in Santa Fe is for most.
Jimmy Santiago Baca's harrowing, brilliant memoir of his life before, during, and immediately after the years he spent in a maximum-security prison garnered tremendous critical acclaim and went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize. Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one and facing five to ten years behind bars for selling drugs. A Place to Stand is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary -- much of it spent in isolation -- with the ability to read and a passion for…
I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.
Most memoirs of Native life describe Native-White relationships. Taffa dives into relationships among Native communities and between Native and Chicanx neighbors and family members in both the Fort Yuma Quechan Reservation and Farmington, New Mexico.
Threaded throughout are the TV shows and diner dinners and dusty hikes and radio soundtracks that almost any New Mexican who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s will remember.
A Best Book of the Year: Washington Post, Esquire, Time, The Atlantic, NPR, and Publishers Weekly
An Oprah Daily "Best New Book" and "Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read" * A New York Times "New Book to Read" * A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" *An Amazon Editors "Best Book of the Month" * A Parade "Best New Work By Indigenous Writers" *…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I was born in Santa Fe to families with long histories in the southern region of the state. It was my grandfather, Louis Whitlock, a state senator, who headed the legislation that landed Carlsbad this monument of folly.
My childhood was shaped by the reality and beauty of the state. The books I’ve chosen are dear to me because they reflect familial lore. It is a state I love, a state I hope every American visits at least once. Yet much of its reality is obscured by pottery and rugs, Lucchese boots and impressive architecture. These books, I hope, offer a counterbalance, so that anybody touring the state can appreciate its complex culture and history.
In the United States, New Mexico is a habitual contender for both poorest and most violent/dangerous.
Stan Hoig’s comprehensive examination of the conquistador expeditions into the region leads one to believe the place never had a chance. Men like Nuno Beltrán de Guzmán and Coronado worked under the guise of spreading the word of God to the New World.
The reality is much different: the kingdom of Castile had bankrupted itself with their defeat of the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula. What Spain really needed was gold, and the kingdom was willing to do anything to stay solvent. From its inception, what we now know as New Mexico had little time for justice: justice takes time.
For anybody planning a visit to New Mexico—and its natural beauty is, to my mind, second-to-none—Came Men on Horses provides a pivotal, historical context to its continued milieu.
Guided by myths of golden cities and worldly rewards, policy makers, conquistador leaders, and expeditionary aspirants alike came to the new world in the sixteenth century and left it a changed land. Came Men on Horses follows two conquistadors--Francisco Vazquez de Coronado and Don Juan de Onate--on their journey across the southwest.
Driven by their search for gold and silver, both Coronado and Onate committed atrocious acts of violence against the Native Americans, and fell out of favor with the Spanish monarchy. Examining the legacy of these two conquistadors Hoig attempts to balance their brutal acts and selfish motivations with…
My inspiration is my life experience as a high-tech entrepreneur. Real-life events are the source of my stories. I love to explore how the corporate environment shapes businesspeople and to push the boundaries of traditional mystery. I find exploring the themes of ambition, betrayal, loyalty, and integrity important.
I really enjoyed how the writer of this book vividly describes a futuristic society changed by technology and explores important ethical issues. He shows how surveillance, corporate power, and personal freedom intersect in a world where advanced technology is everywhere.
The exciting story and tense mood made me think about how our world is changing because of technology.
"Cumulus is your new favorite surveillance-fueled dystopian novel. It's a future we can all recognize--and one that we should all be genuinely afraid of." -Ars Technica
In the not-so-distant future, economic inequality and persistent surveillance push Oakland to the brink of civil war.
Lilly Miyamoto is a passionate analog photographer striving to pursue an ever more distant dream. Huian Li is preeminent among the Silicon Valley elite as the founder and CEO of the pervasive tech giant Cumulus. Graham Chandler is a frustrated intelligence agent forging a new path through the halls of techno-utopian royalty. But when Huian rescues Lilly…
As a physicist by education and therefore fundamentally interested in how things work, my early career was spent in secure communications before moving into finance, specifically payments. I helped to found one of the leading consultancies in the field and worked globally for organizations ranging from Visa and AMEX to various governments and multiple Central Banks. I wrote, it turned out, one of the key books in the field, Identity Is The New Money (2014), and subsequently, Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (2017), about the history and future of money. The Currency Cold War (2020) was a prescient implication of digital currencies, particularly CBDC.
Brett King’s Bank 2.0: How Customer Behaviour and Technology Will Change the Future of Financial Services had an immediate and lasting impact on my career. First, it showed me that you could write about banking, payments, and financial services interestingly. Secondly, it showed me that people were out there thinking the same as me after learning from early internet-era experiments.
Brett’s subsequent work, including this book and The Rise of Technosocialism: How Inequality, AI, and Climate Will Usher in a New World, continues to help me to organize my thoughts about the role of money in a future always, always connected society.
Winner of best book by a foreign author (2019) at the Business Book of the Year Award organised by PwC Russia
The future of banking is already here ― are you ready?
Bank 4.0 explores the radical transformation already taking place in banking, and follows it to its logical conclusion. What will banking look like in 30 years? 50 years? The world’s best banks have been forced to adapt to changing consumer behaviors; regulators are rethinking friction, licensing and regulation; Fintech start-ups and tech giants are redefining how banking fits in the daily life of consumers. To survive, banks are…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
Many believe the planet's energy needs can be provided carbon-free, with solar, wind, and water carrying the load. Coal, oil, and natural gas use will fade away. It’s an appealing vision. But the numbers don’t back it up for seven billion people, many looking in on the comfortable lifestyles of the wealthy countries and thinking: “What about us?”. Humanity needs a mix of energy sources, and nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source that can deliver at scale. I’m a nuclear physicist by training, recently retired from North Carolina State University, with interests in cosmology, energy research and policy, science education, and neutron and neutrino physics.
Putting in the numbers is what Gates does in his book. Climate change is real, no question. How to address it is where the controversy comes in. I really like that from the outset, Gates proposes five questions to consider whenever climate change is discussed: what fraction of the annual carbon dioxide emission are you removing? What’s your plan for cement? How much electrical power will be needed, what’s the cost, and how much space will it take up?
But he’s optimistic that zero emissions can be reached. He argues there are many options to explore, including nuclear, and says, contrary to much of the news reporting, don’t focus on 2030; focus instead on 2050 to give the best solutions time to emerge.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions…
Many believe the planet's energy needs can be provided carbon-free, with solar, wind, and water carrying the load. Coal, oil, and natural gas use will fade away. It’s an appealing vision. But the numbers don’t back it up for seven billion people, many looking in on the comfortable lifestyles of the wealthy countries and thinking: “What about us?”. Humanity needs a mix of energy sources, and nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source that can deliver at scale. I’m a nuclear physicist by training, recently retired from North Carolina State University, with interests in cosmology, energy research and policy, science education, and neutron and neutrino physics.
I can’t say I love this book since I don’t agree with his premise: wind, water, and solar can do it all. But to be fair, he’s right that cleaning up the air by removing coal plants would be a boon to global health everywhere.
He makes an appealing case. But his vision of the future founders for me on the intermittency issue of his power sources, particularly wind and solar. How will they scale to match the needs? Where is the battery technology to support the downtime? What are the environmental impacts? How will the power get from producer to user? He is opposed to nuclear power and yet it is the closest thing to a plug-to-plug replacement for the coal fired plants we all agree should be phased out.
The world needs to turn away from fossil fuels and use clean, renewable sources of energy as soon as we can. Failure to do so will cause catastrophic climate damage sooner than you might think, leading to loss of biodiversity and economic and political instability. But all is not lost! We still have time to save the planet without resorting to 'miracle' technologies. We need to wave goodbye to outdated technologies, such as natural gas and carbon capture, and repurpose the technologies that we already have at our disposal. We can use existing technologies to harness, store, and transmit energy…
I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
Cities are not just concrete and steel anymore—they’re becoming living systems pulsing with data and possibility. Townsend’s book is a hopeful story of how hackers, planners, and dreamers redesign our urban spaces to merge bits and atoms toward building smarter, more connected communities.
This book highlights the positive potential of technology to serve the people who live and work within the most complex structures humans have ever built, enhancing the quality of life and fostering more inclusive urban spaces. At the same time, it does not shy away from addressing the challenges and ethical concerns these innovations present. This book encourages you to dream while also making you think.
We live in a world defined by urbanization and digital ubiquity, where mobile broadband connections outnumber fixed ones, machines dominate a new "internet of things," and more people live in cities than in the countryside.
In Smart Cities, urbanist and technology expert Anthony Townsend takes a broad historical look at the forces that have shaped the planning and design of cities and information technologies from the rise of the great industrial cities of the nineteenth century to the present. A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular networks and cloud…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
Inequality and fairness are basic issues in human conflict and cooperation that have long fascinated me. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, I was confronted with the extreme racial segregation of schools and neighborhoods. My Catholic upbringing taught me to cherish the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance, and my education in political economy taught me that markets can fairly and efficiently allocate resources, when legal power is evenly shared. My formal education culminated in a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, which led me to my current roles: Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Principal Economist at Gallup. I care deeply about the social conditions that create cooperation and conflict.
To understand why some workers are paid more than others, you have to understand how skills are valued and rewarded in the labor market, and how that has changed, as the economy has evolved.
Focused on the United States, Katz and Goldin provide a sweeping overview of how education leads to skills and income, drawing on the most well-established theories in economics. It misses some important causes of inequality, but is essential for understanding the one of the deepest economic forces governing wages: the supply and demand of human capital.
This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the…
