Here are 100 books that Acid West fans have personally recommended if you like
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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…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
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" *…
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.
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…
I’ve researched children’s digital lives since the internet first arrived in many people’s homes. Recently, I noticed parents’ concerns weren’t listened to – mostly, researchers interview parents to find out about their children rather than about parents themselves. Worse, policymakers often make decisions that affect parents without consulting them. So, in Parenting for a Digital Future we focused on parents, following my previous books on Children and the Internet and The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. As a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I love that moment of knocking on a family’s door, and am always curious to see what I will find!
As a researcher, I’m always looking out for fresh ways to approach familiar problems.
Three problems really bother me. One is the idea of reducing all the different types of media, and all the different ways families use media, to a simplistic formula – screen time. As if we could just measure screen time, reduce it by turning parents into screen time police, and thereby solve the problems of our digital age.
Another is the idea of seeing parents as having all the power and children as willful or ignorant or naughty and so needing to be controlled. As if families weren’t trying to be more democratic and as if parents had nothing to learn from their children. The third is the idea that families have got to work all this out on their own, as if digital innovators and the wider society weren’t in some ways part of the…
Children and Families in the Digital Age offers a fresh, nuanced, and empirically-based perspective on how families are using digital media to enhance learning, routines, and relationships. This powerful edited collection contributes to a growing body of work suggesting the importance of understanding how the consequences of digital media use are shaped by family culture, values, practices, and the larger social and economic contexts of families' lives. Chapters offer case studies, real-life examples, and analyses of large-scale national survey data, and provide insights into previously unexplored topics such as the role of siblings in shaping the home media ecology.
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…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have had a long, fruitful career as a business leader, entrepreneur, and inventor in the energy and chemicals industry with seven scientific patents. I'm the founder/CEO of Chem Systems, Inc., lectured at MIT about entrepreneurship and innovation, and recently wrote a book exploring industrial inventions tracing back to the Industrial Revolution. All inventors share the same qualities: they see opportunities, stay persistent, and maintain their faith in the value of their innovation. The books on this list celebrate those qualities and honor the innovators who embody them. The authors highlight the common threads binding past, present, and future together, showing how humanity's progress depends on innovation.
There are plenty of books on Edison, but what I love about Freeberg's telling is that he focuses on more than just the invention itself but its impacts. This book gives a powerful sense of how exciting Edison's incandescent light bulb was and how it transformed America—one light, one household, and one business at a time.
It's also a book that brings history to life, something I really appreciate as an author, not just an inventor. In the "age" of Edison, the late nineteenth century, the world was on the cusp of modernity. It's remarkable to consider just how far we've come in such a short amount of time.
A sweeping history of the electric light revolution and the birth of modern America
The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but more than any other invention, Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb marked the arrival of modernity, transforming its inventor into a mythic figure and avatar of an era. In The Age of Edison, award-winning author and historian Ernest Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it and capturing the wonder Edison's…
I learned about leadership and building organizations in a volunteer, community-based organization growing up. I ran my first leadership workshop as an 18-year-old for 15-16-year-old kids, and at its peak, led a passionate group of 200+ kids. I then woke up from that dream into a “real job” as a product manager in a company selling products like bath soap and shampoo, and later as a strategy consultant. It was there that I noticed the significant pain people were experiencing in the corporate world, and I realized I could help leaders build organizations where both the business and its people could thrive.
Chapter 8! Chapter 8! What a gem on what it really takes to build innovative cultures. Pisano, a Harvard business school professor, articulated ideas that I had observed in my work across Google and with startups around the world—ideas I wish I had authored myself.
The core idea that stood out to me was how people often romanticize innovative cultures as being all about the “bunnies and cotton candy”—like having tolerance for failure or zero hierarchy—while overlooking the harder, more crucial aspects, such as intolerance for incompetence and the discipline required to kill projects that aren’t working.
His insights resonated deeply with my experiences, providing clarity and language for concepts I’ve long recognized but struggled to put into words.
Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano's remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation.
He begins with the simply reality that bigger companies are, well, different. Demanding that they "be like Uber" is no…
I’ve been fascinated by the power of technology to make the world a better place since I read Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo at the age of six. I was born in 1969, the year of the first crewed moon landing and the first connection on ARPANET, the network that started the internet. Space, technology, and the future have always been central to my career as a writer. I began investigating DARPA while writing a book on commercial spaceflight, was amazed by the breadth of technologies the agency helped launch and made it the topic of my next book.
Somewhere between wide-eyed optimism about the potential of human ingenuity and skepticism about technology’s ability to save us from ourselves lies Annie Jacobsen’s book. It covers DARPA’s founding and the first fifty years before reporting on projects active at the time of the book’s writing (it came out in 2015).
The result is a balanced mix of history, analysis, and you-are-there reporting in a highly readable narrative. The book contains the best explanation I’ve seen of DARPA’s controversial, post-911 Total Information Awareness program and raises important questions about when, how, and why governments should conduct research and development in secret.
No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever history of the organization, New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen draws on inside sources, exclusive interviews, private documents and declassified memos to paint a picture of DARPA, or "the Pentagon's brain," from its Cold War inception in 1958 to the present.
This is the book on DARPA - a compelling narrative about this clandestine intersection of science and the American military and the often frightening results.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
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…
