Books like Black Software — picked by fans

Until the 1980s, it seemed like Route 128 in Massachusetts was set to be the dominant location for the tech industry. What could have been a dry look at comparative corporate organizational structures is instead a compelling analysis of the contrasting cultures, business climates, and other forces resulting in the ultimate victory of Silicon Valley. The book is full of fascinating details that I haven’t read anywhere else like the role that California community colleges played in ensuring companies could swiftly train new employees.

A memoir that covers Losse’s experience working at Facebook from 2005 when she was the company’s 51st hire. Losse weaves her own experience—at first as a low-level employee in customer support and later as Mark Zuckerberg’s ghostwriter—with sharp analysis of Silicon Valley’s changing role in politics and culture. A powerful reckoning with her own complicity working for a company that exhibited dangerous “totalitarian” ambition from its very beginning.

A thorough look at the origins of personal computing and connections between computer users beginning in the 1960s that highlights the BASIC programming language and The Oregon Trail game. Shines a light on the role that universities and the education system played in fostering networks between users.

Beginning with Stewart Brand’s influence through his projects like The Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, and Wired magazine, this book examines the unique culture of Silicon Valley. An essential history and one that clarifies the tech industry’s seemingly contradictory values of revolution and corporate power.

This classic book, which has been recently updated, is a must-read for all parents or people who work with children. Tatum does an excellent job of describing how children think about race and the role race plays in their lives. She describes how racial identity develops for Black children, for White children, and for mixed-race children and clearly identifies why it is important for all children. By using lots of quotes and conversations with children and teens, this accessible read leads to “Aha!” moments in every chapter. 

Bill Isaacs offers a pioneering approach to communicating in business and in life. His book starts with the assumption that people don’t know how to talk in a way that will make it easier for them to work together with others to solve shared problems. His company, DIAlogos, has organized dialogues in a wide variety of public and private settings. In the book, his discussion of “the architecture of the invisible” makes clear why better communication begins with listening, respect, suspending our own opinions, and finding our voice. I’m particularly taken with his discussion of how we can “cultivate organizational and system dialogue.” He also has some important ideas about how we can return to civility in our public discourse in the current time when “Red” and “Blue” have forgotten how to communicate at all. 

Cassette tapes of Muslim sermons played by taxi drivers in Cairo set the stage for this profound investigation of the intersection of sound, spiritualism, and technology. The tapes, Hirschkind argues, are not mechanisms for social control as much as jumping-off points for Muslims to find their way towards ethical self-improvement. 

All the books being recommended on this topic see memory and remembering as being structured and directed by the views and perspectives of the social groups to which people belong. Ever since Bartlett and Halbwachs, we have come to see memory as in many ways moulded by particular mental schemata and configurations associated with the various groups that exist within a social whole, yet the notion of collective memory is beset with problems: problems of exaggeration, reification, functionalism, and more. It is therefore fitting that in this edited collection the work of Halbwach in particular is regarded critically, and extended historically, while also being recognised as providing the necessary starting point: "social groups construct their own images of the world by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past" (p. 3).

As we saw with Danziger, the social frameworks of memory as well as the kinds of memory being actively… show more.

Another intimate view of Mediterranean social history, The Captive Sea: brings to light the way networks of captivity and ransom operating between Hapsburg Spain, Ottoman Algiers, Morocco, and beyond helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hershenzon tracks the interactions of various agents involved in the ransom economy— imperial bureaucrats, clergy, merchants, diplomats, renegades.

Combining a wide-angle frame of geopolitics with the particular cases registered in letters, petitions, Inquisition reports, and other archival sources, he reconstructs some remarkable stories that illustrate the complexity of networks of interaction and circulation: stories of individual captives like Fatima, daughter of an Algerian Janissary (slave soldier), or the connected histories of captives (in some cases of quite modest social station) from both sides of the religious divide, repatriated through the correspondence of wives or mothers back home. 

This is another fave of mine because the protagonist is a boy who collects words (rather than stamps or baseball cards). He saves the words he’s learned in a scrapbook until one day, he trips and his words go flying into the air and land in a jumble on the floor. What he discovers are odd and interesting pairings of words he wouldn’t have thought go together. The result is poetic. Finally, he takes a big sack of words to the top of a hill and scatters them into the wind so other kids will make their own connections. This book is fantastic for kids and adults who love words.