Here are 100 books that Intuition fans have personally recommended if you like
Intuition.
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Being a creative person, I studied design to make the world better… only to realise that great ideas and designs often falter because we hold ourselves back by the way we think. I had to study philosophy to understand what is limiting us. And then I left my own design work behind to study the practices expert creatives (like top design professionals) have developed to get past these roadblocks. Having discovered how they can create new frames, time and time again, it has become my mission to empower other people to do this – not only on a project level, but taking these practices to the organizational sector and societal transformation.
In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.
That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one."
The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standing…
A poignant narrative about one young immigrant’s triumph in America, inspired by true events.
1938. Eli Stoff and his parents, Austrian Jews, escape to America just after the Nazis take over their homeland. Within five years, Eli joins the US Army and, thanks to his understanding of the German language…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
A novel that is partly based on the real-life anthropologist Margaret Mead and her work in New Guinea in the 1930s, this book had me gripped from the start as it evoked the complex dynamics between the three main characters and their very different approaches to studying Indigenous people.
I was in awe of the power of story-telling in this short book. It shows us how anthropologists might hope to be impartial observers of the people they study, but in reality, these encounters change everyone.
From the author of Writers & Lovers, Euphoria is Lily King's gripping novel inspired by the true story of a woman who changed the way we understand our world.
'Pretty much perfect' - Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham
In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
I adored this fascinating tale of scientists studying chimpanzees in Africa, intertwined with the story of a failing marriage between one of those scientists, Hope Clearwater, and her mathematician husband back in England.
Reading this book, I was engrossed in the interplay between the people and the chimps, the evocations of African and English landscapes, and the subtle way in which the struggle for power within the chimps’ territory is echoed by human conflict in the same country.
If this all sounds rather complicated, William Boyd is one of the best storytellers around, so I was effortlessly carried along by the gorgeous sentences.
Utterly engaging. A novel of ideas, of big themes.William Boyd is a champion storyteller. - New York Times Book Review William Boyd's classic Brazzaville Beach has been called as a bold seamless blend of philosophy and suspense [that] nevertheless remains accessible to general readers on a level of pure entertainment.(Boston Globe). Released to coincide with Boyd's latest novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, Brazzaville Beach tells the story of a British primate-researcher who relocates to war-torn Africa in the wake of her husband's tragic descent into mental illness. Intense, exhilarating, and engrossing, Brazzaville Beach is rich in action and thought, and William Boyd,…
A poignant narrative about one young immigrant’s triumph in America, inspired by true events.
1938. Eli Stoff and his parents, Austrian Jews, escape to America just after the Nazis take over their homeland. Within five years, Eli joins the US Army and, thanks to his understanding of the German language…
I almost became a scientist. But something about my undergraduate physics labs—could it be that none of my measurements came out right?—didn't quite grab me, and I found myself, by the time I earned my degree, an observer of science instead. I was just as fascinated with fundamental particles, the origin of life, and artificial intelligence as before, but now I was doing the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. You might even call it the science of science. So perhaps I became a scientist after all, but one intent on the question of how science works and why it works so well.
I’m always talking to scientists, but I have never undertaken anything like Bruno Latour’s voyage of ethnographic discovery. He decided to figure out how science works by embedding himself in a scientific lab for two years and, discarding all preconceptions, recording what he saw there as though he were an anthropologist visiting a foreign culture.
It turns out to be an intensely political culture: rather than following prescribed laws of method and logic, scientists are making judgment calls and negotiating with one another to decide the significance of their data, making it up as they go along. Latour brings out the subjectivity of much low-level scientific decision-making, in contrast to Kuhn’s picture, in which the blueprint for thinking—the paradigm—rules over the enterprise like a catechism.
This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the…
I almost became a scientist. But something about my undergraduate physics labs—could it be that none of my measurements came out right?—didn't quite grab me, and I found myself, by the time I earned my degree, an observer of science instead. I was just as fascinated with fundamental particles, the origin of life, and artificial intelligence as before, but now I was doing the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. You might even call it the science of science. So perhaps I became a scientist after all, but one intent on the question of how science works and why it works so well.
Of course I love an exposé, heavily seasoned with gossip. Wade’s book tells the story of a race between two teams of scientists to discover the structure of an important brain hormone.
The reality of science is laid out in all its guts and glory: each team leader’s vaulting ambition to win the race, the complicated, error-prone nature of scientific research, and the tremendous and tedious effort involved from day to day—one of the team leaders later estimated he had processed 100,000 pig brains, just to extract enough of the vital substance to run through a testing regime.
In a delightful twist, one of the labs involved in the race is the very place that Latour infiltrated a few years later, and like Latour, Wade shows how the crucial decision to claim that the structure of the molecule had been discovered was as political as it was scientific.
I almost became a scientist. But something about my undergraduate physics labs—could it be that none of my measurements came out right?—didn't quite grab me, and I found myself, by the time I earned my degree, an observer of science instead. I was just as fascinated with fundamental particles, the origin of life, and artificial intelligence as before, but now I was doing the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. You might even call it the science of science. So perhaps I became a scientist after all, but one intent on the question of how science works and why it works so well.
I live in the world of words. This book plunged me delightfully into the world of images—photographs of distant galaxies and of artworks inspired by those photographs. The subject of the book is the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose patient, painstaking scrutiny of astronomical photographs at Harvard 100 years ago led her to discover the patterns in the behavior of Cepheid variable stars that opened the doors to the mapping of the universe.
The author of the book is Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist working with charcoal and textiles who juxtaposes the story of Leavitt’s breakthrough, the work of other women like Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory, the images that provided the foundation for Leavitt’s thinking, and Von Mertens’ own inspired riffs on those images.
A portrait of trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and an illustrated exploration of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868 1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens s Attention Is Discovery is a fascinating portrait of this remarkable woman who laid the foundation for modern cosmology, as well as an exploration of the power of looking…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
Cli-fi is a well-established genre now, but this was one of the very first novels that dared to engage with climate change in a realistic way. As a reader, I was engrossed by the fully fleshed-out main character, Tina, a geochemist. Her professional life on board a research ship is so beautifully written that we can practically feel the spray of salt water on her skin.
Many women in science and other professions will relate to the problems she faces as she tries to balance her personal and professional lives.
At an oceanography institute in northern California, geochemist Tina Arenas studies climates of the distant geologic past. Heedless of life beyond her circle of scientists, Tina is immersed in a world of dinosaurs and shifting continents, where time is measured in ten-million-year spansbut when both her research and an extracurricular love affair take off in directions she has not anticipated, she is catapulted into the late twentieth century world of people and politics.
Set in the early 1980s, when the problem of global warming had yet to garner much public concern, Carbon Dreams tells the story of one scientist's struggle…
Science is still assumed to be a ‘male’ subject in which women are a minority. I should know—I was one of those women when I worked as an astrophysicist. But there have always been women in science and their stories are fascinating, whether told in nonfiction or in fiction. Fiction is ideally placed to convey the emotions behind the scientific processes and the way in which human interactions and relationships influence what happens in the lab.
How would it change society if women had access to artificial wombs? I was gripped by the premise of this book and the way in which the author explores all the different ramifications of a technology developed by a woman scientist who has now become a recluse from society.
In lesser hands, the concept of external ‘pouches’ in which fetuses are grown might easily have become a straightforwardly dystopian SF novel, but Helen Sedgwick (a former scientist herself) is very careful at balancing the pros and cons and ensuring each character is well-rounded so that I felt drawn to them all, no matter what their views.
What if anyone could have a baby? A boldly original and unforgettable novel from a rising star.
Now we have equality. Now we've outgrown our biology. With FullLife's baby pouch, women are liberated and men can share the joy of childbearing. Holly's whole family knows the benefits, but Eva doesn't believe society has changed for the better and Piotr has uncovered a secret behind FullLife's glossy facade. What separates them may just bring them together, as they search for the truth about FullLife and each face a truth of their own.
I am a professor of visual studies from Canada who has always been interested in dream life—although I’ll admit, it took me a long time to treat this domain as a serious research topic (sometimes the somberness of the academy can impede more adventurous pursuits). I created the Museum of Dreams as a place to explore the social and political significance of these visions, which has led to amazing collaborations with institutions, communities, and individuals around the world. I hope this list has inspired you to attend more closely to your own dreams!
This book was my survival guide for facing a serious illness.
I learned so much from the way this self- described “Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet” remade herself in the process of recovering from cancer. Lorde is a prophet of radical transformation. And one of her key tools was her dreams.
She taught us that change comes from looking inward and by giving voice to what one finds there. And the book contains one of the most amazing dreams I’ve ever read: near the end of her life, Lorde dreamt she wanted to take a course in “language crazure”: the study of “the formation and crack and composure of words.”
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.
A Penguin Classic
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself…
As a cancer doctor, I have spent two decades dedicated to understanding the causes and therapy of cancer, how my patients experience their diagnosis and treatment, and how meaningful improvements in their experience should be reflected in the criteria we use to approve cancer drugs approval in the U.S., to improve their lives. In over 100 essays published in outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post and in two books, I sing the stories of my patients as I learn from their undaunted spirits and their utter humanity, as I try to figure out how to be a better doctor, and a better person.
Less than a century ago, having a diagnosis of cancer was almost universally a death sentence, if the word was even uttered at all.
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee (who overlapped in training with me) takes us back in time to the heroic – and at times cavalier and even brutal – procedures and discoveries that led to the very first cancer treatments, some of which are told by the people who pioneered those therapies.
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.
The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also…
