Here are 100 books that Language of Vision fans have personally recommended if you like
Language of Vision.
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I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book provides the reader with a foundation as to how we think through our bodily experience in the world. It argues that we think through the body and through experience and that bodily engagement with the world (organism-environment interaction) is used to develop more abstract modes of thought.
I find this key to understanding design generally.
In "The Meaning of the Body", Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic "Metaphors We Live By". Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning - including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors - that are all rooted in the body's physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology…
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'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book is essential to anyone who wants to come into the meaning of art, design, and architecture.
Give it time and it will undoubtedly change your life. Dewey’s central argument is that experience itself is aesthetic, that we need to pay deep attention to the quality inherent in every experience.
Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book outlines how the visual field operates at a psychological level.
I am an architect and cannot believe that we don’t teach straight from this and other Arnheim books more often. If you want to know what is happening to you, why you get chills up your spine when looking at art, read this book.
Arnheim is a psychologist, not a designer, so he breaks art down from this perspective.
For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of "The Dynamics of Architectural Form", "Film as Art", "Toward a Psychology of Art", and "Art and Visual Perception", asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. This is an indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
I am a philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and futurologist with a deep interest in the exponential growth of disruptive technologies and how they have the potential to both foster and hinder the progress of human civilisation. My mission is rooted in Transdisciplinary Philosophy and finding transdisciplinary, equitable, and sustainable solutions to identify, predict, and manage frontier risks and geopolitical fractures, both here on earth and in Outer Space. My work at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), and the WEF (as a member of various Global Future Agenda Councils) focuses on the interplay between philosophy, neuroscience, strategic culture, applied history, disruptive technologies, grand strategy, IR theory, and security.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio dismantles the false divide between biology and culture.
He shows how emotions and the biological drive for balance are at the core of human behavior, values, and institutions. He helps us understand the hidden architecture of global affairs: beneath ideology and strategy lie emotional imperatives that shape cultures and geopolitics.
Damasio affirms the centrality of human dignity as an evolved need rather than a political abstraction. His insights help illuminate why rational actors on the world stage often behave in ways that reflect fear, pride, or hope more than calculated interest.
His work also aligns with my belief that humans are Emotional Amoral Egoists: human behaviour is driven by emotional impulses, amoral actions, and egoism, in which individuals or states make decisions based on personal self-interest and power rather than ethical principles.
'Damasio undertakes nothing less than a reconstruction of the natural history of the universe ... [A] brave and honest book' The New York Times Book Review
The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life.
Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular…
I’m an American environmental historian with specialties in food and horticulture. I mostly write on alcohol, wine, garden history, and orchids, but I’ve also kept a small flock of backyard chickens since early 2020. In my preparation for my brood, I read every single chicken history and chicken-keeping book available. Here’s the best of the best.
There are an estimated 50 billion chickens to the world’s 7 billion humans, and chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus rex, so why wouldn’t you want to learn their language?This is a fun, fast book to read in anticipation of getting your first little flock. The central lesson in the book is that you should spend time with your chickens--watching them, but also listening to them. The book teaches what their core vocalizations mean, therefore also helping you in caring for their needs. I couldn’t wait to have a "chicken name" assigned to me by my laying ladies!
Best-selling author Melissa Caughey knows that backyard chickens are like any favorite pet — fun to spend time with and fascinating to observe. Her hours among the flock have resulted in this quirky, irresistible guide packed with firsthand insights into how chickens communicate and interact, use their senses to understand the world around them, and establish pecking order and roles within the flock. Combining her up-close observations with scientific findings and interviews with other chicken enthusiasts, Caughey answers unexpected questions such as Do chickens have names for each other? How do their eyes work? and How do chickens learn?
I live in the past, even as the wellness industry tells me to be present. I try to be present! Of course, I also worry about the future. Time for me, inexorably, moves both backward and forward. I’m always writing things down, scared of forgetting. How do other people do it? That’s why I read fiction (or one of the reasons). As Philip Roth said of his father in Patrimony, “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing.”
Nobody for my dollar moves between front story and back story better than the Canadian author Alice Munro, whose 2013 Nobel Prize was recognition not only for the brilliance of her career but also for the possibilities of the short story as a form.
The final story in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” is among the most lasting fiction I’ve read, a meditation on memory and its limitations, as well as the compromises people make to help those they love and have hurt.
In the her tenth collection (the title story of which is the basis for the new film Hateship Loveship), Alice Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory, and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. A tough-minded housekeeper jettisons the habits of a lifetime because of a teenager’s practical joke. A college student visiting her brassy, unconventional aunt stumbles on an astonishing secret and its meaning in her own life. An incorrigible philanderer responds with unexpected grace to his wife’s nursing-home romance.…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
I love to travel, write, and work in film and TV. My thoughts about how technology is changing people mixed with love for the Mojave Desert drives the story in my first novel, Edna in the Desert. Most of the desert has cell phone service but you can still lose it for stretches. Occasionally, there's a house in the middle of one of these expanses, and I always wondered what a teen living there would do without the usual modern distractions.
The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.
I have a reputation as an expert on the portrayal of psychopathology in contemporary cinema, and I have lectured on this topic hundreds of times in dozens of different countries. This reputation builds on five editions of Movies and Mental Illness and two editions of Positive Psychology at the Movies. I am also currently coauthoring a third book: Movies, Mini-series, and Multiculturalism: Using Films to Understand Culture, and I edit a series of film reviews for Hogrefe titled A Clinical Psychologist Goes to the Movies. Much of my career has been devoted to exploring the fascinating interface of psychopathology and media.
I found Young’s book to be tremendously helpful as I searched for films to use in my abnormal psychology courses. There are numerous recommendations for psychologically relevant films that my students found fascinating.
The book is relatively short, but it is scholarly and a quick read. Young is a clinical psychologist, and he draws on his professional background in recommending relevant films. I came away from this book with dozens of new ideas for films to use in the classroom.
Psychology at the Movies explores the insights to be gained by applying various psychological lenses to popular films including cinematic depictions of human behavior, the psychology of filmmakers, and the impact of viewing movies. Uses the widest range of psychological approaches to explore movies, the people who make them, and the people who watch them Written in an accessible style with vivid examples from a diverse group of popular films, such as The Silence of the Lambs, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, Good Will Hunting, and A Beautiful Mind Brings together psychology, film studies, mass communication, and…
Over a long lifetime, I’ve been intrigued to observe many variations on the themes of marriage, widowhood, divorce, and adultery among my friends, patients, and clients. The majority of marriages are probably happy, but these are not usually very interesting to write about, so marriages in fiction often involve some kind of conflict which leads to a more or less satisfactory resolution. I am a retired doctor, originally from England, and now living in New Zealand with my second husband, to whom I have been married for over 40 years.
Early in my medical career, I spent a year as a country GP, also worked in an old county mental asylum, and this book set in the rural west of England brought back many memories of those times.
It involves the relationship between four characters, a doctor and a farmer, and their respective wives. Both women are expecting their first child. Their isolation and hardship during the freezing winter of 1962 increase the tensions among them.
The landscape is vividly described in this detailed and evocative literary novel.
Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025
A book of the year for the Independent, Guardian, i Newspaper, Good Housekeeping 'Has an uncanny beauty and depth... A novel that travels into the darkest places of history and the strangest corners of the human mind' GUARDIAN, Summer reads
'Tender, elegant, soulful and perfect. A novel that hits your cells and can be felt there, without your brain really knowing what's happened to it. Superb' SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
I have a reputation as an expert on the portrayal of psychopathology in contemporary cinema, and I have lectured on this topic hundreds of times in dozens of different countries. This reputation builds on five editions of Movies and Mental Illness and two editions of Positive Psychology at the Movies. I am also currently coauthoring a third book: Movies, Mini-series, and Multiculturalism: Using Films to Understand Culture, and I edit a series of film reviews for Hogrefe titled A Clinical Psychologist Goes to the Movies. Much of my career has been devoted to exploring the fascinating interface of psychopathology and media.
I found this book to be full of literary and film examples of mental illness that I could bring into the courses I teach in abnormal psychology and medical ethics.
The writing is clear and engaging, and the book introduced me to numerous films that I had not previously seen. I was especially interested in the discussion of films that illustrate (a) positive psychology and (b) movies that depict therapists in action.
Providing intriguing insights for students, film buffs, and readers of various genres of fiction, this fascinating book delves into the psychology of 100 well-known fictional characters. Our favorite fictional characters from books and movies often display an impressive and wide range of psychological attributes, both positive and negative. We admire their resilience, courage, humanity, or justice, and we are intrigued by other characters who show signs of personality disorders and mental illness-psychopathy, narcissism, antisocial personality, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among many other conditions. This book examines the psychological attributes and motivations of 100 fascinating characters that include examples of…