Books like Lo-TEK

I love the way that you get to travel around the world with this book. Its simple idea must have been a logistical nightmare to photograph; finding a home, people who would be willing to have the inconvenience of having all of their possessions taken out of their homes and placed in front of them.

Being nosey and inquisitive myself I enjoy the way you can peak into these families lives through the objects they own (or don’t own). I find the differences in the families circumstances and possessions a poignant visual representation of consumerism.

Concrete is the second most-consumed substance in the world after water.

But modern concrete has an endurance problem: today's steel-reinforced material suffers from "concrete cancer," which will cause widespread degradation. By comparison, non-steel-reinforced Roman concrete structures, such as the Ponte Sant'Angelo or the Pantheon, will long outlast our modern bridges, highways, and towers.

Robert Courland's book is full of such eye-opening insights that will forever change how readers think about this omnipresent material.

Measuring environmental impact typically involves inscrutable measures like equivalent carbon emissions.

The Ecological Footprint method, devised by Wackernagel and Rees at the University of British Columbia, employs a much more palpable calculation of resource utilization and emissions: land. By demonstrating how the flows of global energy, materials, and waste can be converted into land-area equivalents, the authors make environmental impact tangible.

The book clearly articulates the most essential sustainability metric there is: one-Earth living.

A visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, is on most architects' bucket lists.

The virologist Jonas Salk, who commissioned architect Louis Kahn to design the significant project, is best known for developing one of the first successful polio vaccines. Less familiar is this remarkable book, which Salk wrote with his son Jonathan, that explores the future of human societies.

By applying scientific principles about how organisms respond to resource limitations, the authors project the significant resource challenges and opportunities that await future human generations. The book looks beyond the population explosion to explore its mysterious aftermath. Indeed, the transition is already underway.

I wanted to end my list with another book by an Indian author. This is a text similar to Acharya's, a text that impressed me when I found it and that almost no one cites.

This is an author who argues not only that there are external influences in ancient India but that it is a constant in Indian history and that there is no reason to be ashamed of it. Why should there be? It is a basic text in the good sense of the word, a brave book that deserves to be reread.

I remember the first time I realized I was in a city without addresses—Dubai, as it happened—and I was dumbfounded that such a place could exist, let alone succeed. In this book, Deirdre Mask unearths the hidden history of street addresses—a relatively recent invention from the Age of Enlightenment—and notes how many places ranging from rural West Virginia to hyper-modern Tokyo and Seoul do just fine without them.

In this wild ride from addressless ancient Rome to meticulously gridded and numbered Chicago, Mask explains how addresses have been used to keep track of citizens (for both good and ill) and how street names allow urban communities to define themselves by, say, changing Robert E. Lee Avenue into Martin Luther King Boulevard.

When British scientist and novelist CP Snow lamented that society had become divided between scientific and literary cultures, he sought a way to bridge that gap. He needed to look no further than Mary Terrall’s hero, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who was the very model of a modern scientist-artist.

Maupertuis achieved early scientific fame by leading a geodesic voyage to Lapland (modern-day Sweden and Finland) in 1736, where, after a year of fighting extreme cold and summer plagues of mosquitoes, he proved Newton’s theory that the Earth was flattened at the poles. Maupertuis became a regular fixture in the cafes and literary salons of 18th-century Paris and Berlin and helped transform European society in the Age of Enlightenment.  

This is a less sophisticated mystery than the other four but doesn’t suffer for that reason.

Mickie Mckinney is a schoolboy detective and the setting is a school. I like the conceit that his office is in a cupboard under the stairs. The crimes are not sophisticated, which will suit some readers, and the humour is good.

The Enlightenment is often associated with intellectual changes. But the book sheds a new light on this “Age of Reason” by showing how emotions and feelings played a crucial role in this intellectually and sensorially dynamic period. Purnell tells this change by providing many interesting, and funny, episodes. My favorite, among others, is the seventeenth-century vogue for perfumes made of the excretions of the civet cat or the musk deer, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that floral scents became popular. This shift had to do with people’s ideas about health, cleanliness, and naturalness that changed over time. You will learn how and why people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about the senses, how they experience their sensory world, and how our sensory experience came about over the course of a few hundred years.

The philosopher and polemicist Sala-Molins fired a bow shot across Enlightenment scholarship with this book in 1992. In an era when most French scholars of the Enlightenment continued to study (and valorize) the figureheads of the era, Sala-Molins attributed the supposed silence of the philosophes regarding the horrors of chattel slavery to deep-seated racism. More polemically he called out individual thinkers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, the latter of whom Sala-Molins memorably called a négrier or slave trader. Peu importe or little does it matter that the book itself is rife with historical inaccuracies. The Dark Side of the Light was and is a powerful cri de coeur directed at scholars of the eighteenth century, a plea for them to look more carefully at the legacies – good and bad – that we now associate with the Enlightenment.