Here are 100 books that Men, Machines, and Modern Times fans have personally recommended if you like
Men, Machines, and Modern Times.
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As an Arab American, I rarely saw kids’ books about Arab Americans. And until recently, many of the books featuring Arabs and Arab Americans reiterated old stereotypes, showing them in the desert with camels, or as only an ancient (and often backwards) culture, ignoring all the exciting, modern contributions of Arabs historically, and today. In the West, Arabs are often stereotyped as hyper-religious, terrorist, or war-torn. I wanted to share kids’ books about Arab kids having fun, being creative, and in loving, caring families – books that share the richness of Arab culture in a positive way.
Ask someone to name inventions or inventors and they’ll probably think of Western culture. But Arabs and Muslims have an amazingly creative history. I loved browsing through this colorful book of facts and pictures, where I learned how Arabs invented algebra, mapped and named the stars, and made all kinds of discoveries in the fields like medicine, architecture, and language. While Europe was in the Dark Ages, Arabs and Muslim civilization flourished, and this book will reinvent how you see history!
We often think that people from a thouand years ago were living in the Dark Ages. But from the 7th century onward in Muslim civilisation there were amazing advances and inventions that still influence our everyday lives.
People living in the Muslim world saw what the Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Greek and Romans had discovered and spent the next one thousand years adding new developments and ideas. Inventors created marvels like the elephant water clock, explorers drew detailed maps of the world, women made scientific breakthroughs and founded universities, architects built huge domes larger than anywhere else on earth. astronomers mapped…
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 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.
I'm fascinated by the connection between our modern world and how we got here, and this book takes a deep dive into just that. Johnson looks at the most common objects we often accept as if they've been a part of life forever (such as eyeglass lenses), and traces not only how they were created, their impact on our lives.
I find Johnson's writing incredibly informative without being pedantic and always entertaining. He's got an eye for unintended consequences and pays homage to the spirited determination innovators tend to have. As an inventor I note his appreciation for those brilliant mistakes that turn into brilliant technologies, a great lesson in the value of taking chances.
From Steven Johnson, the bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, comes How We Got to Now, the companion book to his five-part BBC TV series.
How did the advent of refrigeration help create the golden age of Hollywood? How did the invention of flash photography help shift public opinion on the plight of New York's poorest inhabitants and bring about social reform? And what about our battle against dirt? How did that help create the microchips in our smartphones and computers?
In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson traces six essential innovations that made the modern world;…
I’ve devoted my career to helping people achieve their potential and improve their wellbeing. One of the greatest challenges we’re all facing today is the highly unnatural world of work in which we all must perform. I’ve been fortunate both to lead large teams in this environment and to guide the Fortune 1000 on how to help their people thrive in its midst. Achieving sustainable peak performance requires that we understand what we are up against. This book list is a great place to start!
Future Politics takes the conversation to the societal level, looking at how technology will change the fabric of our communities. Susskind brings an expert eye to a sweeping body of knowledge and resists simple narratives. This book is dense, but worth the effort for those looking to understand the dynamics that will shape society as we know it, for better and for worse.
Susskind is a scholar of history and politics and brings that love of fundamental political questions to this work. I enjoy how he anchors modern questions about the implications of technology for freedom, for example, in much older debates about freedom and the State.
Politics in the Twentieth Century was dominated by a single question: how much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?
Now the debate is different: to what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems - and on what terms?
Digital technologies - from artificial intelligence to blockchain, from robotics to virtual reality - are transforming the way we live together. Those who control the most powerful technologies are increasingly able to control the rest of us. As time goes on, these…
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’ve always been attracted to picking apart “taken-for-granted” things and wondered how ubiquitous and mundane technologies have become that way. What were they before they were ordinary? When I started researching and writing about push buttons, I discovered that the interfaces right under our fingers have a long and complex history. I loved reading about a time when pushing a button was both a novelty and a danger, and these recommended books similarly reframe familiar technologies as anything but familiar. I hope that these books will add a little bit of strangeness to the every day, just like they did for me!
Ainissa Ramirez is a scientist and a storyteller, and from page one of this book, I found myself transfixed by her ability to make complex things comprehensible. From the springs that make clocks work and the carbon filaments that help us see to the electrons in glass that now power computers and smartphones, Ramirez taught me how much matter matters in understanding technological developments of the present moment.
My favorite part of the book is her writing style, as she begins each chapter with an inviting anecdote, like how Abraham Lincoln’s body was carried in a funeral rail car made possible by the steel in train tracks.
A “timely, informative, and fascinating” study of 8 inventions—and how they shaped our world—with “totally compelling” insights on little-known inventors throughout history (Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction)
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines 8 inventions and reveals how they shaped the human experience:
• Clocks • Steel rails • Copper communication cables • Photographic film • Light bulbs • Hard disks • Scientific labware • Silicon chips
Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the…
In sixth grade, I got into an argument with my neighbor, Billy. We were in his backyard, looking at the stars through his new telescope. “I see Orion,” said Billy. “What do you see?” “A bunch of stars.” “I aimed it at Orion. See him?” ”I see a bunch of stars.” “Don’t you see his belt? His sword?” Billy got more agitated. “Everybody knows that’s Orion. I can’t believe you can’t see him.” “It’s not actually Orion – it was just a bunch of stars until someone told a story about it and gave it meaning.” That compelled me to write, to construct a meaning for what I experienced, and try to make sense of it.
I love books that cause me to view things in ways I never had before. Connections did that over and over again.
Burke views history through the lens of technical innovation. What his book revealed to me was that everything has its antecedents; things that came before that were the building blocks of what was to come. The more I read, the more I noticed that I was looking at things differently, not only seeing links but thinking about what could come next based on where something came from and the direction our culture was moving. This is a transformative book.
How did the popularity of underwear in the twelfth century lead to the invention of the printing press? How did the waterwheel evolve into the computer? How did the arrival of the cannon lead eventually to the development of movies?
In this highly acclaimed and bestselling book, James Burke brilliantly examines the ideas, inventions, and coincidences that have culminated in the major technological advances of today. With dazzling insight, he untangles the pattern of interconnecting events: the accidents of time, circumstance, and place that gave rise to the major inventions of the world.
I’ve spent my entire professional life dealing with how technology impacts business. I started out writing code to improve the operations of retail stores and factories. I managed teams developing products from videophones to cellphones. I’ve had a front-row seat to the evolution of the music business, from selling CDs to streaming files to billions of fans. These experiences provided the background for writing a book about tech disruption in the music business, starting with the phonograph and leading to Generative AI. The books on this list gave me the broader historical perspective I needed and the context to understand how other industries dealt with their own seismic changes.
It is impossible to overestimate the breadth and importance of Edison’s contributions to our lives. But Stross gave me a much better picture of Edison as a relentless competitor who often struggled to develop the business practices and processes to achieve commercial success with his numerous inventions.
The fact that I could visit the Menlo Park historical site in NJ to see things for myself made the book come alive.
At the height of his fame Thomas Alva Edison was hailed as “the Napoleon of invention” and blazed in the public imagination as a virtual demigod. Starting with the first public demonstrations of the phonograph in 1878 and extending through the development of incandescent light and the first motion picture cameras, Edison’s name became emblematic of all the wonder and promise of the emerging age of technological marvels.
But as Randall Stross makes clear in this critical biography of the man who is arguably the most globally famous of all Americans, Thomas Edison’s…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve always been fascinated by advertising—its creativity, its persuasive force, its sometimes relentless nature. I’m a law professor and I’ve written numerous articles on the relationship between law, technology, and advertising. A lot of what I’m interested in is psychology. Only by understanding the capabilities of audiences for advertising can judges and legislatures determine what legal limits need to be placed on advertisers.
This fascinating book combines in-depth present-day interviews with historical accounts to illuminate the similarities and differences in how current and previous generations view technology. The juxtaposition generates significant insights. The meaning of vanity, boredom, loneliness, and anger have all changed under the influence of smartphones and social media. Fernandez and Matt reveal how these innovations are not just changing our habits, but the very content of our emotional lives.
Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don't just affect how we feel-they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we're bored, we don't mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to…
Having managed to convert a passion for shopping and curiosity about digital technologies into a 25-year-long career as a journalist and publisher, and analyst and research director latterly, I’m lucky to have been able to bring my knowledge and experience to bear in advising retailers and their technology providers on strategy and best practice. So, it was a natural progression for me and my co-author to research and dissect their biggest disruptor, Amazon, as a subject for our own book. The books I’ve recommended here are some of those I felt really helped me understand the dynamics shaping today’s shopping experiences and their impact on the wider world we live in.
Written by the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, this book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand how the technological revolution will change our lives. It begins to unravel the seemingly irreconcilable differences between our insatiable appetite for convenience and consumption with equity and sustainability.
'In this book, Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum contribute significantly to one of the most important issues of our time - how to move forward in the Fourth Industrial Revolution' Jack Ma, Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group Holding, People's Republic of China
'It's no secret that technologies are reshaping the world's economies and societies. To manage the risks and spread the benefits, we have to act now, and in the interest of stakeholders everywhere' Andrew McAfee, Co-Founder, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, MIT, USA
We are on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And this one will…
The essential feature of democratic capitalism is creative destruction–put simply, constant innovation in the products and services we produce and how we produce them. My book gives a history of electricity and demonstrates the wide-angle lens we must use to fully understand this sort of innovation. The books I recommend here are among the absolute best in this regard. Importantly, in Cold War II, China is challenging America with state capitalism and creative destruction is at the heart of the battle. I have a Ph.D. in Economics and founded a consulting company that assessed new technologies in the energy sector for over 30 years.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the hot topic in the news today, but seldom do we see pundits try to explain it by drawing parallels to other communications or technological revolutions. Wheeler focuses, amongst others, on two paradigm-shifting revolutions: the invention of movable type (printing press) in the 1400s and the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s.
These two technologies upended the world and provided the foundation for massive changes brought forth by other events, including globalization, the Renaissance, scientific revolutions, and more. Wheeler does a great job of revealing the impact of these revolutions on all levels of society and provides a template for how to better understand the technological revolutions we are in the midst of today.
Network revolutions of the past have shaped the present and set the stage for the revolution we are experiencing today
In an era of seemingly instant change, it's easy to think that today's revolutions—in communications, business, and many areas of daily life—are unprecedented. Today's changes may be new and may be happening faster than ever before. But our ancestors at times were just as bewildered by rapid upheavals in what we now call “networks”—the physical links that bind any society together.
In this fascinating book, former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler brings to life the two great network revolutions of the…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I'm the mother of three children, ages 6, 3, and 1, and because I tend to write about what interests me, started to investigate the world of parenting when my eldest was born. (Prior to that, I was a food reporter and editor.) As my husband, a tech entrepreneur, kept bringing home pieces of technology that were supposed to make my life easier (spoiler alert: they rarely did), I found myself urgently trying to figure out what was best for my kids, and myself: the boring pile of blocks, or the flashy, sexy iPad? I spent years delving into the fields of neurobiology, psychology, philosophy, and pediatrics to get a better handle on these questions.
Palfrey is not just a known authority on internet law and emerging media, but also the former head of the prep school Phillips Academy, Andover; the former executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a research center that studies cyberspace and internet-related legal issues; the head of the MacArthur Foundation; and, I learned before speaking with him, a great-great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. This book, newly updated, delves into the myriad permutations of what it means to grow up in a digital world, with your every move captured and publicized. Yes, it focuses on children growing up digital, but it will be of interest to anyone who has questions and concerns about the future of privacy—meaning, just about all of us.
The first generation of children who were born into and raised in the digital world are coming of age and reshaping the world in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life are being transformed. But who are these wired young people? And what is the world they're creating going to look like? In this revised and updated edition, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a cutting-edge sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and…
