Here are 100 books that Origins of the Modern Mind fans have personally recommended if you like
Origins of the Modern Mind.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
After decades of teaching in graduate school as well as a career in acting, and writing 11 produced plays in NYC, then writing films & television in Hollywood, and later becoming the author of 8 published books—both fiction and non-fiction, and marriage and motherhood—I began to reflect on a long and adventurous life, which led to writing a memoir.
As an undergraduate, I loved this memoir of C. G. Jung, which led me years later to obtain a graduate degree in Jungian Psychology.
The most accessible of Jung’s writings are recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, who was trained by Jung. This unique memoir reveals not only the origin of Jung’s psychological discoveries but the man behind the genius. With humor and heart, Jung, in his 80's, looks back on a remarkable life and work.
Ahead of his time, Jung leaves a valuable and timeless legacy for today.
'I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals' Carl Jung
An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings.
In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that book, composed of conversations with his colleague and friend Aniela Jaffe, as well as chapters written in his own hand,…
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…
A certain idea kept cropping up in my reading, triggered perhaps by Richard Dawkins's conception in The Selfish Gene, of the “meme.” It seemed that the meme had a life of its own. Then I came across Richerson’s and Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone, and they laid it out: culturesevolve. And they evolve independently of the genes—free of genetic constraints in an idea or thought to contribute to its own survival. That is up to the multitude of people who happen to come across it. I now have a new book readying for publication:How Cognition, Language, Myth, and Culture Came Together To Make Us What We Are.
Campbell, to me, is the dean of writers on myth. I met him once, through a professor at Hollins University who, at her graduation, had awardedAnna, my wife-to-be, the first three volumes of The Hero of a Thousand Faces, as a prize in English Literature (the fourth, Creative Mythology, was yet to be published).
After we met, I learned that Campbell had edited the Penguin Portable Jung – and it is that book that set me on a course of study and writing on myth and literature that I have pursued ever since.
As a final note, Campbell also co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, a book that many years later led me into James Joyce’s masterwork, Finnegans Wake – to me, the apotheosis of mythic literature.
The author of such acclaimed books as Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth discusses the primitive roots of mythology, examining them in light of the most recent discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology
A certain idea kept cropping up in my reading, triggered perhaps by Richard Dawkins's conception in The Selfish Gene, of the “meme.” It seemed that the meme had a life of its own. Then I came across Richerson’s and Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone, and they laid it out: culturesevolve. And they evolve independently of the genes—free of genetic constraints in an idea or thought to contribute to its own survival. That is up to the multitude of people who happen to come across it. I now have a new book readying for publication:How Cognition, Language, Myth, and Culture Came Together To Make Us What We Are.
Of seminal importance to an understanding of the world is the conception of a collective unconscious grounded in inheritable archetypes. These evolve: how could it be otherwise—everything in nature evolves. And that means that our consciousness, too, evolves. Its evolution is, in a sense, teleological: from the less conscious to the more consciousness. This is to say that the evolution of the archetypes permits the increasing distillation of consciousness from the vastness of the collective unconscious. I believe that language, which is indivisible from consciousness, did not begin to materialize until about 10,000 BC. I may have been virtually alone in this view, but computerized models of evolutionary linguists today suggest that the key to language capability may have been enfolded in our make-up from our earliest beginnings.
The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying…
A certain idea kept cropping up in my reading, triggered perhaps by Richard Dawkins's conception in The Selfish Gene, of the “meme.” It seemed that the meme had a life of its own. Then I came across Richerson’s and Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone, and they laid it out: culturesevolve. And they evolve independently of the genes—free of genetic constraints in an idea or thought to contribute to its own survival. That is up to the multitude of people who happen to come across it. I now have a new book readying for publication:How Cognition, Language, Myth, and Culture Came Together To Make Us What We Are.
At about 10,000 BC, there appeared in Mesopotamia female statuettes, clearly privileging fertility. They came to be associated with the bucranium – the head and horns of the wild bull aurochs, and, over time, the pair took on the unmistakable stamp of a goddess and her consort, a bull.
Jacques Cauvin, who conducted their excavation, was able to link the pair with the birth of agriculture, and in so doing he found that the individual came, for the first time, to stand in a worshipful posture toward an other-worldly existent – bringing about for humanity thereby an entirely new cultural orientation. Indeed, the pair bore “all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominated the oriental pantheon, “right up to the time of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel” (p. 31).
Jacques Cauvin has spent many years researching the beginnings of the Neolithic in the Near East, excavating key sites and developing new ideas to explain the hugely significant cultural, social and economic changes which transformed mobile hunter-gatherers into the first village societies and farmers in the world. In this book, first published in 2000, the synthesis of his mature understanding of the process beginning around 14,000 years ago challenges ecological and materialist interpretations, arguing for a quite different kind of understanding influenced by ideas of structuralist archaeologists and members of the French Annales school of historians. Defining the Neolithic Revolution…
I became fascinated by the origin and evolution of life as a chemistry student after watching the TV series The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. I have been thrilled by the dramatic breakthroughs that have occurred since then, and I’ve written many articles and reviews on this and related topics for newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, Independent, The Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, New Humanist, World Medicine, New Statesman, and three books on various aspects of the evolution of both life and technology, including Thinking Small and Large.
I love the way that Everything Evolves insists that the way that technology develops really is the same process as evolution in nature.
People have often used this idea metaphorically, but Vellend shows how the concept of evolution didn’t have to start in biology. It’s just that Darwin’s idea had maximum impact for obvious reasons.
The book reinforces the ideas in Peter Brannen’s, showing that there is now a fresh way of looking at, yes, Everything.
How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence
Everything Evolves reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.
Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the…
I have spent my career studying the evolution of female biology. My PhD thesis was on the evolution of pregnancy and menstruation. I am currently a researcher at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging studying the evolution of menopause. I also inhabit a female body and have a personal interest in understanding how and why my own body works the way it does. As a lifelong teacher who has taught high school, college, and graduate students, I am passionate about sharing what I know with other women. I hope you enjoy these fascinating books about the female body and its amazing evolutionary history.
Mother Nature completely changed the way I think about motherhood. As a mother of 4 kids, I am consumed both by my maternal responsibilities and with guilt for not meeting those responsibilities perfectly.
In this paradigm-shifting book, Hrdy takes her readers on a journey through human history and the animal world to reveal a different view of motherhood than the one mothers are conditioned to have—that mothers should sacrifice everything for their children.
Hrdy uses evolutionary theory, experimental evidence, and examples from nature to show how mammalian and primate mothers evolved to skillfully deal with the competing demands of survival and motherhood. Our bodies and brains are exquisitely built to balance our own needs with those of our children.
Mother Nature is the big new popular science book for the end of the millennium. It starts from the standpoint of Darwinist evolutionary theory, but turns it on its head. It is the first such major book by a women, qho ia professor of SocioBiology at the University of California, trained in Anthropology and an expert on Primates in particular. She's also one of the few women members fo the US Academy of Sciences. It's not for nothing that Nature is known as Mother Nature. Evolution is controlled, Hrdy demonstrates, not by the male of species, but by the female…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
I have been enamored with archaeology and evolutions since childhood when my parents handed me my first book on these subjects: Ruth Moore's Man, Time and Fossils, and The Testimony of the Spade by Geoffrey Bibby. These themes have guided my study and teaching. I retired as a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the SUNY system. I am the author or editor of eight books in areas related to this interest. My focus on archaeology and cultural evolution and my counter-intuitive conclusion that workload and illness often increased with the evolution of civilization were stimulated by the works of Lee and Boserup.
This book revolutionized our common understanding of human history by showing that the smallest and simplest (most “primitive”) human populations, mobile rather than sedentary, subsisting only on wild foods, contra the standard Hobbesian characterization of primitive life, actually had relatively light workloads and often were better nourished and more disease free than contemporary agriculturalists [and I might add many historic civilizations].
This book excited me and started me on my counterintuitive interpretation of the evolution of human economies.
Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
My first passion, as a youngster, was speculative fiction—stories and comics that set the imagination ablaze with visions of wondrous possibilities and impossibilities. Later, my experiences of being queer, transgender, and autistic led me to an academic career in which I helped create the field of Neurodiversity Studies and something called Neuroqueer Theory (which is what you get when you mix Queer Theory and neurodiversity together and shake vigorously). These days I’m back to writing fiction, including the urban fantasy webcomic Weird Luck, and I’m thrilled to find myself part of an emerging wave of neuroqueer speculative fiction. Here are some of the best so far...
The Outsideis a gripping sci-fi novel with a queer autistic protagonist, written by an autistic author who perfectly conveys the flavor of autistic thinking. This one’s set far in the future, in a galaxy-spanning theocracy ruled by powerful artificial intelligences that have set themselves up as gods. Scientist Yasira Shien has developed a brilliant new energy drive. The problem? Turns out the drive taps into an extradimensional reality called the Outside, which, true to its name, exists outside ordinary spacetime—and which is capable of spilling over catastrophically into the material world. Highly original world-building blended with classic space opera. Compelling characters and a plot that had me hooked all the way. Oh, and it’s the first book in a trilogy!
Autistic scientist Yasira Shien has developed a radical new energy drive on board The Pride of Jai that could change the future of humanity. But when she activates it, reality warps, destroying the space station and everyone left inside.
The Gods declare her work heretical, and Yasira is abducted by their agents. Instead of simply executing her, they offer mercy if she'll help them hunt down a bigger target: her mysterious, vanished mentor.
With her homeworld's fate in the balance, Yasira must choose who to trust: the Gods and their ruthless post-human angels, or the rebel scientist whose unorthodox mathematics…
I’m a journalist and a tinkerer. I’m fascinated not only by how things work but by how small levers can move mountains. Growing up in the workshop of my grandfather, an old Boston boatwright, I was mesmerized by the idea that a small rudder could maneuver a huge vessel. In college, I fell in love with how a small idea or expression could redirect a course of research or a country. As a self-taught maker of things, I appreciate how technologies empower us. I’ve chosen these books because they’re examples of how small ideas become things, lines of research, or patterns of thinking that shift human progress in unknowable ways.
I love gutsy books by outsiders, and Ms. Saxena, as a woman of color working in the Ivy League and the worlds of artificial intelligence and Big Data, is very much an outsider.
That makes her deep knowledge and insights into how AI and Big Data are changing business even that much more interesting. Plus, this is one of the only books I’ve read that explains how artificial intelligence works in a clear, direct way that doesn’t assume the reader already knows about things like machine learning and neural nets.
Have you heard about artificial intelligence (AI) and big data but felt they are technologies too big or too complicated for you or your business? Do you imagine AI as a Hollywood science fiction stereotype or something in the far and distant future?
Take heart. AI is none of those things. It's part of our everyday lives, and it has the power to transform your business.
This book will put AI, big data, the cloud, robotics, and smart devices in context. It will reveal how these technologies can dramatically multiply any businesses-including yours-by strategically using your data's latent, transformative…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
As a Chief AI Officer and Strategic AI Expert, I've earned the nickname "AI Whisperer" for my intuitive ability to bridge the gap between artificial intelligence and real-world business applications. My fascination with cycles and patterns, which I explored deeply in my master's thesis on Kondratieff waves, led me to recognize AI's transformative potential long before it became mainstream. With over 25 years of experience blending business strategy, sales leadership, and technological innovation, I've helped countless organizations harness AI's power to revolutionize their operations. What truly sets my heart racing is seeing how AI innovations can unlock human potential.
I actually hugged this book after finishing it! Finally, finally, someone explained GenAI in a way that made my heart race with possibility!
I've been working in tech for years, but this book had me scribbling notes like a possessed person. Every chapter felt like unwrapping a present—I kept running to my partner, saying, "Listen to this!"
An indispensable look at the next frontier of technological advancement and its impact on our world
Generative AI is rewriting the rulebook with its seemingly endless capabilities, from crafting intricate industrial designs, writing computer code, and producing mesmerizing synthetic voices to composing enchanting music and innovating genetic breakthroughs. In Generative AI in Practice, renowned futurist Bernard Marr offers readers a deep dive into the captivating universe of GenAI. This comprehensive guide introduces you to the basics of this groundbreaking technology and outlines the profound impact that GenAI will have on business and society. Professionals, technophiles, and anyone with an interest…
