100 Books Like Vision and Art

Meadows, a pioneer in this arena, had an extraordinary gift for making complex systems thinking accessible without dumbing it down.

She left us all too soon. I do return to this book, especially her concept of "leverage points": places within systems where small shifts create disproportionate change. Her insight that changing paradigms proves more powerful than adjusting surface parameters directly informed my research on organizational edges.

What I treasure most is how she wrote with both rigour and humility. She acknowledged that systems are messy, that we can't predict everything, that unintended consequences are inevitable; yet she shows us how to work with complexity rather than against it.

When I'm helping organizations navigate transformation, her frameworks help me identify where to intervene for maximum impact. The chapter on system traps and opportunities has probably saved me from dozens of well-intentioned but ultimately counterproductive interventions.

This is the book I gift… show more.

I cannot remember in which of his many short stories I read it, but the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges put into the mouth of one of his inimitable characters a line that has never left me: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Borges was the master of the unexpected, describing situations no one could have foreseen. I have read everything he wrote and read his stories over and over again. 

The ones I like best deal with bravery and cowardice but also with time and how time can change what we think happened in the past out of all recognition. In The Other Death, a man who ran away during a great battle, dying forty years later of natural causes, describes in his delirium how he had fought bravely.

Those who heard him provide this first-hand account to the… show more.

Do I need a reason to love this book? There are too many characters, too many subplots, too many deaths, and the ruins of beloved characters. And yet, the entire picture it presents is beautiful. That is how life is– unpredictable and chaotic.

I learned a lot about war, the mentality of people who go to fight, and the mentality of the people left behind. Above all, it was such a good feeling to finish the big book–probably one of the biggest books I had read and loved! 

This is it. The Bible of the Mind. The Codex of Consciousness. The Scroll of the Soul. Stephen Grossberg’s masterwork is a comprehensive mathematical account of human cognition.

Pick any part of the brain, any mental function—a sodium channel, a pyramidal neuron, a circadian circuit, a cerebellar lobe, audio recognition, hate, melodic preferences, linguistic meaning, throwing a spear at a target, visual memory, schizophrenia, free will—and Dr. Grossberg has put math to it. You’ll find that math in this book.

But be forewarned: this book is very, very, very challenging. The math isn’t derived from some other field of science. Because consciousness is not a subset of electromagnetism or a variety of planetary orbit. Consciousness is its own unique thing in the cosmos, and demands its own unique math.

Sophisticated, ornery math. Inaccessible math for most of us, sadly, but if you want to take a shot at the Finnegan’s… show more.

Galen Rowell was, to use Galen’s own term, a phantom mentor to me as a 29-year-old freelance writer and photographer specializing in the outdoors.

The photographs, anecdotes, and insights into the craft of landscape and outdoor-adventure photography found in this book inspired me to look with more observant eyes at the beauty of the natural world and to hone the skills required to capture the magical moments I was experiencing in the wilderness.

Understanding natural light in all its varieties is crucial for a landscape photographer. This book is still one of the best books I’ve read on the science of atmospheric optics, the study of how sunlight interacts with our atmosphere.

After reading it, I understood for the first time why the sky on a clear day is blue, why sunrise and sunset light is sometimes red, how rainbows form, and where in the sky to find them. We often fail to see phenomena we don’t understand because we don’t know where to look. Rainbows, Halos, and Glories helped me understand natural light, which helped me appreciate the ever-changing beauty of the sky.

Over the last 10 years or so, the rapid advances in digital photography have created a whole new genre of photography: landscape photography at night. I became fascinated with the genre when I saw a slide show given by night photographer and author Grant Collier.

In an effort to master the subject, I picked up Grant Collier’s book. Grant is deeply knowledgeable on the topic and conveys his knowledge in readily understandable ways. My own photography benefited greatly as a result.

I loved this book because it deepened my understanding of light, lenses, cameras, how humans view color, and the limits of human vision. I strongly believe that the more I know about the tools I use to create my images and how my images are perceived by my viewers, the better a photographer I will become.

Reading this book took me one long step further toward that goal.

This book is a lively, questioning, and comprehensive survey of American photography, from its beginnings to the present. It analyzes achievements in each of the genres, from portraiture, through landscape, to documentary, fashion, etc. It treats individual photographic artists, from Avedon to Weegee, from the views of New York taken by Berenice Abbott to J.T. Zealy’s likenesses of enslaved Africans. American Photography is always concerned to underscore what photographs have to tell us about major aspects of American culture: race and ethnicity, gender and identity, business and technology, religion, and region. It also has numerous well-reproduced images; illuminating sidebars and boxes on such topics as the daguerreotype or picture magazines; a helpful timeline; and notes on further reading and viewing. The book was expanded and retitled as Photography in America in 2015, but the first edition still holds up. 

It’s a huge book! Huge in size, huge in the image reproductions, huge in the photographic artist’s effort to construct composite images of dramatic international scenes from many iconic places, such as Times Square, Paris, Rome, National Parks of the World, that transform from day to night.

Yes, all in the same image! One side is night that slowly across the image melds into day. Technological marvel, but no kitsch here. Hundreds of hours, thousands of images layered together to create an entirely new art form.