Louis Birnbaum, Red Dawn at Lexington: "If They Mean to Have a War, Let It Begin Here!"

Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson

Sterling North, Rascal

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Lois Lowry, The Giver

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy consisting of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King

Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

Georgie Anne Geyer, Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

David Packard, The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company

Harvey Mackay, Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eatern Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate You Competition

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

"I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility. . . .I didn't find it. It's not there any more. Maybe it'll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves that it was ever there."

-- A human settler of Mars while gazing back on war-torn Earth

Harvey Mackay, Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You'll Need

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Garrison Keillor, The Book of Guys

Pepper White, The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT

Christopher Grayling & Christopher Langdon, Just Another Star: Anglo-American Relations Since 1945

Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

"This book takes the radical position that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right."

Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation

James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas

Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System

"The most important step for a country to achieve a high-bandwidth infrastructure is to encourage competition in telecommunications." (p. 125)

Edward Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy

Does society exist to serve economies or should it be the other way around?

"It is obvious that personal economic insecurity is the other side of the coin of turbo-capitalist opportunity."

Edmund Mennis, How the Economy Works: An Investor's Guide to Tracking the Economy (Second Edition)

From Bob Brinker's reading list. He hosts a radio talk-show every Saturday and Sunday.

James Carville, Sticking': The Case for Loyalty

Carville's Last Rule of Loyalty: "Stick with your friends. And stick it to your enemies."

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?" -- Ellsworth Toohey (p. 368)

"They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do." -- Kent Lansing about building the Aquitania hotel (p. 333)

P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty

"There is a strong aesthetic element to the environmentalist movement. Most modern people who have been to college will call any view without man-made features beautiful. The fact that they would rather be in a motel than on an ice floe doesn't make them liars. They do think the ice floe is prettier. The 'exterior decorator' motive behind exological activism is so prevalent that it has led Jerry Taylor [the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute] to say, 'Environment is a luxury good.' (p. 182)
"Money unsaddles the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or, anyway, mounts them on donkeys. Famine, Plague, Destruction, and Death become Heart Disease, Cancer, Car Wrecks, and Accidents in the Home." (p. 332)

Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

"Dr. Gammon was led by his survey [of the British Health Service] to promulgate what he calls a theory of bureaucratic displacement: the more bureaucratic an organization, the greater the extent to which useless work tends to displace useful work--an interesting extention of one of Parkinson's laws." (p. 114)

"The capital resources of the nation are not increased by using the tax collector rather than the stock market to mobilize them." (p. 222)

Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic

"Each person's interpretation of facts respresents prior experiences, and the facts have no meaning whatsoever apart from the interpretation" (p. 29)

Barbara Waugh, Garage for the World: Story of a Corporate Revolutionary

Bob Woodward, Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education

"I wanted to do good and do well." (p. 15)

"I learned that day to separate what I thought was right from what I thought would work, a skill that would serve me well -- at a price. Judging how the world will judge what you do -- how a position will "play" -- is an essential political skill. If you can't predict what will work, you can't survive in office. If you don't keep your job, you can't achieve what you think is right. The danger is when you stop caring about the difference between being right and being employed, or fail to notice that you don't know what the difference is anymore." (p. 19)

Congressman Tony Coelho's advice after George was replaced as Clinton's Communications Director: "Nobody will remember what happened to you. They'll remember how you handle it." (p. 151)

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."--TS Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (p. 382)

Randy Komisar, The monk and the riddle: the education of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur

Robert Reich, The Future of Success

"How do we reap the advantage of the new economy while preventing its excesses and tempering its injustices?" (p. 242)

Richard Wagner, Designs on Space: Blueprints for 21st Century Space Exploration

Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage

"[Senator Lucius Lamar] told of an incident which he swore had occured during the war. Lamar, in the company of other prominent military and civilian officers of the Confederacy, was on board a blocade runner making for Savannah harbor. Although the high-ranking officers after consultation had decided it was safe to go ahead, Lamar related, the Captain sent Sailor Billy Summers to the top mast to look for Yankee gunboats in the harbor, and Billy said he had seen ten. That distinguished array of officers knew where the Yankee fleet was, and it was not in Savannah; and they told the Captan that Billy was wrong and the ship must proceed ahead. The Captain refused, insisting that while the officers knew a great deal more about military affairs, Billy Summers on the top mast with a powerful glass has a much better opportunity to judge the immediate situation at hand. It later developed that Billy was right, Lamar said, and if they has gone ahead they would have all be captured." (p. 175)

James Burke, The Knowledge Web, From Electronic Agents to Stonehenge and Back--and Other Journeys Through Knowledge

Micheal Keating and Pierre Bricaud, Reuse Methodology Manual for System-On-A-Chip Designs, Second Edition

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

"At the heart of this book is the thesis that 90 to 95 percent reductions in material and energy are possible in developed nations without diminishing the quality of life or quality of services that people want." (p. 176)

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The three rules of Epidemics are The Law of the Few--Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen--, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context.
"As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression [the geometric progression], because the end result--the effect--seems out of proportion to the cause. To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about propotionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly." (p. 11) [Does the butterfly flapping its wings in China really cause a storm on the other side of the globe?]
"Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context...The questions are posed to the Contestant, and after the quiz is over, both parties are asked to estimate the level of general knowledge of the other. Invariably, the Contestants rate the Questioners as being a lot smarter than they themselves are." (p. 160)

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

The authors are members of the Harvard Negotiation Project which also produced "Getting to Yes".

Peter Bernstein, Capital ideas : the improbable origins of modern Wall Street

[Economist Paul Samuelson notes] Stanford in those days [1934] "was in the boondocks." (p. 94)

"Suppose that the people with inside information religiously obey the rule, refraining from trading and disclosing the information. Inside information is almost always good information. If people with inside information keep it to themselves and fail to act on it, they will not be driving market prices toward their shadow prices and there will be that much more noise in the market. Thus does well-meaning regulation often lead to unexpected and undesirable consequences." (p. 125)

Stanley Bing, What Would Machiavelli Do?: The Ends Justify the Meanness

Gil Schwartz, Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications for CBS using the "Stanley Bing" nom de plume, writes scathing but hilarious send-ups of corporate life.

Blaine McCormick, At work with Thomas Edison: 10 business lessons from America's greatest innovator

"There are only two choices when it comes to calling cards: talents or titles." (p. 54)

"Interestingly enough, Edison even served as a source of inspiration for the young Steve Jobs, according to Jeffrey Young's book Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward. Before he started Apple Computer, Jobs and his friend Dan Kottke took a journey of self-discovery to India to visit the ashram of guru Neem Kairolie Baba. Although the quest has its high points, they also experienced poverty, rejection, fleas, and filth. One day the young Jobs realized, "We weren't going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Bab put together." Shortly after this epiphany, Jobs returned to the United States and the rest is history." (p. 22)

"[Edison] also expressed some critical opinions of the shortcomings of most education material: "Most of our textbooks fail on two big counts. They are not sufficiently human, and their application is not sufficiently practical. Their tendency seems to be to look upon the whole process of education as a job of dull and uninteresting work--with the apparent argument that the duller and more uninteresting it is made the more credit there is for doing it."" (p. 183)

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

David Isenberg's review.

"Before 1995 (when the dot.com era began), the oil industry earned a higher rate of return on invested capital than any other industry. When oil companies tried to use some of their earnings to diversify, they discovered that everything else was less profitable than oil. Their only investment option was doing research to make their own exploration and production operations even more profitable. Billions of dollarts when into petroleum technology development, and much of the work was successful. That makes it difficult to ask today for new technology. Most of those wheels have already been invented." (p. 8)

"A theme throughout this book: progress has been going on for a long time, and there is little expectation that something dramatic will come riding to the rescue as world oil production starts to decline." (p. 108)

"A permanent drop in oil production will pull one of the blocks out from underneath the [world economy] pyramid. The previous chapter strongly suggests that the drop will happen in this decade [2000-2010]. Major disruptions likely will follow. What should we do? The question exists at two levels:
1. What can individuals and institution do, in their enlightened self-interest, to minimize the impact of a global oil shortage?
2. As a society, how can we rearrange the global economy to lessen our dependence on oil?
Republicans choose line 1; Democrats pick line 2. The division is not that simple. I'm a registered Democrat, but I still feel authorized to protect myself while the world gets its act together. That why line 1 says "enlightened self-interest." (p. 160)

"In a sense, the fossil fuels are a one-time gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources." (p. 160)

"It may seem easy to increase the fuel efficiencies of automobiles by changing the specifications for gasoline and diesel fuel. If the required changes increase the energy used inside the refinery, the change may be self-defeating." (p. 188)

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

"If gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under-valued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living. (p. 72)"

Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

"The Catholic Church was the first major institution in history that was independent of temporal authority and willing to challenge it. By doing this it cracked the edifice of state power, and in nooks and crannies individual liberty began to grow." (p. 34)

"The institutions and attitudes that have preserved liberal democratic capitalism in the West were built over centuries. They are being destroyed in decades. Once torn down they will not be so easy to repair. We watch this destruction without really being able to stop it--that would be undemocratic. But it will leave its mark on our politics, economies, and culture, all of which will increasingly be dominated by short-term interests and enthusiasms. Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future." (p. 255)

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Blaine McCormick, Ben Franklin's 12 Rules of Management: The Founding Father of American Business Solves Your Toughest Problems (featured in TechWeek)

Jim Hightower, Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush

The Apollo Alliance is a broad coalition within the labor, environmental, business, urban, and faith communities in support of good jobs and energy independence.

"Autopsy studies done at Yale and elsewhere show that 20 percent of people diagnosed with Alzherimer's were misdiagnosed. They actually had another brain-wasting disease called CJD, and thousands of these cases might well be a variety of CJD caused by mad-cow infected meat that the victims had eaten years earlier." (p. 92)

Harvey Mackay, We got fired! and it's the best thing that ever happened to us

Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code

"Misunderstanding breeds distrust, [protagonist Robert] Langdon thought." (p. 45)

Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

"American conservatism depends for its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making certain mental connections about the world, connections that until recently were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet. For example, the connection between mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore without reservation. Or between the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns into the red-state dust--which forces they praise in the most exalted forms." (p. 248)

Andy Kessler, How We Got Here : A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

"Sometimes, it's just ignoring conventional wisdom and reapplying someone else's invention that creates innovation." (p. 50)

"Trading in commodities was worth more as an economic engine than pillaging gold, which merely glitters, a lesson still forgotten." (p. 61)

"I once asked Gordon Moore about the whole Microma experience [Intels' digital watch foray in the 1970s], and he quickly pointed me to a Microma watch on his wrist and told me he wears it often to remind himself never to be that stupid again. Intel's lesson? Make the intellectual property, not the end product." (p. 131)

Bill Schultheis, The Coffeehouse Investor: How to build wealth, ignore wall street, and get on with your life

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

"How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal." (p. 114)

"Great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"--filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables." (jacket cover)

"With even half an hour of practice, [Paul Ekman] says, people can become adept at picking up [facial] micro-expressions. "I have a training tape, and people love it. They start it, and they cannot see any of these expressions. Thirty-five minutes later, they can see them all. What that says is that this is an accessible skill." (p. 239)