Stewart Baker , once the general counsel for the NSA, specializes in high tech law. When he finishes a book, he either gives it away or throws it away. "I went on a binge of poetry by Sharon Olds
The Dead and the Living, The Gold Cell , and The Wellspring . These books left me stunned like a steer on a killing line. You cannot read the first line without wanting to read the rest of the poem: 'After they go away to summer camp, I am alone in the house in the early evening....' That just pulls you in. It's extraordinarily autobiographical and devastatingly honest about her family relationships. So much poetry is written about love and so little about the relationship between parents and children - this speaks to a whole other area of experience." William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic , by Alan Taylor. "This is a history of Cooperstown; a history of the dispossession of the Indians and then dispossession of the Tories. It gives a different perspective on the American Revolution to read about colonial soldiers bayoneting Tory children. We don't think of our revolution as having inspired that kind of blood lust." Linda Jacobson is the virtual reality evangelist at Silicon Graphics and the cofounder of VeRGe, a group for technophobes and technophiles alike.The Secret Language of the Mind: A Visual Inquiry into the Mysteries of Consciousness, by David Cohen. "Whew! This is truly a gorgeous book - well-written, with mind-bending illustrations. I'm fascinated by brain science, by how we perceive, remember, and experience the world around us ... which has everything to do with creating effective virtual reality applications and technologies.""Late at night, I'm reading a fast, fun novel called The Bestseller , by Olivia Goldsmith, a fictionalized account of the book publishing business. Goldsmith dishes factual dirt about Manhattan-based book people and draws some great characters and snappy dialog. Overall, the passions these characters have for their own writing makes me want to write another book. But it's such a backbiting industry. It's about who you know and what your publisher had for breakfast that morning." Douglas Rushkoff , author of too many books to list here, writes about the relationship between technology, media, and culture. White Noise, by Don DeLillo. "DeLillo may just be the best American novelist around these days. I particularly like the way he makes pop cultural references without making pop cultural references. He just thinks and writes from that place between a character's awareness and the world in which that character lives. It makes for terrifically funny, dark comedy. In one scene, two cultural studies profs do a comparison of Elvis Presley and Adolf Hitler that is both absolutely inane and sheer genius." Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Volume 1: The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience, by Robert Dilts, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, and Judith DeLozier. "What interests me most about neurolinguistic programming is the attempt to break down and define human thought and behavior. People as robots. They figure out which way you glance when you're thinking about the past, say, or an emotional experience, and then use this information to help or manipulate you."
STREET CRED
Atari DazeDawkinian Evolution
On the bookshelves of the digerati
