NICK DONATIELLO is president and CEO of Odyssey, a market research firm that studies what people want from technology and entertainment. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West , by Stephen E. Ambrose. "Ambrose gives a wonderful sense of what our country was like at the end of the 1700s. For someone like me who often crosses the country three or four times in a week, thinking about people walking from Detroit to Pittsburgh puts things in perspective."
Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, edited by William Safire. "This collection of great speeches begins with Pericles and continues through Ronald Reagan. Most of the speeches I had never read before - like General MacArthur's address to West Point, which was breathtaking for its cadence and for the passion that he felt toward his commitments. The older speeches were the most fascinating - language was used with such precision. You don't see that anymore. But words well chosen can be so powerful and stay so long."
JERRY MICHALSKI, managing editor of Release 1.0*, writes about the social implications of technology.*
Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. "This book teases the underlying metaphors out of our everyday speech and explores their implications. Argument as war, for instance, is a well-accepted metaphor: you take a position, assault your opponent's position, strike down counterarguments. These war metaphors encourage opposition; I would prefer a metaphor of argument as discussion. Another metaphor that I object to is individual as consumer, the idea that people are defined as buyers. I prefer individual as citizen, as member of some jointly created society."
STREET CRED
War for the Operating System of the FutureWebonomics
README On the bookshelves of the digerati
