Tom Peters
is the guru of business gurus (see "Peters Provocations," Wired 5.12, page 204).
Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, by Stephen Jay Gould.
"The book expands an older essay on why the most phenomenal event in baseball history wasn't any single event, but Joe DiMaggio's winning streak. This work reminded me that if I'm not thinking in terms of distributions, then I'm not thinking right. Focusing on the spread of natural phenomenon completely changes your outlook."
After Rain, by William Trevor.
"Whenever I'm working on a book, the only things I can read are mysteries and easy fiction, so I got on a short-story kick a few months ago. After Rain is just beautiful writing that digs deeply into the human condition in all its absurdity. These aren't stories with happy endings."
The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Roger Chartier and Alain Boreau.
"The best parallel to the arrival of the Internet is the arrival of the moving press. The press didn't lead immediately to great books - first came broadsides, the equivalent of chat rooms. And the first hundred years of publishing were all unedited. The editors came along only later. Similarly, we are just now deciding that we need help filtering all this data."
Karen Wickre
who founded Digital Queers, among other things, is the executive editor of Upside magazine.
No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
"This is a history of World War II on the home front and, specifically, about the working relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Though pieces of their relationship were missing, it was a wonderful model; they were partners. Beyond that, the war was a watershed period for the US. People moved away from home and met people unlike themselves for the first time. This shook up race relations and traditional gender roles and brought us into the 20th century. You can see the seeds of the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and gay and lesbian pride in the '40s."
The Window, by Michael Dorris.
"I'm a big fan of Dorris, who died last year. His last novel is told in the voice of Rayona, a character from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Cloud Chamber. I've never known a male author who created female characters so well. Though I've experienced burnout with some authors - loving their first book and then being disappointed by the later works - I didn't feel that with The Window. Of course, The Window is the end of the line. I've wondered if someone would make these stories into a film. Dorris's style of piecing stories together is well suited for cinema."
Ric Burns
a documentary filmmaker, is best known for The Civil War, produced with his brother Ken; his history of New York City will air on PBS this year.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, by Allan Nevins.
"If you want to know how New York City changed in the 19th century, this extraordinary diary is the place to start. It's a riveting account. In one incredible passage Strong writes that 'everything we feel, and everything we do, abides forever.' We all think that, and, coming across the idea in someone else's life, you realize that there is a certain endurance that comes when we are able to connect with a moment in someone else's life and time. In all of my projects I try to make that connection to the past. "
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.
"This is the greatest poem ever written in America. When everybody was lamenting the influx of foreigners to New York, he recognized that immigrants were the future. It sometimes seems that there's nothing new to be read. These old books have such power to live on."
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer.
"When I finished the book, I wanted to become amnesiac and read it again. Watching the disaster unfold misstep by misstep gave me a sense of vertigo. You feel that you too could be sucked in. Suddenly, there Krakauer is in the death zone, hallucinating at 28,000 feet."
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