This section of the Newsletter is meant to guide readers to books or articles that someone recommended to me because they are useful, provocative, or enjoyable—at best, all three. Suggestions of other materials to be reviewed would be most welcome, with or without comments, but I hope you feel free to comment on my opinions as well.
-Barrett Hazeltine, Division of Engineering, Brown University
NEW POSTS
Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Click here to see review
Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Click here to see review
OLDER POSTS
Alexander, Jennifer Karns. The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control. Click here to see review
Anderson, Ray, C. with Robin White. Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose--Doing Business by Respecting the Earth. Click here to see review
Bardi, Jason Socrates. The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two-Thousand-Year-Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe. Click here to see review
Bryant, John and Chris Sangwin. How Round is Your Circle?: Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet. Click here to see review
Castells, Manuel, Jack Linchuan Qui, Mireia Fernández-Ardévol, Araba Sey. Mobile Communications and Society: A Global Perspective. Click here to see review
Chatterjee, Pratap. How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. Click here to see review
Coburn, Pip. The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn. Click here to see review
Conover, Ted. THE ROUTES OF MAN: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010 Pp. 333. Hardcover, $26.95; paperback, $15.95. Click here to see review
Kelly, Kevin. WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS. New York: Penguin, 2010. Pp. 406. Hardcover, $27.95. Click here to see review
Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class to Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Click here to see review
Dodgson, Mark and David Gann. Innovation: A very Short Introduction. Click here to see review
Emanuel, Kerry. What We Know About Climate Change. Click here to see review
Friedel, Robert. A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium. Click here to see review
Frost, Gary L. Early FM Radio: Incremental Technology in Twientieth-Century America. Click here to see review
Gelb, Michael J. and Sarah Miller Caldicott. Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor. Click here to see review
Gomez, Nicholas Wey. The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies. Click here to see review
Greenberg, Gary. The Noble Lie: When Scientists Give the Right Answers for the Wrong Reasons. Click here to see review
Hård, Mikael and Andrew Jamison. Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science. Click here to see review
Hård, Mikael and Thomas J. Misa. Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities. Click here to see review
Hart, Steven. The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway. Click here to see review
Maeda, John. Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life. Click here to see review
Mazur, Allan. True Warnings and False Alarms: Evaluating fears About Health Risks of Technology, 1948-1971.Click here to see review
Morton, David L. and Joseph Gabriel. Electronics: The Life Story of a Technology. Click here to see review
Palmer, Stephen. Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation. Click here to see review
Polak, Paul. Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. Click here to see review
Ruddiman, William. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Click here to see review
Stibel, Jeffrey. Wired For Thought: How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet. Click here to see review
Strum, Wesley, Joel Genuth, and Ivan Chompalov. Structures of Scientific Collaboration. Click here to see review
Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Click here to see review
