Books that fundamentally changed how I think. Each challenged my assumptions and opened up new ways of seeing the world that continue to influence me today.
- • The Cause — The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783
- • The Machiavellians — Defenders of Freedom
- • Modernity without Restraint — The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
- • Benjamin Franklin — An American Life
- • The History of the Ancient World — From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome
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- • The Ancient City — A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome
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- • How to Build a Car — The Autobiography of the World's Greatest Formula 1 Designer
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- • The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce — The Man Behind the Microchip
- • Seeing Like a State — How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- • The Dream Machine — J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
- • The Sovereign Individual — Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
- • The Beginning of Infinity — Explanations That Transform the World
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- • Softwar — An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle
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- • The Mythical Man-Month — Essays on Software Engineering
- • Mindstorms — Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
- • Masters of Doom — How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
- • Skunk Works — A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
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- • Thinking in Systems — A Primer
- • Superintelligence — Paths, Dangers, Strategies
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- • Founders at Work — Stories of Startups' Early Days
- • Showstopper — The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT
- • Dealers of Lightning — Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
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- • PG's essays — Hackers & Painters
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- • The Big Score — The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley
- • Finite and Infinite Games — A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
- • A Pattern Language — Towns, Buildings, Construction
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- • Revolution in the Valley — The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
- • Uncanny Valley — A Memoir
- • LessWrong — Rationality: From AI to Zombies
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- • The PayPal Wars — Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
- • The Cathedral and the Bazaar — Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
- • The Diamond Age — Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
- • What the Dormouse Said — How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
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- • The Power Broker — Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
- • Gödel, Escher, Bach — An Eternal Golden Braid