Alan Kays Reading List
I first met AlanKay in 1991 and then briefly but every 3 months for a 3-4 years thereafter at Vanguard conferences. Alan is a true polymath and has a personal library of 5000 books. Each time I met him I asked him for another book recommendation. Clearly others were doing the same. Eventually he responded to the pressure and produced the following 'beginners reading list' which he sent to several of us. I cherish the list. There are some wonderfully funny comments in the list e.g. 'Plato (any etc.)'. -- RichardPawson
(Also maintained on Squeakland: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)
TECHNOLOGY & MEDIA
MarshallMcLuhan (any of his books)
- Gutenberg galaxy
- Understanding media
PeterDrucker (any of his books)
- Technology, Management, and Society
- Innovation and Entreprenuring
Neil Postman (any of his books)
- Amusing ourselves to death
- The disappearence of childhood
- Conscientious objections
LewisMumford (any of his books)
- The myth of the machine
- Technics and civilization
LEARNING & CREATIVITY
Jean Piaget (any of his books)
- The psychology of the child
- To understand is to invent
Jerome Bruner (any of his books)
- Towards a theory of instruction
- The relevance of education
Lev Vygotsky (any of his books)
- Thought and language
- Mind in society
- The psychology of art
EdwardDeBono (any of his books)
Frank Smith (any of his books)
- Essays into literacy
John Holt (any of his books)
- Instead of education
- Teach them yourself
Tim Gallwey (any of his books)
- The inner game of tennis
Shinichi Suzuki (any of his books)
- Nurtured by love
Maria Montessori (any of her books)
- The secret of childhood
- The discovery of the child
- MindStorms
- The childrens' machine
John Dewey (any of his books)
- School and society
- Freedom and culture
Arthur Koestler (any of his books)
- Act of creation
- The ghost in the machine
ANTHROPOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY
JosephCampbell (any of his books)
- Myths to live by
- The masks of god
Derek Bickerton (any of his books)
- Language and species
Silvia Scribner & Mike Cole (gets technical)
- The psychology of literacy
Julian Jaynes
- The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind
Clifford Geertz (any of his books)
- The interpretation of cultures
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (any of his books)
- Beyond boredom and anxiety
- Flow
Robert Ornstein & Paul Ehrlich (any of their books)
- New World, New Mind
Charles Hampden-Turner
- Maps of the mind
Carl Jung (any of his books)
- Man and his symbols
- Modern man in search of a soul
MarvinMinsky (any of his books)
- Society of mind
Anthony Stevens
- Archetypes
PHILOSOPHY
Plato (any etc) [MrPlato]
- Timeaus
- Republic
BertrandRussell (any of his books)
- History of western philosophy
- Human knowledge, its scope and limits
- Skeptical essays
Richard Tarnas
- The passion of the western mind
Jacob Bronowski (any of his books)
- Ascent of man
Mary Midgley
- Wisdom, information, & wonder
- Science as salvation
Hannah Arendt
- The human condition
Korzybski
- Science and Sanity
- Science is not enough
Mark Booth (ed)
- What i believe
"Great books"
- Most of greeks, etc., Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Montaigne, etc.
Mortimer Adler
- The great ideas: Syntopicon of "great books" (Vol I,II)
Lao-tzu [LaoTse]
D.T. Suzuki (any of his books)
- Zen mind, beginner's mind (this is by Shinryu Suzuki, not D.T. Suzuki)
ART & PERCEPTION
Kenneth Clark (any of his books)
- Civilisation
- What is a masterpiece?
Ernst Gombrich (any of his books)
- Art and illusion
Richard Gregory (any of his books)
- Eye and
Rudolf Arnheim (any of his books)
- Visual thinking
DESIGN
ChristopherAlexander (any of his books)
Grosser
- Gossamer odyssey
Valentino Braitenberg
- Vehicles
W. Gray Walter
- The living
- TheVisualDisplayOfQuantitativeInformation
- VisualizingInformation
SCIENCE
David Goodsell
- The machinery of life
Philip Morrison (any of his books)
- The ring of truth
Niko Tinbergen (any of his books)
- The animal in its world
L. C. Epstein
- Relativity visualized
- Engines of creation
RichardDawkins (any of his books)
- The blind watchmaker
Evert
- Neuroethology (semitechnical)
RichardFeynman (semitechnical)
- The character of physical law
- -- QED
Leon Lederman (semitechnical)
- The God particle
- From quark to cosmos
James Watson
- The double helix
POLITICAL
Daniel Boorstin (any of his books on any subject)
- An american primer
- The americans
Madison, et.al,
- Federalist papers
- The debate on the constitution
Ralph Ketcham (ed)
- The anti-federalist papers
Tom Paine
- Common sense
- The rights of man
- The age of reason
Benjamin Barber
- An aristocracy of everyone
COMPUTERS (most of the good stuff is still in papers, here are a few books)
DougLenat
- --
- LISP 1.5 manual (MITPress)
MarvinMinsky (any of his books)
- Computation: finite and infinite machines (technical)
- The architecture machine
- Architecture machines