Book Lists

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.

You are under surveillance right now… your cell phone provider tracks your location, your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate the prices we’re offered; governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, and put people in danger worldwide. Schneier shows what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day.

Explores the idea of big data, which refers to our newfound ability to crunch vast amounts of information, analyze it instantly, and draw profound and surprising conclusions from it.

In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.

An FBI futurist and senior advisor to Interpol analyzes the digital underground to reveal the alarming ways criminals, corporations and countries are using emerging technologies to target individuals and wage war.

The world's most famous former computer hacker, now a security consultant, describes his life on the run from the FBI creating fake identities, finding jobs at a law firm and a hospital, and keeping tabs on his pursuers.

As we enjoy the Internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Carr describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”–from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer–and interweaves recent discoveries in neuroscience. Now, he expands his argument into a compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences.

Extra Lives is an impassioned defense of this assailed and misunderstood art form. Bissell argues that we are in a golden age of gaming--but he also believes games could be even better. He offers a fascinating and often hilarious critique of the ways video games dazzle and, just as often, frustrate. Along the way, we get firsthand portraits of some of the best minds at work in video game design today, as well as a shattering and deeply moving final chapter that describes, in searing detail, Bissell's descent into the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, a game whose themes mirror his own increasingly self-destructive compulsions.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years–as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues–Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination.