100 books like Has Man a Future?

This is a fascinating book that explores the risks to humanity’s future, from well-documented threats such as climate change and weapons of mass destruction to less understood dangers emanating from disruptive technologies and man-made pandemics.

Ord, an Oxford philosopher, does an impressive job at explaining complex scientific issues in terms easily digestible for a broader audience. The book also develops important moral frameworks for tackling a wide range of existential risks.

Despite having been published 70 years ago, this eloquent book still has enduring appeal as it provides an intellectually stimulating way of approaching big ideas.

It teaches us how to think both deeply and pragmatically about the monumental challenges facing humanity. In his unique way, Berlin, a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, gives us prescient philosophical insights into human behaviour.

This book is a timely primer on the promise and peril of artificial intelligence (AI) authored by an unlikely coalition of insightful thinkers: a 100-year-old diplomat, a former Google chief executive, and an M.I.T. professor.

They present an interesting overview of the range of AI technologies and their likely impact on many spheres of life, from medicine and the military to health care and urban development.

The result is an accessible, thought-provoking book that asks important questions about the role of machine learning in changing human society, for good and ill.

The highly respected Cambridge scientist and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees provides a fascinating and highly accessible read on how we can harness science and technology for the betterment – and ultimately preservation – of humanity.

The book is a refreshingly optimistic take on how advances in, for example, robotics and biotechnology, can protect us against the greatest threats facing humanity. This is a must-read book which pushes the boundaries of scientific knowledge while building bridges to many other academic disciplines.

I was researching a novel and wanted to know more about the Cuban Missile Crisis. This non-fiction book reads like an action thriller, going hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute.

I finished this one in a single weekend and felt almost physically sick at the thought of how close the world had come to Armageddon in those few tense days and how lucky we were the leaders of the time were so determined to avoid it.

Would our leaders today be as level-headed? You judge!

The books discussed above concentrate on the missile crisis in the US, but there was also a crisis in Moscow and Havana. Americans called this event “the Cuban missile crisis,” the Soviets called it “the Caribbean Crisis,” and the Cubans “the October crisis”—because conflict with the US had become a recurring fact of life in Cuba. The Kennedy administration had also been sponsoring sabotage and political assassination in Cuba kept secret from the American people but well known to the Russians and the Cubans. The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis opens a window into Castro’s fury at not being informed or consulted about the secret October 27 Kennedy-Khrushchev deal to remove the missiles from both Cuba and Turkey; only the masterful November diplomacy by Khrushchev’s personal envoy in Cuba, Anastas Mikoyan, kept the deal on track. 

Voorhees' assessment of John F. Kennedy's leadership during the Cuban missile crisis is strikingly different from most books on the subject. He examines JFK's decision-making through the lens of the president's domestic political concerns and use of back-channel diplomacy with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rather than through the conventional workings of his foreign and national security policy establishments. He also challenges the prevailing view that Kennedy's ultimate strategy for resolving the crisis was primarily shaped by the “ExComm” or by the top officials at the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA. Voorhees insists, supported by an impressive array of evidence, that the Cuban missile crisis did not bring the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon and his book promises to become an integral part of the historical conversation.

At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy met with the Pentagon’s head of civil defense, Steuart Pittman, to assess plans for protecting the American civilian population in the event of nuclear war. JFK mistakenly claimed that rural America could be better protected from radiation than urban America; Pittman, however, bluntly told the president that he was wrong: insisting that, “the only protection today is in the cities and there is little or no protection in the rural areas.” Kennedy became quite irritated, but unfortunately, his harsh reply was largely lost because the sound quality of the tape recording suddenly went from poor to inaudible. The fact that the President himself was so misinformed about civil defense sums up the research and conclusions of Alice George’s sobering book: planning for civil defense had been chaotic and inadequate and if nuclear war had come the results would have been… show more.

This book was written by one of the leading photographic interpreters of the Cold War. He worked directly under Art Lundahl at the National Photographic Interpretive Center (NPIC) in preparing and briefing President Kennedy on the high-altitude U-2 and low-level RF-8A Crusader's photoreconnaissance imagery that confirmed Soviet missiles in Cuba. Dino Brugioni was a family friend and a mentor to me as a young adult. He personally escorted me thru the CIA headquarters in 1977 when I was 12 years old shortly after my father’s death earlier that year. When I founded The Cold War Museum in 1996, Dino agreed to serve as an Advisory Board Member. Dino is a great writer and researcher. This book really helps the reader to learn about the importance of photographic reconnaissance, Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close we came to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

I first met Colonel Whitten in October 2012 when he attended the Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary conference that I organized for The Cold War Museum and George Mason University. His book is a nonfiction narrative about the Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron 2 (VMCJ-2) that flew low-level photographic reconnaissance flights over Cuba before, during, and after the Crisis in their F8U-1P (RF-8A) Crusaders. As a result of these missions, the VMCJ-2 squadron was awarded a Navy Unit Commendation for the period September 1, 1960 – December 1, 1962. According to USMC Brigadier General William A. Bloomer (ret) who wrote the forward, this book not only gives an account of the Marine Corps role in the Crisis but also, “recounts Castro’s rise to power, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his build up in military capabilities courtesy of the Soviet Union.”