73 books like A History of the World in 100 Objects

I have never been brought so close to a battle and a battlefield experience as when reading this book.

The horror, tension, excitement, valor, and regret of warfare are clearly depicted. The motivations for fighting for a terrible cause are examined. The determination to see things through to the bitter end is in evidence. It is a blueprint for writing warfare and helps the reader understand the excitement and tension in leading troops to the fear and futility of being on the line.

Best of all, Shaara has been able to bring life to Lee, who so often is referred to as a marble man. Here, he’s been humanized, and this alone makes our reading of history so much more personal and relevant.

This is the now classic work on why “advanced” civilization developed in some places and not others in human history. It remains a controversial issue.

A psychologist, ecologist, and geographer with a background in field study in New Guinea, Diamond makes a strong argument that there are environmental reasons for these differences. Ranging across all the continents and thousands of years of human history, I found it hard to put down and even harder to understand how Diamond can work in so many fields at once!

Some do not like this daring book. But nobody has surpassed it yet. 

Adoption and change often lead to the kind of conflict that regularly breaks people.

I find that creators are often equipped to deal with technical creation, but are rarely equipped to deal with conflict. In this book, Amanda Ripley walks through how several skilled professionals found themselves in conflict.

Then she walks through how those conflicts started, who the players are, how they interact, how to engage in healthy conflict, and eventually how to get back out again.

Many of my peers in open-source technology, especially creators of languages and frameworks, find themselves in conflict and don’t have the tools to deal with it.

This book helped me think of conflict in a systematic way, and how to plot a course back out again. 

This was the book that got me into thinking about technology and adoption.

It introduces a framework for thinking about the major groups of people who adopt new technologies. It pays particular attention to the chasm, a difficult adoption challenge that occurs after early adopters accept a technology but before mainstream adoption. Entrepreneurs need to understand these concepts.

This book particularly resonated with me because of my days as an early adopter of the Ruby programming language, and later the Elixir programming language. 

I spent years on the conference circuit speaking about programming language adoption, and this book helped me see why these concepts matter.

Archaeologists have a history of stimulating and provocative big-picture thinking about Britain, and this volume represents one of the latest and most ambitious surveys of the material remains of Britain as a whole. Its author is a veteran excavator with experience on sites from Sutton Hoo to Portmahomack. Carver’s title signals one of his goals: to break free of the ethnic, national labels for this period, and to lay down a new chronological and geographical framework for thinking about the whole of Britain across the period. 

If you are curious to know whether consciousness and personality survive the death of the physical body, this book is for you!

For decades, materialist scientists and philosophers have claimed that NDEs are just elaborate hallucinations produced by a dying brain. Guess what? These scientists and philosophers were wrong! Indeed, The Self Does Not Die contains over 125 reliable (often firsthand) accounts of perceptions during NDEs that were later verified as accurate by independent sources (those are called veridical perceptions).

A number of these cases involved people who were clinically dead (i.e. no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity). These findings indicate that the materialist view about mind-brain relationship (the idea that the brain produces mind) is false.

Much SF&F literature has explored the concept of what the world might look like with fewer (or no) humans.

Weisman’s well-researched book imagines how our environment would recover; how nature might take back control without humans around to continue wrecking it.

He imagines the primacy of nature in a fascinating way and manages to avoid the normative language that might be off-putting, drawing the reader into a place that might as well be 1000 light years away from Earth.

We all know King is the master of horror. Most of his books are novels of one story but I love his short stories. They are fast-paced and leave you wondering what lurks around the corner. King talks about struggling as a writer and barely making it in the beginning. He sold his stories to men’s magazines to make ends meet when he was first starting out. It gives hope to us who feel like we will never make it. 

Creation’s Journey ties actual native stories and beliefs with genuine artifacts from the vast collections of the National Museum of the American Indian. It provides a refreshing approach to our understanding of indigenous people’s utilitarian objects and how important they are in their daily lives. The photos in this book show the care for detail and craftsmanship that was pervasive in everyday Native American objects and clothing. It inspired me to commission native Americans to hand make the various costumes shown in my book.

My archaeological career began in 1971 in the Mimbres region of Southwestern New Mexico. I continued to work in the area, on and off, until 2013. Along the way, I wrote four books and many chapters/articles about Mimbres, and I formed some strong opinions on ancient Mimbres history.

Centered in the Mimbres River valley, the Mimbres built about twenty sizable stone villages at the same time as Chaco Canyon, from 1000 to 1125. Their towns were notably large for the time, fueled by sophisticated canal irrigation (probably adopted from the Hohokam, see above). But Mimbres is most famous for its remarkable black-on-white pottery: artfully-painted bowl interiors show bugs, fish, antelopes, birds, and people – people doing things, tableaus of daily life, esoteric rituals, mythical events. These images appeal strongly to us, today. In ancient times, however, Mimbres bowls and Mimbres art seems to have been limited to the Mimbres region… show more.