Here are 100 books that Fire and Memory fans have personally recommended if you like
Fire and Memory.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Alison and Walter have come into architecture on different paths, Alison with a biology/chemistry background (yes, one can become an architect with an accredited, first professional degree in architecture) and Walter through architectural engineering. We both believe that the union of science, aesthetics, energy, comfort, and health make buildings work! We enjoy creating simplified design processes for students to use in their work, so that they can gain confidence in the first steps of design. Equally, we feel it important to clearly understand what is to be created and how to confirm that what was intended actually results in the built environment.
A must read for exploring the qualitative, cultural, and social sensations of heat and coolth and understanding the thermodynamics of building design that elicits ways that we use, remember, and care about the energy that provides comfort (or discomfort) for building occupants.
Often in our environmental systems courses, we ask students to write down their most memorable thermal experience. Responses range from very hot to very cold and include many contrasting events, such as skiing, then sitting around a campfire. Thermal Delight gives experience after experience for us to consider how our comfort might be tempered or enjoyed and sets the foundation for designing with climate.
As designers, should we make our buildings not-uncomfortable or make them delightful?
Our thermal environment is as rich in cultural associations as our visual, acoustic, olfactory, and tactile environments. This book explores the potential for using thermal qualities as an expressive element in building design.
Until quite recently, building technology and design has favored high-energy-consuming mechanical methods of neutralizing the thermal environment. It has not responded to the various ways that people use, remember, and care about the thermal environment and how they associate their thermal sense with their other senses. The hearth fire, the sauna, the Roman and Japanese baths, and the Islamic garden are discussed as archetypes of thermal delight…
Alison and Walter have come into architecture on different paths, Alison with a biology/chemistry background (yes, one can become an architect with an accredited, first professional degree in architecture) and Walter through architectural engineering. We both believe that the union of science, aesthetics, energy, comfort, and health make buildings work! We enjoy creating simplified design processes for students to use in their work, so that they can gain confidence in the first steps of design. Equally, we feel it important to clearly understand what is to be created and how to confirm that what was intended actually results in the built environment.
Likely the first energy “guidebook” for architects. Published during the 1970s oil crises, Mazria lays out a design process for saving energy through passive solar design.
The book is full of foundational knowledge, core principles, concepts, early data on material properties based on research done at the University of Oregon, clear definitions, and lots of black and white hand drawings showing solar positions, angles, and access for buildings. Though no longer in print, copies are still available, and the content is still relevant today.
As more design process is relegated to blackbox software that “may” consider many of the same variables dealt with in the Handbook, it is wise to refer to Mazria to conceptually back up important design decisions. [As an aside, Ed Mazria is currently the CEO of Architecture 2030.]
Provides comprehensive information on the design and application of passive solar-energy systems and assesses twenty-seven design patterns that offset a variety of factors influencing the effectiveness of solar heating
Alison and Walter have come into architecture on different paths, Alison with a biology/chemistry background (yes, one can become an architect with an accredited, first professional degree in architecture) and Walter through architectural engineering. We both believe that the union of science, aesthetics, energy, comfort, and health make buildings work! We enjoy creating simplified design processes for students to use in their work, so that they can gain confidence in the first steps of design. Equally, we feel it important to clearly understand what is to be created and how to confirm that what was intended actually results in the built environment.
For much of the history of architecture material availability has been a key design concern.
More recently (say the past 50 years) operational energy has become a concern (both socially via codes and individually via cost). We are now in transition to a design landscape where carbon emissions are replacing energy consumption as the currency of concern.
Life Cycle Assessment does an excellent job of bringing the issue of carbon to the forefront and explaining how designers and owners rationally account for the carbon damage inflicted by their buildings. An easy read but not at all simpleminded.
Life Cycle Assessment addresses the dynamic and dialectic of building and ecology, presenting the key theories and techniques surrounding the use of life cycle assessment data and methods.
Architects and construction professionals must assume greater responsibility in helping building owners to understand the implications of making material, manufacturing, and assemblage decisions and therefore design to accommodate more ecological building. Life Cycle Assessment is a guide for architects, engineers, and builders, presenting the principles and art of performing life cycle impact assessments of materials and whole buildings, including the need to define meaningful goals and objectives and critically evaluate analysis assumptions.…
Alison and Walter have come into architecture on different paths, Alison with a biology/chemistry background (yes, one can become an architect with an accredited, first professional degree in architecture) and Walter through architectural engineering. We both believe that the union of science, aesthetics, energy, comfort, and health make buildings work! We enjoy creating simplified design processes for students to use in their work, so that they can gain confidence in the first steps of design. Equally, we feel it important to clearly understand what is to be created and how to confirm that what was intended actually results in the built environment.
Fitch is best known as a city planner—not as an architect or engineer. Perhaps it is this perspective that allowed him to prepare a delightful introduction to the various sensory dimensions—the environmental forces—we engage as building users.
These dimensions, which constitute much of our holistic experience with architecture, include air quality, light, sound, and heat. None are truly shown on architectural plans. All affect us for better or worse. This is a great introductory read bereft of equations.
Few books have influenced the field of architecture more than American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It. Originally published in 1947, it has emerged as a classic work on the relationships among buildings, their inhabitants, and the environment. Now comes the first major revision in over twenty-five years, bringing this essential book completely up to date for a new, more environmentally aware generation of architects and designers. In this superb volume, James Marston Fitch provides a fundamental theory of buildings. "The ultimate task of architecture," he writes, "is to act in favor of human beings: to interpose itself between…
I don’t think I could have been anything else but an engineer. Following my father’s example, I have a love for moving metal things – both the physical/mathematical aspects and the practical aspects, that apprentices pick up. Engineering systems have personalities all their own – the noisy excitement of a racing motorcycle, the brooding, contented hum of a nuclear powerplant or the clanging and crashing of a steam locomotive in its overrun, literally with fire in its belly.
Here is a genuine Engineering Textbook. Thermodynamics was my favourite subject as an undergraduate and the only subject in which I excelled, coming first in class in my final year in Thermo, as we students called it. Thermodynamics deals with Heat as a form of energy and its uses in the creation of engines, turbines, rockets, and the like. Without it and its twin technology, electricity, the modern world could not exist. Before the Industrial Revolution, the only power sources were wind, water, animals, and men (as slaves). Then came the quantum leap of Steam and the world has never been the same.
This is an introduction to thermodynamics for engineering students. No previous knowledge is assumed. The book covers the first and second laws of thermodynamics and their consequences for engineers. Each topic is illustrated with worked examples and subjects are introduced in a logical order allowing the student to tackle increasingly complex problems as he reads. Problems and selected answers are included. The heart of engineering thermodynamics is the conversion of heat into work. Increasing demands for more efficient conversion, for example to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, are leading to the adoption of new thermodynamic cycles. However the principles of these…
I’m a science writer with over 40 books published. Science is central to all our modern lives—but for many people it feels remote, and difficult to understand. I love the opportunity to communicate science—to turn it from a collection of facts into stories that people can relate to. I always read popular science before I got into writing, but, if anything, I read it even more now. My own background is physics and math—and I enjoy reading and writing about that—but sometimes, it’s particularly interesting to pull together different aspects of science that affect all of us, crossing disciplines and uncovering the wonders that science bring us.
In this compact hardback, physicist Jim Al-Khalili outlines in a straightforward way what he describes as the “three pillars of physics”. These don’t overlap much with the physics many of us will have done at school: they are relativity, quantum theory, and thermodynamics. Yet Al-Khalili shows how these three topics help us understand how everything works. In an approachable way, without a single equation, we get a feel for the power of physics. Al-Khalili’s personality and enthusiasm shine through.
Quantum physicist, New York Times bestselling author, and BBC host Jim Al-Khalili offers a fascinating and illuminating look at what physics reveals about the world
Shining a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics, Jim Al-Khalili invites us all to understand what this crucially important science tells us about the universe and the nature of reality itself.
Al-Khalili begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of space, time, energy, and matter, and then describes the three pillars of modern physics-quantum theory, relativity, and thermodynamics-showing how all three must come together if we are ever to have a full…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
Still exciting after all these years! Perhaps because it is politically incorrect and unself-conscious.
The cover blurb says it is an "investigation of the sex lives of the men and women of the Trobriand Islands and deals with prenuptial intercourse, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, erotic psychology, ritual, morals, and manners" – forbidden territory nowadays.
I do not excuse the sexism and racism occasionally detectable, but think the detail, intimacy, and authorial reflexivity about a disappeared world are more valuable now than ever. A century ahead of his time, Malinowski included himself in his observations and ideas about others.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
I am an anthropologist with a background in evolutionary biology, primate behavior, and cross-cultural approaches to parenting. I taught “The Anthropology of Parenting” for 20 years at Cornell University. The book grew from interviews with anthropologists, pediatricians, and child development experts taking a different stance about parents and babies—that we should look at how babies are designed by evolution and how cultures then interfere with those expectations. My book shows there is no perfect way to raise a child but there are styles in other cultures we can borrow to make our babies, and ourselves, more at ease.
Konner is an anthropologist and physician who spent time with the !Kung hunters and gatherers studying children. This book is based on the PBS show Childhood, and it is everything you might want to know about childhood because it traverses both biology and culture. A dense read, but worth it.
This Channel 4 TV tie-in book by anthropologist and psychiatrist Melvin Konner takes a journey through the childhood years - from conception and birth through adolescence - showing how children experience them, how parents and societies shape them and how science is beginning to understand them.
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
I am deeply persuaded by psychoanalysis as arational scientific theory of the unconscious mind which, if it exists as Freud describes it, has a determining role in nearly every aspect of individual and social life among ourselves and exotic others.
But most scholars, feminists especially (of whom I consider myself one), even when they acknowledge Freud's genius, "then proceed to dismiss the whole business as hopelessly out of date and culture-bound."
This collection of essays, a series of paired expositions by classic thinkers and eminent scholars in many fields in dialogue with each other, provides an in-depth overview of the debate about 'women and analysis.'
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
This is a very short book with a single brilliant insight into the human condition.
It shows how wrong it is to suppose (as Marx and Engels did) that first there were self-sufficient nuclear families who thenproduced surpluses to exchange with other nuclear families.
Mauss used early fieldwork in the South Pacific and Northwest Coast of Canada, to demonstrate that exchange is the very essence of human social life, inseparable from the incest taboo, marriage rules, and a fully realized highly elaborate symbolic universe based upon principles of animism, sympathetic magic and rites of passage.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank…
Interested in
anthropology,
sociology,
and
social science?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
anthropology,
sociology,
and
social science.
