100 books like Frontiers II

This book has long been a favorite of spiritual seekers, with its sweeping panoply of stories from antiquity’s gods and goddesses to the world’s wisdom traditions and more.

This is a book for those interested in the universality of human experience across time and culture—which I am. But even more, it opens our minds to the importance of a story itself.

Campbell helps readers understand that truth and fact are different—indeed, there are several kinds of truth: empirical truth, which depends on objective data, and also mythopoetic and narrative truth, which rely on symbols and stories to provide meaning.

C.S. Lewis is widely known for his children’s book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. His list of publications is, however, much longer. This little volume of essays gives a reader (or a writer) insight into how the form of a story shapes its meaning. For instance, he writes about stories for children and how some authors mistakenly think that children are only interested in childish things. He compares that to people who have the gift of being able to access the child that is still in them and speak with them in a shared experience. 

Of science fiction, he shares the difference between an author who is a creator of worlds, and one who rearranges alien props to make a pedestrian story appear clever. The key is a story that makes contact with the reader.

At first glance, it appears to be a book about rabbits but it’s much more about humanity.

Watership Down was my childhood favorite story. Its themes of home, overcoming incredible obstacles, and finding a few good friends along the way are lessons I still carry with me. When I first read it as a young boy, I was lost in the gaps of the foster care system.

This book gave me a vision – and a plan – for how to overcome it. Those lessons apply to all of us and are desperately needed in a world that too often bends towards cynicism and chaos.

Hang-gliding is a literal leap of faith. You jump from terra firma and hope that the wind rises beneath your airfoil. Running from Safety is the author’s leap of faith, and, by extension, the readers. “Have you ever met anybody…like the people in your books?”  This is the cryptic question that begins this life exploration. 

As a writer myself, I know that every character in my books is me. Bach knows this, too. But do we really learn from the collection of stuff we hold inside, stuff that is our history? The book begins when Bach is confronted by Dickie, his child-self. The boy asks for one thing: He wants his adult self to sign off on the meaning of life contained in his eight-year-old vision of maturity. Bach is appalled at his simple naiveté. What should you tell your younger self? 

The late French philosopher Bruno Latour was infamous for his iconoclastic work in the history and sociology of science and technology.

If you read only one of his books, I’d say go for We Have Never Been Modern because it cuts to the heart of things by disrupting the conventional understanding of modernity as a clear separation between nature and culture. Latour argues that even as “moderns” have been rhetorically invested in this particular bifurcation of the world, nature-culture hybrids are continually proliferating.

So if you’ve ever asked yourself, why are cities not considered natural landscapes? Or why are animals always presumed to be without culture? Or what does it even mean to be modern? Then this is the book for you.

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.

This book is full of “wow” moments. The author describes the history of numerous inventions to show the ingenuity of Chinese civilization. Some of these inventions are well known, like paper and the compass. But most of them come as a surprise. Until about two hundred years ago, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in most types of technology. In some respects, such as agricultural tools and steel smelting, China was two thousand years ahead of Europe. When you read this book, you will realize that for most of history, Europe was like a marginal third-world society and China was the center of things.  

Anyone in the education world likely hears about STEM all the time.

We know, intuitively, that science and technology matter. But rarely does anyone so beautifully make the case for what great STEM learning can look like.

In What STEM Can Do for Your Classroom, author Jason McKenna provides practical advice; turnkey activities; and helpful, plainspoken research that can help teachers change students’ lives through STEM—just as McKenna’s teachers did for him.

One of my areas of scholarly interest is Roman intellectual history; I am curious about how Romans thought about their world and how this thinking changed over time (often through the introduction of new concepts or terms).

This interest allows me to examine the ways in which the Romans, at a cognitive level, simply understood information differently from how we do today. Riggsby analyzes various forms of information technology (maps, lists, tables, etc.) that seem basic and obvious, yet he reveals how rare it was for the Romans to deploy them (and usually in quite context-specific ways, such as military duty rosters).

This book really helped me question my assumptions about information literacy and how minds organize data, so that I am more aware of the cultural factors at work.

It is both entertaining and informative to learn how some of the greatest scientists have been wrong… at least some of the time.

Because of its triumphs, many people look upon science as unerring. Those of us involved in science, however, know that its power comes from its self-correction. Livio shows how scientific mistakes happen and also how they result in ever-closer approximations to the truth.