Here are 100 books that Maps of Time fans have personally recommended if you like
Maps of Time.
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I’m a science researcher and writer living in London. My research field is astrobiology and the possibility of life on other planets – it brings together lots of different areas of science with engineering and space exploration and so is deeply ‘interdisciplinary’. And as a science writer, I try to bring this same broad perspective and unifying approach to other profound questions. My fascination with understanding our own origins was sparked by my childhood growing up in East Africa, the cradle of humanity. In Origins I explored different ways that planet Earth has influenced our human story across the millennia - it’s an example of ‘Big History’.
Guns. Germs and Steel is an absolutely thrilling ride through world history in pursuit of the deepest answers to the question: why was it that European powers came to dominate those of the Americas from the sixteenth century, and not vice versa. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and is a cracking example of what has come to be known as ‘Big History’.
I’m a science researcher and writer living in London. My research field is astrobiology and the possibility of life on other planets – it brings together lots of different areas of science with engineering and space exploration and so is deeply ‘interdisciplinary’. And as a science writer, I try to bring this same broad perspective and unifying approach to other profound questions. My fascination with understanding our own origins was sparked by my childhood growing up in East Africa, the cradle of humanity. In Origins I explored different ways that planet Earth has influenced our human story across the millennia - it’s an example of ‘Big History’.
The historian William McNeill studied the effects on world history of diseases and contact between different civilizations; ideas which have been hugely influential on other books such as Guns, Germs and Steel (above). In this book, he teams up with his son John, to deliver one of the best overviews of the grand themes and trends within human history that I’ve read.
World-historical questions such as these, the subjects of major works by Jared Diamond, David Landes, and others, are now of great moment as global frictions increase. In a spirited and original contribution to this quickening discussion, two renowned historians, father and son, explore the webs that have drawn humans together in patterns of interaction and exchange, cooperation and competition, since earliest times. Whether small or large, loose or dense, these webs have provided the medium for the movement of ideas, goods, power, and money within and across cultures, societies, and nations. From the thin, localized webs that characterized agricultural communities…
I am an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University, where I taught 20-year-olds for thirty years. It was my job to explore the world, learn about it, and then educate others, underscoring the notion that all peoples and cultures are equally interesting and valuable. I started out, as a graduate student, watching macaque monkeys for my research, testing if their behavior might give us clues to the evolution of human behavior. But then I switched to science journalism for the popular audience and have, for decades, written for magazines, newspapers, and many books about the intersection of biology and culture on human thought and behavior.
When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word “geopolitics” is spot on.
You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shop—it’s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.
During much of our lives, we don’t even think about…
In this New York Times bestseller, an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers—“fans of geography, history, and politics (and maps) will be enthralled” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only about our current location or where we are going but about the world in general. And yet, when it comes to geo-politics, much of what we are told is generated by analysts and other experts who have neglected…
I’m a science researcher and writer living in London. My research field is astrobiology and the possibility of life on other planets – it brings together lots of different areas of science with engineering and space exploration and so is deeply ‘interdisciplinary’. And as a science writer, I try to bring this same broad perspective and unifying approach to other profound questions. My fascination with understanding our own origins was sparked by my childhood growing up in East Africa, the cradle of humanity. In Origins I explored different ways that planet Earth has influenced our human story across the millennia - it’s an example of ‘Big History’.
This is a much lesser-known book than the others I’ve picked, and I feel it deserves a load more attention. Walter Alvarez was instrumental to the development of the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped-out by an asteroid impact. Here, he casts his professor-of-geology eye across the whole of Earth’s history to show us the astonishing ways that our world – and the cosmos around us – have nurtured life on the planet and influenced the human story.
Big History, the field that integrates traditional historical scholarship with scientific insights to study the full sweep of our universe, has so far been the domain of historians. Famed geologist Walter Alvarez-best known for the "Impact Theory" explaining dinosaur extinction-has instead championed a science-first approach to Big History. Here he wields his unique expertise to give us a new appreciation for the incredible occurrences-from the Big Bang to the formation of supercontinents, the dawn of the Bronze Age, and beyond-that have led to our improbable place in the universe.
When I learned science's story of the universe–that it began as a primordial plasma that transformed itself into stars, galaxies and a living planet that then transmogrified into plants and animals and consciousness–when I learned the details of how the universe began as small as an acorn and then magically transformed that acorn of elementary particles into two trillion galaxies, I was beset with one, piercing, lifelong question: WHY ISN'T EVERYONE WAKING UP EACH MORNING STUNNED OUT OF THEIR MINDS? My entire professional life has been an effort to draw others into this amazement, into life as an ongoing celebration.
In his book, Wolfgang Leidhold examines the entire journey of humanity and discovers something truly amazing: even though the human brain has not changed in structure during the 300,000 years of the existence of Homo sapiens, a series of mental powers have been evoked through our conscious participation. He shows us how humans became involved in building human mentality, going through eight such transitions, including the evocation of self-reflexive consciousness, inner transcendence, and the reproductive imagination.
The great gift of this book is the conviction it awakens that the development of human consciousness is not over and that those of us alive today can become involved in what he calls "the next turn in human experience."
In a wide arc from the Paleolithic to the present day, this book explores the changing structure of human experience and its impact on the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, and political ideas.
The main thesis is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant but changes over time. Looking at the entire range of human history, there are a total of nine transformations, beginning with conscious perception and imagination in the Paleolithic and ending, for the time being, in modern times with the discovery of the unconscious. In between, this book explores six more transformations…
Even before I became a philosopher I was wondering about everything—life the universe and whatever else Douglas Adams thought was important when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. As a philosopher, I’ve been able to spend my life scratching the itch of these questions. When I finally figured them out I wrote The Atheist’s Guide to Reality as an introduction to what science tells us besides that there is no god. In How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories I apply much of that to getting to the bottom of why it’s so hard for us, me included, to really absorb the nature of reality.
Easier to read than On the Origin of Species, this book connects Darwin’s overwhelmingly significant explanatory insight to the last fifty years of advance in our understanding of biology, psychology, social science, and the nature of the mind. Dennett is a brilliantly ingenious builder of images and metaphors that really enable you to grasp Darwin’s breakthrough, one at least as important as Newton’s and Einstein’s, but more relevant to understanding the meaning of life.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life Daniel C. Dennett argues that the theory of evolution can demystify the miracles of life without devaluing our most cherished beliefs.
From the moment it first appeared, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been controversial: misrepresented, abused, denied and fiercely debated. In this powerful defence of Darwin, Daniel C. Dennett explores every aspect of evolutionary thinking to show why it is so fundamental to our existence, and why it affirms - not threatens - our convictions about the meaning of life.
I'm an architect, professor, and director of the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Throughout my career, I've sought to empower people to improve the designed environment through better knowledge of materials. I've written nine books and many articles on emerging materials, sustainable building technologies, and Japanese architecture and design. Having lived in Japan several times, I also appreciate the importance of developing an expanded worldview of material practices.
A visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, is on most architects' bucket lists.
The virologist Jonas Salk, who commissioned architect Louis Kahn to design the significant project, is best known for developing one of the first successful polio vaccines. Less familiar is this remarkable book, which Salk wrote with his son Jonathan, that explores the future of human societies.
By applying scientific principles about how organisms respond to resource limitations, the authors project the significant resource challenges and opportunities that await future human generations. The book looks beyond the population explosion to explore its mysterious aftermath. Indeed, the transition is already underway.
A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future provides a startling, fresh new message of understanding, perspective and hope for today’s tense, rapid-fire, kaleidoscopically changing world.
Drawn from the writings of visionary scientist Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, and extended and developed by his son Jonathan, the message of A New Reality explodes from the past, and sheds light on tensions that besiege us, and the currents of discord that are raging as these words are written. More importantly, it indicates a way forward out of our current situation.
We approached our book, theme, and recommendations as readers and lovers of Melville’s work who were inspired by following in his footsteps to places “whole oceans away,” as he describes the Pacific in Moby-Dick. Melville traveled widely and kept up his travels throughout a lifetime of further exploration, as well as voluminous writing. We want to share the exhilaration of traveling witha writer: that is, by reading of Melville’s travels, traveling to the places he visited, and also hearing from people who know those places too. We hope our book gives readers contact with the many dimensions of global travel, in whatever form they find for themselves.
In past and present narratives of the Marquesas, along with other Pacific paradises, writers tend toward sensational or romantic exaggeration. T. Walter Herbert sets the record straight, showing what Melville likely encountered during his sojourn to Nukuhiva. In Herbert’s book, Melville is one of three examples of visitors to the islands, along with ship’s captain David Porter, whose narrative describes his laying violent waste to villages in the interior, and missionary William Alexander. Herbert shows what these visitors misunderstood about people characterized as “savages” and “barbarians”—readings that continue to influence cultural attitudes today. No one writes with quite the controlled fury and keen insight of this author!
I’m a criminologist who is increasingly at least as interested in social order as I am in crime. In part I think this can be expressed as a concern with what glues us together rather than what pulls us apart. What particularly makes me smile, and draws me in, is the ability that some writers and researchers have to find the fascinating and the remarkable in the everyday. Whether it be what we wear, how we speak, or when we sleep, there is just as much to learn about our contemporary society from such matters as there is from who’s in parliament or how our financial institutions are behaving.
This is a remarkable book (the first of two volumes), taking in a huge sweep of history, making bold claims about social change over the centuries, yet focusing as much on manners, civility, and such everyday matters as how we eat at table as much as it does on the changing nature of medieval society and the rise of the modern nation-state. A deeply serious book, but one with chapter titles that include ‘On blowing one’s nose’, ‘On spitting,’ and ‘On behaviour in the bedroom’. Elias has had a huge impact on modern understanding of social change, not least in documenting and analysing the centuries-long trend toward diminishing violence and increasing shame and ‘civility’ in daily life.
The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages by demonstrating how the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them changed Western society forever.
I am a writer and reporter who has spent two decades covering complicated topics for a wide audience. This started when I covered Wall Street for Bloomberg News, where I spent 17 years as a reporter, and continues to this day with my own crypto media company, DeCential Media. My love of distilling new technologies to their essence is what informs the best of my writing and comes with the added bonus of being able to interview and learn from some of the smartest people in tech and finance.
Critical Path is a tour de force of structured thought that tackles some of the biggest problems facing humanity. R. Buckminster Fuller is one of the most lucid thinkers of the 20th Century who writes with inimitable style. Absorbing his work helped me to distill the issues facing the 21st century that blockchain technology and decentralized systems are trying to solve.
Critical Path is R. Buckminster Fuller's masterwork - the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern - as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication over 20 years ago. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation - at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises. Fuller's analysis has been proven correct in many areas since then and his options for the survival of mankind are as compelling as ever. Critical Path is an essential text for any student of humanity.
