57 books like Road to Nowhere

Elon Musk didn’t emerge out of a vacuum; this book shows how what we now know of as Musk actually happened. Walter Isaacson writes the best tech biographies.

I was actually going to put his book on Apple founder Steve Jobs here but switched to Musk at the last minute because something about this book drew me in even more. Instead of dwelling on the philosophies of capitalism and libertarianism, Isaacson told the story of this poor nerd who got beaten up as a kid and never quite felt at home.

This is part of the tech bro story. It’s easy to forget: most of them started as nerds.

This book is about the ultimate pyramid scheme, written largely from the perspective of someone who fell for it. Michael Lewis tells a story like nobody else. It is about Sam Bankman Fried, the crypto billionaire who is now in jail for defrauding everybody.

Only it was written before Fried was convicted, and some reviewers felt Lewis had himself been charmed and hoodwinked by Fried. But that’s precisely the reason I love this book: the author falls under the spell of a Silicon Valley accelerationist and techno-utopian.

We get to experience the logic of “effective altruism” and the cult of exponential growth from the inside rather than the cynicism of how it all turned out.

This is the story of how and where the tech bro mindset was born. I was at first intimidated by the size of this thing and the breadth of its subtitle. But Harris manages to explain how the ethos of Palo Alto was forged long ago in a system of horse breeding that has carried through to the way startups are funded, evaluated, and shed today.

What I liked about it most were the stories of the people who developed this strange part of the country and how all of them contributed to what is now unquestioned: the Silicon Valley mindset. It really has nothing to do with doing business properly. It’s more of a cult.

This heartfelt but bitingly satiric novel explores the ridiculousness informing how tech companies operate.

This novel hit me in a surprisingly deep way. It follows a young woman trying to maintain her connection to humanity—and stay employed—in an increasingly technologized world. The joke is that she’s the driver of an autonomous taxi. Yeah, it’s about a tech company with a fleet of autonomous vehicles and human drivers hidden inside.

It felt so true to me, the perfect symbol for the uselessness of so much tech, the desire of tech bros to replace humans with machines, and the toll on those of us who want to live lives of meaning and connection.

This book paints a detailed picture of how the future of mobility will look like.

It explains what the hype around electric mobility, autonomous driving, car sharing, and ride-hailing is about. It is a great introduction for everyone who wants to get started in understanding the future of sustainable mobility and carbon-free transport.

My dad used to read to me every night as a kid, and among my favorites were those of the whimsical Dr. Seuss-esque variety.

While this book isn’t technically penned by Dr. Seuss, it maintains the same whimsy through its illustrations. The simplicity of the text helped me learn to identify words as a small kid. Upon revisiting the book as an adult, I am also delighted by the blunt honesty of the illustrated dogs.

My dad passed away recently, and the memory of him reading this book to me has become even more cherished.

"Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle."

Illich’s book - more of a long essay, really - remains astonishingly relevant almost fifty years on. It confirmed countless things that I sensed and suspected on the cusp of my career in urbanism many years ago. His rationality about transport, energy, and democracy is carved out of the finest literary granite. Criticism of this text merely runs off the rock like raindrops. It is my ultimate inspiration for working in urbanism and yet a constant source of dismay that our societies continue to neglect the wisdom within the words. The essay “The Social Ideology of the Motorcar” by André Gorz is a must-read companion to Illich’s visionary words.

During the Battle of the Atlantic, it was the Merchant Seamen of many nations that kept the flow of supplies running across the Atlantic despite attacks from ship, submarine, and aircraft, together with all the normal hazards of storm and sea.

Civilians from diverse backgrounds, multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-faith they came together as crews to fight their ships through. This is a sympathetic study that takes us into their world to understand why and how, by dogged determination, they withstood the constant dangers to bring their cargo home.

This book is full of unexpected delights from beginning to end.

The first spread states, “ROAR!! Goes the…” opposite a cutout that shows a tiger driving. The next spread says, “…TRUCK that rumbles up the road,” and shows the tiger driving a truck with a crate of tacks tumbling onto the road.

Likewise, “Hiss…goes the CAR that gets a flat tire,” driven by a snake. A parade of vehicles gets held up behind them until a coyote-driven police car (Awooo!) and beaver-driven tow truck (chomp!) save the day.

Cushman’s illustrations contain even more visual jokes. The sloth passing the pile-up on the sidewalk while pushing a tennis-ball-footed walker made me laugh out loud, even without a vehicle- or animal-loving toddler to read it to.

Vaporis’ Breaking Barriers gave me the background knowledge to understand how developed the system of travel was in Edo Japan. Both in relation to the infrastructure and the regulations imposed by the Bakufu under the Tokugawa regime. I was particularly impressed to learn about the sankin kotai, which is the travel expeditions of the regional lords (the daimyo) for their mandatory alternate residency in Tokyo, and the different protocols and checks across the roads.

Despite the harsh laws of the Tokugawa’s system of roads, barriers, relays, and permits, I was surprised to discover the social reality of the roads and how travelers managed to overcome the regulations and escape from social restrictions. I also enjoyed the multiplicity of sources that Vaporis is using to describe the culture of the road beyond the official records: from diaries and literary sources to woodblock prints.