Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
10 best books like Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Norbert Wiener): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Gravity's Rainbow, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, The Soft Machine, Ethics, Cosmicomics
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
| Author | Michel Foucault |
| ISBN | 0679752552 |
This book begins with a bang – in fact, a series of bangs. That is the point, you see. We need to be shocked about what is, after all, our relatively recent past. We too easily forget that there was a time when ‘people like us’ actually span back in history for nearly as far as the mind could imagine. Now,...
| Author | Thomas Pynchon |
| ISBN | 0143039946 |
Advice for a first time reader of Gravity's Rainbow:
Gravity's Rainbow is a book you either love or hate, and if you hate it it's probably because you couldn't finish the damn thing. Though by no means impenetrable, the novel is daunting enough to merit a list of tips for those wishing to tackle...
Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
| Author | Stephen Jay Gould |
| ISBN | 0393308189 |
More than any other modern scientists, Stephen Jay Gould has opened up to millions the wonders of evolutionary biology. His genius as an essayist lies in his unmatched ability to use his knowledge of the world, including popular culture, to illuminate the realm of science.
Ever Since Darwin,...
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
| Author | James Gleick |
| ISBN | 0375423729 |
James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The...
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
One of the most influential works of this century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan, and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning....
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
| Author | Thomas S. Kuhn |
| ISBN | 0226458083 |
Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index. "A landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. . . . It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. . . . Kuhn does not permit...
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
| Author | Jordan B. Peterson |
| ISBN | 0415922224 |
Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? Jordan Peterson offers a provocative new hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern...
| Author | William S. Burroughs |
| ISBN | 0802133290 |
In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy,...
| Author | Baruch Spinoza |
| ISBN | 0140435719 |
Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work - an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines...
| Author | Italo Calvino |
| ISBN | 0156226006 |
Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification...
| Author | Philip K. Dick |
| ISBN | 1598530097 |
Known in his lifetime primarily to readers of science fiction, Philip K. Dick is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem’s words, “wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely...
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church.
The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed...
The Computer and the Brain
| Author | John von Neumann |
| ISBN | 0300084730 |
Picked this up to read with a friend who said they were reading it so I'm still waiting for them to finish it. I think it was really cool reading for understanding the advent of computer architecture and where it was at this point and seeing computers compared to the brain. This book combined all the things...
Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction
| Author | Chuck Klosterman |
| ISBN | 0735217920 |
Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong?
A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs...
