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4 Responses to “Suggestion for a book for me to choose for English?”

1. popsicle Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 6:15 pm

   The Book Thief my Mark Zusak. set in Nazi Germany times and told through the eyes of death.

2. Ceeee Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 7:09 am

   Night by Eilie Wiesel. Very good book and to the point. Its about the hallocaust. I thought I would really hate reading about that kinda stuff b/c I hate suffering etc. but it was very meaningful. Its one of those books where while you read it you can picture it very clearly in your head.

3. Winston S Says:
   November 2nd, 2009 at 9:18 am

   A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson

4. Patrick R Says:
   November 4th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

   I have no idea what your abilities, powers of concentration, time in which to do the report, etc., are, so some of these are pretty ambitious books. (However, I realize it’s usually the case that anyone interested in these subjects has plenty of ability and concentration….)

   So here we go! I’ve annotated only parts of the list because I didn’t have time to do more…. And of course I could have added more titles, too! Aaargh!

   TECHNOLOGY:
   Theory and Design in the First Machine Age — Reyner Banham
   Mechanization Takes Command — Siegfried Giedion (germinal)
   Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life — Gaby Wood (British Title = Living Dolls)
   several biographies of Nikola Tesla (something of a cult figure)
   Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 — David Nye
   An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment — Patricia Fara
   Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time — Dava Sobel (hugely popular)
   anything by Henry Petroski
   The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann — Herman H. Goldstine
   America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 — Claude S. Fischer

   SCIENCE:
   Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science — Thomas Levenson
   The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus — Owen Gingerich
   It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions — Richard Lewontin
   The Mismeasure of Man — Stephen J. Gould (important attack on the ever-pervasive pseudoscience of “racial hierarchy”)
   Chaos — James Gleick
   On Growth and Form — D’Arcy Thompson (extremely important)
   The Two Cultures, and A Second Look — C. P. Snow (very influential)
   Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body — Armand Marie Leroi
   Latitude and the Magnetic Earth (more about the discovery of magnetism than about technology per se) — Stephen Pumfrey
   Science and the Founding Fathers — I. Bernard Cohen (the inventor of history of science as an academic discipline)
   The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes (looong version)
   The Manhattan Project — Jeff Hughest (short version)
   Newton’s Tyranny: The Suppressed Scientific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed — David Clark and Stephen P. H. Clark (obviously heretical)
   Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the Late 19th Century — Margaret Alic
   Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future — Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
   The Northern Lights — Lucy Jago
   *a special case, sort of a genre all its own: The Periodic Table — Primo Levi (a writer and a book no one should ever miss)

   MATH:
   Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy — Bertrand Russell
   The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 — Theodore M. Porter
   Fermat’s Last Theorem
   Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics — John Derbyshire
   A Tour of the Calculus — David Berlinski
   Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics — William Dunham
   A Mathematician’s Apology — G. H. Hardy
   The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (bio of Paul Erdos) — Paul Hoffman
   The Man Who Knew Infinity (bio of Ramanujan) — Robert Kanigel
   Alan Turing: The Enigma — Andrew Hodges
   Flatland — Edwin Abbott (fiction)
   Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem — Simon Singh and John Lynch
   Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea — Charles Seife
   Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences — John Allen Paulos (check his other books, too)

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