Alan Kays Reading List

I first met AlanKay in 1991 and then briefly but every 3 months for a 3-4 years thereafter at Vanguard conferences. Alan is a true polymath and has a personal library of 5000 books. Each time I met him I asked him for another book recommendation. Clearly others were doing the same. Eventually he responded to the pressure and produced the following 'beginners reading list' which he sent to several of us. I cherish the list. There are some wonderfully funny comments in the list e.g. 'Plato (any etc.)'. -- RichardPawson

(Also maintained on Squeakland: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)

TECHNOLOGY & MEDIA

MarshallMcLuhan (any of his books)

• Gutenberg galaxy
• Understanding media

PeterDrucker (any of his books)

• Technology, Management, and Society
• Innovation and Entreprenuring

Neil Postman (any of his books)

• Amusing ourselves to death
• The disappearence of childhood
• Conscientious objections

LewisMumford (any of his books)

• The myth of the machine
• Technics and civilization

LEARNING & CREATIVITY

Jean Piaget (any of his books)

• The psychology of the child
• To understand is to invent

Jerome Bruner (any of his books)

• Towards a theory of instruction
• The relevance of education

Lev Vygotsky (any of his books)

• Thought and language
• Mind in society
• The psychology of art

EdwardDeBono (any of his books)

• LateralThinking
• SixThinkingHats

Frank Smith (any of his books)

• Essays into literacy

John Holt (any of his books)

• Instead of education
• Teach them yourself

Tim Gallwey (any of his books)

• The inner game of tennis

Shinichi Suzuki (any of his books)

• Nurtured by love

Maria Montessori (any of her books)

• The secret of childhood
• The discovery of the child

SeymourPapert

• MindStorms
• The childrens' machine

John Dewey (any of his books)

• School and society
• Freedom and culture

Arthur Koestler (any of his books)

• Act of creation
• The ghost in the machine

ANTHROPOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY

JosephCampbell (any of his books)

• Myths to live by
• The masks of god

Derek Bickerton (any of his books)

• Language and species

Silvia Scribner & Mike Cole (gets technical)

• The psychology of literacy

Julian Jaynes

• The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind

Clifford Geertz (any of his books)

• The interpretation of cultures

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (any of his books)

• Beyond boredom and anxiety
• Flow

Robert Ornstein & Paul Ehrlich (any of their books)

• New World, New Mind

Charles Hampden-Turner

• Maps of the mind

Carl Jung (any of his books)

• Man and his symbols
• Modern man in search of a soul

MarvinMinsky (any of his books)

• Society of mind

Anthony Stevens

• Archetypes

PHILOSOPHY

Plato (any etc) [MrPlato]

• Timeaus
• Republic

BertrandRussell (any of his books)

• History of western philosophy
• Human knowledge, its scope and limits
• Skeptical essays

Richard Tarnas

• The passion of the western mind

Jacob Bronowski (any of his books)

• Ascent of man

Mary Midgley

• Wisdom, information, & wonder
• Science as salvation

Hannah Arendt

• The human condition

Korzybski

• Science and Sanity

VannevarBush

• Science is not enough

Mark Booth (ed)

• What i believe

"Great books"

• Most of greeks, etc., Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Montaigne, etc.

Mortimer Adler

• The great ideas: Syntopicon of "great books" (Vol I,II)

Lao-tzu [LaoTse]

• TaoTeChing

D.T. Suzuki (any of his books)

• Zen mind, beginner's mind (this is by Shinryu Suzuki, not D.T. Suzuki)

ART & PERCEPTION

Kenneth Clark (any of his books)

• Civilisation
• What is a masterpiece?

Ernst Gombrich (any of his books)

• Art and illusion

Richard Gregory (any of his books)

• Eye and

Rudolf Arnheim (any of his books)

• Visual thinking

DESIGN

ChristopherAlexander (any of his books)

• NotesOnTheSynthesisOfForm
• APatternLanguage

Grosser

• Gossamer odyssey

Valentino Braitenberg

• Vehicles

W. Gray Walter

• The living

EdwardTufte

• TheVisualDisplayOfQuantitativeInformation
• VisualizingInformation?

SCIENCE

David Goodsell

• The machinery of life

Philip Morrison (any of his books)

• The ring of truth

Niko Tinbergen (any of his books)

• The animal in its world

L. C. Epstein

• Relativity visualized

EricDrexler

• Engines of creation

RichardDawkins (any of his books)

• The blind watchmaker

Evert

• Neuroethology (semitechnical)

RichardFeynman (semitechnical)

• The character of physical law
• -- QED

Leon Lederman (semitechnical)

• The God particle
• From quark to cosmos

James Watson

• The double helix

POLITICAL

Daniel Boorstin (any of his books on any subject)

• An american primer
• The americans

Madison, et.al,

• Federalist papers
• The debate on the constitution

Ralph Ketcham (ed)

• The anti-federalist papers

Tom Paine

• Common sense
• The rights of man
• The age of reason

Benjamin Barber

• An aristocracy of everyone

COMPUTERS (most of the good stuff is still in papers, here are a few books)

DougLenat

• --

JohnMcCarthy

• LISP 1.5 manual (MITPress)

MarvinMinsky (any of his books)

• Computation: finite and infinite machines (technical)

NicholasNegroponte

• The architecture machine
• Architecture machines