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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Second Edition
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
By David Ricardo |
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The Parsimonious Universe: Shape and Form in the Natural World
by Stevan Hildebrandt, Anthony Tromba
This book does more than explain why soap films always meet at 120° and why hexagons occur so frequently in nature. It helps you see how the principle of the economy of means (the attractor property of low-energy states) leads to the order we see in chaos. It does so by taking you on a historical tour of the mathematics leading up to calculus of variation. You don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy this book. |
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The Weather Book (2nd Edition)
by Jack Williams, USA Today
This is the book that will give you the tools you need to understand the link between economics and thermodynamics. It's loaded with cool charts showing how temperature and pressure differentials drive the weather. |
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The Character of Physical Law
by Richard Feynman
Feynman's Character is a little book that reminds us not to become wedded to any model. Models are simply devices for doing quick calculations, Feynman tells us. "Every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven theoretical representations for the same physics. We must always keep all the alternative ways of looking at things in our heads." The same is true in economics. It is good to have an open mind. |
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Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: A History of Heat
by Hans Christian Von Baeyer, Hans Christian Von Baeyer
This is a great first book on thermodynamics for people who hate math. Von Baeyer is a great teacher, and does a great job explaining the equivalence of heat and motion, and the link between entropy, disorder, and information, and between irreversibility, dissipative processes, and the direction of time. |
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Understanding Thermodynamics
by H.C. Van Ness
This is a good second book on thermodynamics, full of heat engines, steam turbines, and equations for reversible processes.
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The End of Certainty
by Isabelle Stengers, Ilya Prigogine
This book was an eye-opener for me. Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for establishing the equivalence between the physics of far-from-equilibrium systems and irreversible thermodynamic processes, and for showing that distance from equilibrium is an essential parameter of nature. His work provided the foundation upon which chaos theory, complexity, and complex adaptive systems, and self-organizing systems were built. This book will help you see the importance of looking at the world as non-equilibrium events, and understand why life is only possible in a non-equilibrium universe. |
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The Second Law
by P. W. Atkins
This is a great book for understanding entropy, "the fundamental tax of nature," and for seeing the difference between work (coherent motion), and heat (incoherent motion.) After you read this book you will understand that the job of policy makers is to maximize work and minimize heat in the economy. Also helps to understand the role of markets in achieving and maintaining a healthy balance between the efficiency or order and the flexibility of change. |
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The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind
by William H. Calvin
This book is very cool. It helps you to see the way your brain processes information from sensory inputs by first converting them to storable metaphors. The traffic cops for this process are the triangular neurons in your grey matter. Vivid description of the process by which metaphors compete for scarce storage space in the brain and what the resulting limited metaphor bank means for cognition. |
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The Seekers : The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World
by Daniel J. Boorstin |
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The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
by Daniel J. Boorstin |
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The Discoverers
by Daniel J. Boorstin |
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A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes 1-VI
by Arnold Joseph Toynbee , D. C. Somervell
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An Introduction to Information Theory
by J. R. Pierce |
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A Study of History; Abridgement of Volumes VII-X
by Arnold Joseph Toynbee |
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Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity
by John H. Holland , Heather Mimnaugh (Editor) |
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Exploring Complexity: An Introduction
by Gregoire Nicolis , Ilya Prigogine , G. Nocolis |
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The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, Books 1 and 2
by Thomas L. Heath (Author), Euclid |
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The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
by Isaac Newton |
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The Thirteen Books of the Elements (Euclid, Vol. 2--Books III-IX)
by Thomas L. Heath (Author), Euclid |
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Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy : How Music Captures Our Imagination
by R Jourdain |
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The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, Books 10 - 13
by Thomas L. Heath (Author), Euclid |
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The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution
by Stuart A. Kauffman |
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Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts |
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Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks
by Mark Buchanan |
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Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
by Steven Strogatz |
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The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex
by Harold J. Morowitz |
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Plague, Pox & Pestilence: Disease in History
by Kenneth F. Kiple (Editor), Elaine Willis |
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Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again
by Robert L. Bartley
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Rats, Lice and History
by Hans Zinsser |
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The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England
by Paul Slack |
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Enchiridion
 by Epictetus , George Long (Translator) |
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Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius (Author), Gregory Hays (Translator) |
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Principles of Geology
by Charles Lyell, James A. Secord |
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The Plague (Vintage International)
by Albert Camus |
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Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues
by Christopher Wills |
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Plagues and Peoples
by William McNeill |
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The General Theory
of Employment, Interest, and Money
by John
Maynard Keynes
Don't just read the book about the book. Read the book! Everyone has an opinion
of Keynes, but nobody has actually read Keynes. Please save me from being the
only person in America who has read the General Theory from cover to cover. When
you do, you will discover that Keynes, like all geniuses, was much smarter than
you would think from reading his followers. See especially his brilliant chapter
17 on "own rates of interest." It will change your thinking about real interest
rates. Viewed through the prism of modern network theory, Keynes presages much
of the recent work on cascading system failure. |
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The Value Imperative: Managing for Superior Shareholder Returns
by James M. McTaggart, Peter W. Kontes, and Michael Mankins (Contributor)
Jim McTaggart is a good friend and an extraordinary thinker about deploying capital to improve business value. He has been personally involved with some of the most celebrated restructuring programs of the past 20 years. |
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The Quest for Value
By B. Bennett Stewart
Ben's book does a great job of helping a manager understand the link between return on capital and business value. |
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The Elements of Physical Chemistry With Applications in Biology
By Peter Atkins
Now I get it! Chemistry never made sense to me; it seemed like trying to memorize a phone book. This book changes all that. It shows why chemical reactions occur by explaining chemical change as the same thermodynamic coooling process that cools your cup of hot coffee. You'll even learn how to use the term "Botlzmann's Distribution" in every day conversation. |
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Linked: The New Science of Networks
by Albert-László Barabási
Bill Miller told me to read this book-he was right, as usual. Barabasi's book will help you see that a network, or system, is not simply the sum of its parts; it is a thing unto itself. It helps us understand blackouts as cascading system failures, and that the robustness of a system depends on its degree of connectedness and its redundancy. This is very important for understanding the critical importance for providing incentives for capital formation in the network industries-electricity, telecommunications, security-that are increasingly dominating economic growth. |
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What Went Wrong? : The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
by Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis, Dan Yergin, and I attended the meetings where we provided advice to the task force for rebuilding Iraq. It was a real treat. Bernard Lewis is the most respected historian of the Middle East in the world today. This little book provides a good historical background for current events in the Middle East. |
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The Middle East
by Bernard Lewis
This book digs deeper into the historical roots of conflict that dominate the Middle East. It is well worth the read. |
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The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
Even after making dozens of trips to the Gulf region and working in the field for many years I learned a ton from reading Dan's history of the oil industry. |
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New Era Value Investing: A Disciplined Approach to Buying Value and Growth Stocks
by Nancy Tengler
Nancy Tengler's book does a great job showing you why being a good value investor is a lot of work. |
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John's Amazon Store |
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