Book Choice List

Voting Rules:

·         Everyone gets 6 votes

·         You must use all 6 votes – you can allocate the votes to as many books (or only 1 book if you want)

·         You can’t vote for your own book

Book Choices:

The First World War
Author: Gerard J. De Groot
Length: 240 pages

The origins of the First World War, both diplomatic and social, are discussed thoroughly examined. The reader is then taken through the major battles on the Eastern and Western fronts, and is given insight into the eventual Allied victory. The war at sea, on the home front, and in distant theaters is carefully examined. The war as it was experienced by the men in the trenches is also explored.

A Bubble That Broke the World
Author: Garet Garrett
Length: 192 pages

The names of the players are different, but these cautionary essays about massive national debt-written in the long wake of World War I and as the Great Depression was starting to make its horrible power fully known-are still fully applicable today. A powerful libertarian voice of the early 20th century, Garet Garrett, writing originally in the Saturday Evening Post, warned about the extension of American credit to a Europe staggering under a massive debt leftover from the financing of World War I… a situation echoed, if reversed, today as the overextended United States continues her rampant borrowing. Collected in book form, Garrett’s writings are a cry for a retreat from financial insanity, a clear-eyed look at a complicated and little understood era of financial history, and perhaps an ominous warning for today. American journalist GARET GARRETT (1878-1954) also wrote The American Omen (1928), Rise of Empire (1941), and Garet Garrett’s: The People’s Pottage (later retitled Ex America) (1951)

The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America

Author: Steven Johnson
Length: 304 pages

The author of Everything Bad Is Good for You provides an entertaining account of the eighteenth-century scientist and radical Joseph Priestley’s monumental discovery that plants restore “something fundamental”—what we now know as oxygen—to the air. Johnson also offers a clear-sighted and intelligent exploration of the conditions that are propitious to scientific innovation, such as the availability of coffee and the unfettered circulation of information through social networks. The members of the networks that Priestley belonged to, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, provide Johnson with some of his strongest material. But he sometimes overstates the relationship between politics and science, particularly when he strains to make the case that Priestley, after fleeing England in 1794, became a pivotal figure in the formation of the American republic.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Author: Steven Johnson
Length: 336 pages

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Beginning with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.

Most exhilarating is Johnson’s conclusion that with today’s tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow’s great ideas.

The Gnostic Gospels

Author: Elaine Pagels

Length: 224 pages

A clear, cogent, and very effective introduction to the subject of Gnosticism, a different form of Christianity that was declared heretical and virtually stamped out by the orthodox church by the start of the second century after Christ. Most of what we knew of the Gnostic belief system came from the religious authors who worked so hard to destroy the movement, but that changed drastically with the still relatively recent discovery of a number of lost Gnostic writings near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt (like Dead Sea scrolls)

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
Author: Thomas Hager
Length: 281 pages

Fixed nitrogen (which is immediately usable to plants) is essential in agriculture. Its rarity dramatically shaped the world and its politics. But by 1905, as Hager details, German chemist Fritz Haber discovered a process for transforming abundant air-borne nitrogen into ammonia, and Carl Bosch’s ingenious engineering scaled Haber’s benchtop chemistry into industrial processes to make fertilizer. But Hager’s story is not only one of triumph, of how Haber and Bosch invented a way to turn air into bread, earning a Nobel Prize and saving millions from starvation. This is also a story of irony and tragedy. First, life-saving nitrogen is also the main ingredient in explosives, and Hager cogently summarizes the Haber-Bosch process’s critical role in both world wars. In addition, Hager illustrates Haber’s extreme German patriotism and desperate wish to assimilate; shattered by the rise of Hitler, he became an outcast, abandoned even by his onetime colleague Bosch.

The Best and Brightest

Author: David Halberstam

Length: 700 pages

The Vietnam War has seemed more shadowy and cinematic to me than anything else for most of my life. I was born during the Watergate Hearings. My generation was touched by the war in Vietnam, but only in the sense that our parents were part of it—whether they marched for peace or served in the military or fell somewhere in between. But unlike the Baby Boomers, we are not defined by the war—it, literally and figuratively, did not make us. So, as a consequence, when I think of the Vietnam War it is the images that the generations before me created that come to mind—Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon…

When I read The Best and the Brightest, that all changed. For the first time, I understood. No matter what your position may have been or may be, this book fully and expertly explores the American foreign policy decisions and actions that led to this war and its execution and paints a clear picture of its catalytic role in the shaping of today’s America.