Current books

Posted by jgrant, 2006-09-25 12:13:00

Some thoughts on a few books that I've read recently.

• 'Virus of the Mind' by Richard Brodie
  The title being as cheesy as it is almost stopped me from reading this book. Eventually got around to reading this. Guess this meme finally got it's way with my mind. The book is an introduction to memetics. It's an easy enough read with comparisons between the gene and meme in layman's terms showing how evolution ties into all this. It's a good place to start if this is a new topic to the reader. Brodie being the guy that wrote the first versions of Microsoft Word back in the day. The MS culture shows through in his writing especially when he gets into NLP techniques and how people are easily manipulated. It seems to be a topic he's very familiar with. Also, the way he describes the MS culture back in the late 80's and early 90's makes it sound like Google a few years ago. 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins (what initially introduced the concept of the meme back in 1976) is a much deeper read on this topic and ties in evolution with the concept more completely. It sucks that Brodie copied the title of an essay by Dawkins called 'Viruses of the Mind'. This dropped the credibility of the book for me. VOTM is still worth reading for a succinct coverage of this world-changing topic if the executive summary is what your looking for.

• 'The Stairway to Heaven' by Zecharia Sitchin
  Book 2 of The Earth Chronicles. Sitchin has done an amazing amount of 'heavy lifting' as usual in researching the topic of immortality as far back as ancient Sumerian times and mans quest to be like the gods. The ancient tale of The Epic of Gilgamesh is where the book starts. It's a very long read filled with huge amounts of evidence that leads the reader to some undeniable facts about the ancient past and near future without pushing the reader to such conclusions. The Pyramids, the Sphinx and many other ancient monuments are shown to have purposes that most people will never have heard about yet. Probably one of the best published works on this topic in the 20th century but Sitchin mostly avoids exploring the implications that this may have for us as the human race. Still incredibly valuable reading.

• 'The Wisdom of Crowds' by James Surowiecki
  A look at how collective human intelligence provides better results than the smartest individuals amongst us, sometimes. Think about the 'Poll the audience' option that a contestant had to guess the correct answer to a question in the 'Who wants to be a millionaire ?' TV show from the early 00's and you get the idea of this book. It covers some interesting topics regarding business history and strategy mostly over the last 100 years and why this topic that the author is describing will be necessary to run a successfull business in the future, improve society etc. There's more to it than that but that's what stood out the most.