161–170 of 188 posts
The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1864)
Intellectuals By Paul Johnson
Daniel J. Boorstin - The Discoverers
The Great Courses - The Industrial Revolution (audiobook/lectures)
Decline of the West - Spengler
The Bible. Even if you don't care for it's spiritual implications, there is a rich history that is used by archaeologists, and many face-value lessons of cause and effect, and even recommendations on how to manage a business and employees. The beautiful non-spiritual message is that humans don't change, but we can still learn from histories mistakes.
This is the most powerful spiritual text I’ve encountered to date. Instantly places me in a state of deep understanding. I open it on a weekly basis.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman. It’s a great read about early scribe practices and known problems with different manuscript translations in the New Testament.
I've not personally read "Misquoting Jesus", but I've listened to Ehrman on YT a bit. Based on that, and having spoken with a few biblical scholars who have read Ehrman, the general impression I get is that he has a "select is broken"[0] attitude toward the reliability of the Bible. Much like GCC, and the Linux kernel, and the PostgreSQL query planner, the Bible is a battle-tested historical artifact. There may be a…
Crazy that historians don't seem to believe that right?
I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" at the moment. It's about Data General and the development of a new minicomputer. I read it at the dawn of my IT career in the 1990s and found much of was still relevant then. (the book was written in 1981) Thirty years later, I'm mostly just nodding as I follow along; yep, yep, yep. "Engineering" is a distant second to corporate politics and office pecking or…
I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" at the moment. It's about Data General and the development of a new minicomputer. I read it at the dawn of my IT career in the 1990s and found much of was still relevant then. (the book was written in 1981) Thirty years later, I'm mostly just nodding as I follow along; yep, yep, yep. "Engineering" is a distant second to corporate politics and office pecking or…
Another vote for The Soul of a New Machine. It's one of my favorite books.
I'm re-reading Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" at the moment. It's about Data General and the development of a new minicomputer. I read it at the dawn of my IT career in the 1990s and found much of was still relevant then. (the book was written in 1981) Thirty years later, I'm mostly just nodding as I follow along; yep, yep, yep. "Engineering" is a distant second to corporate politics and office pecking or…
Another vote for The Soul of a New Machine. It's one of my favorite books.
I read it shortly after buying the house that would be (and is) our 'family home', of a very similar vintage (early 80s, East Coast.) Certainly not every home from the past was artfully constructed (or even well-built), but something just feels different with the modern, Fortune-500 homebuilders that rush an army of interchangeable subcontractors through cookie-cutter plans to maximize interior square-footage and stack as many units as possible on a tract of land.
seneca's letters from a stoic, marcus aurelius' meditations, the pragmatic programmer by david thomas & andrew hunt
The Foxfire books ever since I was little. It's a series of books documenting traditional skills like crop growing, fiddle making, blacksmithing, plumbing, foraging, cooking, etc. as done by rural people in Appalachia. They contain all kinds of valuable information in them as well as a good source of life skills & fun hobbies. I recommend them to everyone.