Alan Kays Reading List

last modified: November 17, 2014

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)

PeterDrucker (any of his books)

Neil Postman (any of his books)

LewisMumford (any of his books)

LEARNING & CREATIVITY

Jean Piaget (any of his books)

Jerome Bruner (any of his books)

Lev Vygotsky (any of his books)

EdwardDeBono (any of his books)

Frank Smith (any of his books)

John Holt (any of his books)

Tim Gallwey (any of his books)

Shinichi Suzuki (any of his books)

Maria Montessori (any of her books)

SeymourPapert

John Dewey (any of his books)

Arthur Koestler (any of his books)

ANTHROPOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY

JosephCampbell (any of his books)

Derek Bickerton (any of his books)

Silvia Scribner & Mike Cole (gets technical)

Julian Jaynes

Clifford Geertz (any of his books)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (any of his books)

Robert Ornstein & Paul Ehrlich (any of their books)

Charles Hampden-Turner

Carl Jung (any of his books)

MarvinMinsky (any of his books)

Anthony Stevens

PHILOSOPHY

Plato (any etc) [MrPlato]

BertrandRussell (any of his books)

Richard Tarnas

Jacob Bronowski (any of his books)

Mary Midgley

Hannah Arendt

Korzybski

VannevarBush

Mark Booth (ed)

"Great books"

Mortimer Adler

Lao-tzu [LaoTse]

D.T. Suzuki (any of his books)

ART & PERCEPTION

Kenneth Clark (any of his books)

Ernst Gombrich (any of his books)

Richard Gregory (any of his books)

Rudolf Arnheim (any of his books)

DESIGN

ChristopherAlexander (any of his books)

Grosser

Valentino Braitenberg

W. Gray Walter

EdwardTufte

SCIENCE

David Goodsell

Philip Morrison (any of his books)

Niko Tinbergen (any of his books)

L. C. Epstein

EricDrexler

RichardDawkins (any of his books)

Evert

RichardFeynman (semitechnical)

Leon Lederman (semitechnical)

James Watson

POLITICAL

Daniel Boorstin (any of his books on any subject)

Madison, et.al,

Ralph Ketcham (ed)

Tom Paine

Benjamin Barber

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

DougLenat


JohnMcCarthy

MarvinMinsky (any of his books)

NicholasNegroponte


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