by David Alan Grier (2009)
Based on author David A. Grier's column "In Our Time," which runs monthly in Computer magazine, Too Soon To Tell presents a collection of essays skillfully written about the computer age, an era that began February 1946. Examining ideas that are both contemporary and timeless, these chronological essays examine the revolutionary nature of the computer, the relation between machines and human institutions, and the connections between fathers and sons to provide general readers with a picture of a specific technology that attempted to rebuild human institutions in its own image.
Margaret Morse
In Virtualities, Margaret Morse focuses on the interactions that people have with machines and images. Morse contends that such interactions, far from being liberating, actually cloak an impoverished public sphere by idealising impersonal relations.
Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) is perhaps the preeminent historian of classical and Renaissance art, architecture, and culture. Burckhardt completed significant " cultural history," which he only described in his famous Reflections on History and in a celebrated series of lectures delivered in Basel in 1872. Burckhardt dramatically renounced these speeches during his own lifetime, fearing a hostile reception by a world body of scholars and critics who remained wedded to a romanticized view of the ancient Greek world. It is only now, for the first time, that the core of these lectures is available in book form to the English-language reader. Rejecting the notion that a perfect democracy had in fact existed, Burckhardt portrayed ancient Greek culture as an aristocratic world based on ruthless competition for honor, which led, in turn, to a tyrannous state with minimal freedoms.
With a pref. by Warren Susman
Published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik. (Goodreads.com)
Joan Hiatt Harlow
In Boston in 1775, orphaned fourteen-year-old Hannah is indentured to the family of a British general and begins attending secret meetings disguised as a boy, then passing messages and warnings to the revolutionaries using her beloved horse Promise. Includes historical notes.