ABIDE Presentation

The Books

This is not a book club, nor a recommended reading list; some of these books I don’t even particularly like or care to ever read again. These books represent ten touchstones that I can use to tell the story of my life, my family, people who influenced or inspired me when I was growing up, etc.

Le Petit Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupery 1900-1944

This children’s story has been translated into more different languages than any book in history (except for religious texts like the Bible.) My family didn’t have this book growing up, but both sets of grandparents had copies of it; so I would read it at their houses.

Paris to Ho Chi Minh City

Lewis Hamilton protests F1 jewelry ban

Unbroken

The story of Louis Zamperini, a 1936 Olympic middle-distance star who survived unbearable conditions as a POW in WW2. After the War, Zamperini became a Christian evangelist.

Martin Gardner: Scientific American columns 1957-81 and beyond

Who Was Martin Gardner?

Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was: an unassuming Oklahoman who edited the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for 25 years (despite having no formal mathematical education): an author of 100+ books and a leading authority on card magic and the books of Lewis Carroll; a correspondent who maintained lifelong conversations with the likes of Sagan, Asimov, Russell, Knuth; and a leader of the Skeptical movement.

Ball Four

“Ball Four is a people book, not just a baseball book.” - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times book critic

This book helped me laugh during some dark times in my life, and serves as a shibboleth for a group of my friends. Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 Major League Baseball season reveals a man who never stopped dreaming.

Visual Display of Quantitative Information

I saw Edward Tufte’s live one-day seminar in Arlington, VA in 2003 and I’ve spent the last 20 years trying to figure out what it was all about. Maybe now I’m just starting to understand. Tufte didn’t draw the graphic below, but he made it famous.

Tufte is an outspoken critic of Microsoft PowerPoint and has made many suggestions for improving the graphics capabilities of Microsoft Excel.

Tufte’s Tip for Effective Meetings

Who Shot John Maynard Keynes?

I’ve probably read this book six or seven times, first when I was in high school and then again through college and into my professional life. Maybe everyone needs a book like this in their life.

The Art of the Impossible

When I was in high school, I read a (long-out of print) collection of UN Security Council speeches by US politician and ambassador Adlai Stevenson. I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading stenography of a live speech and not the written word. The only other person I ever felt that way about was Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned unlikely Prime Minister of the Czech Republic.

Our list of authors is full of Dreamers in the Enneagram rubric. Havel was the biggest dreamer of all.

Vaclav Havel 1936-2011

The Politics of Glory

Later editions had a different title (Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?) - somewhat dated now, but countless ideas from this book are still in use today. Even if you don’t care about baseball, this book taught me more than anything else about how to frame an argument - for almost 30 years now, almost every argument about who should or shouldn’t be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame is informed by the guidelines that James laid out.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures

When I was a kid, I really wanted to read James Michener’s novel Space - I was forbidden to read it (and rightly so) but that made me even more curious about what was in that book. In 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the world not to read this book, thus triggering The Streisand Effect on an international scale.

Chris and Carol’s Cookbook

The Greatest Story Ever Told.