Tracy Kidder inside Data General building a computer in 1979; the first great tech book.
A father and son ride from Minnesota to California while Pirsig asks what quality is.
Dee Brown's history of the American West from the Native side, 1860 to 1890.
Freud's royal road to the unconscious, from 1899.
Alexander's 253 patterns for towns, buildings and rooms; the book software engineers stole from.
Maya Angelou's childhood in Arkansas and the years of silence after the rape; the first of seven memoirs.
Don Norman on doors that need instructions and why the user is not wrong.
Kuhn's paradigm shifts; the book that gave the phrase to everyone.
John Berger on how oil painting and advertising teach us to look; the BBC series as a book.
Strunk and White's eighty pages on writing plainly; omit needless words.
Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.
Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.
Steven Levy on the MIT hackers, the homebrew club and the game makers who built the culture.
John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.
Four stories of a Bronx tenement; Will Eisner coined the term graphic novel for it.
James Baldwin's two essays of 1963 on race and religion in America.
Gombrich from cave paintings to the present; the art history book with no jargon, eight million copies.
Jane Jacobs against the planners; eyes on the street and short blocks.
Knuth's volumes since 1968; the book programmers own and do not finish.
Julia Child's 1961 book that taught Americans to make boeuf bourguignon.
Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and the psychology he built from it; those with a why can bear any how.
A bear of very little brain in the Hundred Acre Wood; Milne and Shepard.
One apple, two pears and a lot of cake; the board book with holes.
Darwin's one long argument for natural selection, still readable.
Steinbeck drives around America with a poodle in 1960 to see what it has become.
The murder of a Kansas farm family and the two men who did it; Capote's non-fiction novel.
Seneca writes to Lucilius on time, death and the cost of living well.
Shirer, who was there, on Germany from 1933 to 1945 in 1,200 pages.
Rachel Carson on DDT and the birds that stopped singing; the book that started environmentalism.
Sagan's book of the series: the pale blue dot before the photo and the cosmic calendar.
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