Books like The Soul of a New Machine

01

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Tracy Kidder · Biography

Tracy Kidder's portrait of Paul Farmer — the physician and anthropologist who co-founded Partners in Health and spent decades treating tuberculosis, AIDS, and cholera in rural Haiti and among the poorest communities of the world — is one of the most compelling biographies of a contemporary American figure.

02

The Right Stuff

Tom Wolfe · Memoir

Tom Wolfe's account of the early years of American manned spaceflight — from the test pilots of Edwards Air Force Base to the Mercury Seven astronauts — is the most celebrated work of New Journalism and one of the essential books about American culture in the twentieth century.

03

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson · Science

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's history of the digital revolution, tracing the development of computers and the internet from Ada Lovelace's conceptualization of programming in the 1840s through the emergence of the modern internet, personal computer, and smartphone.

04

10% Happier

Dan Harris · Memoir

10% Happier is Dan Harris's account of discovering meditation after a panic attack live on Good Morning America in 2004 forced him to confront an anxiety problem he'd been managing with cocaine and a punishing work schedule.

05

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis · Memoir

A Grief Observed is C.

06

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.