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The Way I Think > (Chapter 15:) Bibliography
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The following are books which I would encourage for further reading.
Adams, James L., Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas
This is a book on whitebox thinking and how to think outside the box. As such, it may be as unnecessary as telling a fish how to swim, but it is still a good book, and worth mentioning.
The Bible
Number one in logical priority in this bibliography. My number two two recommendation is Insight.
Carnegie, Dale, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Social skills 101. The title to this book sounds positively Machiavellian, but the approach outlined is anything but manipulative. I greatly prefer to work with people who have read the book and are making some semblance of an attempt to work with its principles; the Golden Rule is not mentioned in the book (perhaps as being too obvious to comment on), but it's the sort of thing that's outlined in the book. People who like it might also like Stephen R. Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Feynman, Richard, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
When I read this book, I was disappointed, because it appears naive and simpleminded. I realized on coming back that it was worth a second look.
l'Engle, Madeleine, A Wind in the Door
This book has a number of facets; one of them is a character, a little boy named Charles Wallace, whose IQ is "so high it's untestable by normal means." It provides deep literary insight into what it's like growing up very gifted, and it draws to the forefront an important question: How will Charles Wallace, who is getting beaten up every day at school, adapt.
Griffin, Em, A First Look at Communication Theory
For a theory-oriented mind, this provides the theoretical underpinnings to understanding how to work with those around you. It works well in tandem with other books.
Heinlein, Robert A., Stranger in a Strange Land
This classic science fiction novel has, as its basic premise, someone who is raised by Martians and brought to earth as a young man; the book has great merits and great flaws, and its main character is (alongside Charles Wallace) one of the characters in literature I have most identified with. It provides a significant view of how a brilliant mind might first just struggle to fit in, then learn about, then thrive in our culture.
Lonergan, Bernard, Insight
Insight fleshes out a good many things that I have only been in a position to hint at. It has occasional annoyances to the mathematician--trying to be sophisticated by quoting a misunderstanding of Göodel's Incompleteness Theorem, which after seeing similar misunderstandings in humanities work grates on a mathematician's nerves like fingers on a chalkboard--but this book makes a pretty serious and well-researched attempt at what I was trying to do.
Insight is my number two reccommendation, second only to the Bible.
Musashi, Miyamoto, A Book of Five Rings
The classic in response to which this book was written. It is subtle, cryptic, and deliberately written to be obscure, but it still holds a number of gems. It explains the Way of swordsmanship in Japanese culture.
Pollock, David C. The Third Culture Kid Experience: Growing Up Among Worlds
The Third Culture Kid (TCK), who in his growing-up years has been shaped by more than one culture, does not so much live in a culture in the sense of someone monocultural, as live in a meta-culture that examines others but does not fit in to any culture. The same is true of a really bright mind; the source of the distinctive feature is different (an intellectual instead of a cultural gap), but a definite resemblance is at play. Reading this book and then asking, "How does this apply to me?" should provide insights.
Polya, G., How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
This is a book about how one goes about solving a math problem -- something that is rarely explicitly transmitted -- and is applicable to far broader domains.
Spradley, James P., Participant Observation: Step by Step
This is a book of anthropology, about how to observe, understand, and describe a culture in an ethnography. There was another dimension in which it stimulated my thinking, but I am mentioning it here because the principles it provides to understand a cultural situation are useful tools for bright minds to use to understand a culture they don't fit in to. It might be retitled, How to understand and function in an alien culture.
Webb, James T.; Meckstroth, Elizabeth A.; Tolan, Stephanie S. Guiding the Gifted Child: A Practical Source for Parents and Teachers
This book is more than just what its title would suggest. When reading it, a number of things clicked into place that hadn't made sense before: an unusual sense of humor, feeling that I didn't fit in anywhere, the rate at which I learn... Parents who are reading my book to instruct a talented youngster would be well advised to read that as well. For all readers, it forms a good part of the backdrop to this writing.
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