ECS 188 – Example Books for Book-Based Projects

These books are only examples; you are in no way limited to them.
  1. Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (Ozzie Zehner)
  2. Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us Or the Environment (Michael Huesemann, Joyce Huesemann)
  3. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway)
  4. In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race that Took it Down (Stanley Reed, Alison Fitzgeral)
  5. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Joseph Dumit) (UCD author)
  6. What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
  7. Our Final Hour (Martin Rees)
  8. The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (John Leslie)
  9. A Short History of Progress (Ronald Wright)
  10. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond)
  11. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Latour and Woolgar)
  12. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
  13. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt). Or perhaps The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt)
  14. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (L. Fleck) (1935, trans. 1981)
  15. Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (David Sanger)
  16. An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (McNeill, McNeill, and Kennedy)
  17. The Climate War (Eric Pooley)
  18. Storms of My Granchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (James Hansen)
  19. Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (Daniel Sarewitz)
  20. Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Daniel S. Greenberg)
  21. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Christopher R. Browning). Alternative:
  22. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Robert Jay Lifton)
  23. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (William Patry)
  24. What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
  25. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (Eli Pariser)
  26. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Tim Wu)
  27. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
  28. The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam (Philip Howard)
  29. The Myth of Digital Democracy (Matthew Hindman)
  30. Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston).
  31. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Donald MacKenzie)
  32. Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (Joseph Cirincione)
  33. To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (Henry Petroski)
  34. Our Stolen Future: How We Are Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival (Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, John Peter Meyers)
  35. Living Downstream : A Scientist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Sandra Steingraber)
  36. A Patent System for the 21st Century (Board of Science, Technology, and Economic Policy)
  37. The Technological Society (Jacques Ellul) (challenging)
  38. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Neil Postman)
  39. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Albert Borgmann)
  40. Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? (Greg Conti)
  41. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Peter Singer and Jim Mason)
  42. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Leo Marx)
  43. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (David Noble)
  44. Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (David F. Noble)
  45. Technics and Civilization (Lewis Mumford) (challenging)
  46. Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (Lewis Mumford)
  47. Code and other Laws of Cyberspace (Lawrence Lessig)
  48. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (George B. Dyson)
  49. Ethics in an Age of Technology: Gifford Lectures, Volume Two (Ian Barbour)
  50. Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (Peter Hershock)
  51. The Rise of the Network Society (Manuel Castells)
  52. Does Technology Drive History: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Merritt Roe Smith, Leo Marx)
  53. Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (James E. III McClellan, Harold Dorn)
  54. Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History (Arnold Pacey)
  55. Sakharov: A Biography (Richard Lourie)
  56. Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, vol. II (Lewis Mumford)
  57. World Without Secrets: Business, Crime and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Richard Hunter)
  58. Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Sissela Bok)
  59. Questioning Technology (Andrew Feenberg)
  60. Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (Carl Mitcham)
  61. Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (Lawrence Rosen) (legal background may be useful)
  62. The Ethical Brain (Michael Gazzaniga)
  63. Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (Wesley Smith)
  64. Classica Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of Cases that have Shaped Medical Ethics, with Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Backgrounds (Gregory Pence)
  65. Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth (John Robbins)
  66. Euthanasia, Ethics and Public Policy: An Argument Against Legalisation (John Keown)
  67. Connection on the Ice: Environmental Ethics in Theory and Practice (Patti Clayton and Charles Masson)
  68. Animal Liberation (Peter Singer)
  69. For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and their Islands (Second Edition) (Jack Niedenthal)
  70. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Jared Diamond)
  71. The End of Poverty: Economic Possiblities for Our Times (Jeffrey Sachs)
  72. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro) and some selection from Elusive Justice (a symposium on the Bhopal gas disaster after twenty years) (2004)
  73. Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical and the Toxic Century (Jack Doyle)
  74. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Hans Jonas)
  75. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (David Brin)