Book recommendations from a genius..

Cornells Jon Kleinberg gave a few book recommendations in a recent email interview. With Christmas and all coming up, I thought a link was in order.

Here's the citation:
"Six Degrees, by Duncan Watts, and The Search, by John Battelle, are two good examples; the first covers network theory and social networks, while the second covers the growth of the search industry and what it means for everyday life.

Both are engagingly written, and both succeed marvelously at conveying some of what I was discussing earlier -- the mix of excitement and frustration that comes from doing research in science and technology.

Duncan Watts's book is reminiscent of a very thought-provoking earlier book that I've been recommending to students for a number of years: Thomas Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior. Through a sequence of compelling examples, he illustrates how clever insights and quantitative models can expose the ways in which large-scale social processes are often influenced by very localized mechanisms.

At a more general level, I'd also mention some "classic" collections of biographical essays about famous scientists of the past; for example, Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters and E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics have remained inspirational reading long after they were first written. "