books

I'm trying to clean up my desk, and so putting away books I taught from this semester. I reuse a few textbooks, but for a lot of the books I assign I pick new books every year. For my book on recent techology I was disappointed by Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back. The students seem to have liked it but I thought the analysis not very interesting. I liked Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology much better. The best book I read with a class was Flight: My Life in Mission Control by Chris Kraft. An amazingly good read, particularly for a book by an engineer. I may assign it to my honors freshman engineers; it might give them more perspective on what it means to be an engineer. And at least it would counter the old prejudice that government employees don't work hard.