You Should Read This

As summer days dwindle and students ready themselves for autumn back in Cambridge, Slice of MIT asked faculty about their own summer reading adventures. We presume that those who didn't write back by deadline are too buried in beach reading, but a few wrote in answer to this query: with only a week or two of summer left, what one book would you have us read?

Professor Robert Langer of MIT’s Langer Lab recommends The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead, 2013; $27.95). It’s a warm, All-American novel, wrote the New York Times Book Review, “but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas.”

Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics, enjoyed Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson (2013, Liveright; $29,95). The book is, in the words of the American Prospect review, a “relentless investigation” into the themes behind Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency.

Miklos Porkolab, director of the MIT Science and Fusion Center, suggests Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A History of the U.S. Fusion Energy Program by Stephen O. Dean (Springer, 2013; $24.99). The Energy Collective calls Dean’s book a detailed exploration into the roller-coaster history of fusion funding and experimentation in this country.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, recommends Jan Chipchase's Hidden in Plain Sight (HarperBusiness, 2013; $19.88). “Chipchase is a designer, ethnographer and blogger who draws inspiration from the ways technology is adopted and adapted by its users around the world,” says Zuckerman. “His first book summarizes many of the insights from his years of watching how people repurpose technologies, especially mobile phones, to meet their needs and offers a terrific introduction to thinking about product design that starts not from a blank sheet of paper but from the ways people use technologies in the real world.”

If none of these titles strike a vein, there is plenty of summer reading from alumni and professors (the above professors notwithstanding) to be had. Let us also give the Slice bump to Brain and Cognitive Sciences professor Suzanne Corkin, whose Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M. was published this spring by Basic Books and was reviewed in the July/August issue of Technology Review. A humane and inspiring portrait of one man's sacrifice for science, it will leave you weighting each day with a little more worth, whether in summer or any season.

Got a must-read addition to the list? Add a comment and let us know.