Government Books

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A crash course in the business of learning-from the bestselling author of The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution…

“A brilliant teacher, Christensen brings clarity to a muddled and chaotic world of education.”
-Jim Collins, bestselling author of Good to Great

According to recent studies in neuroscience, the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. If we hope to stay competitive-academically, economically, and technologically-we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence, reevaluate our educational system, and reinvigorate our commitment to learning. In other words, we need “disruptive innovation.”

Now, in his long-awaited new book, Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson take one of the most important issues of our time-education-and apply Christensen's now-famous theories of “disruptive” change using a wide range of real-life examples. Whether you're a school administrator, government official, business leader, parent, teacher, or entrepreneur, you'll discover surprising new ideas, outside-the-box strategies, and straight-A success stories.

You'll learn how

• Customized learning will help many more students succeed in school
• Student-centric classrooms will increase the demand for new technology
• Computers must be disruptively deployed to every student
• Disruptive innovation can circumvent roadblocks that have prevented other attempts at school reform
• We can compete in the global classroom-and get ahead in the global market

Filled with fascinating case studies, scientific findings, and unprecedented insights on how innovation must be managed, Disrupting Class will open your eyes to new possibilities, unlock hidden potential, and get you to think differently. Professor Christensen and his coauthors provide a bold new lesson in innovation that will help you make the grade for years to come.

The future is now. Class is in session.

How to Be Invisible: The Essential Guide to Protecting Your Personal Privacy, Your Assets, and Your Life (Revised Edition)

J.J. Luna

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Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From cyberspace to crawl spaces, new innovations in information gathering have left the private life of the average person open to scrutiny, and worse, exploitation. In this thoroughly revised update of his immensely popular guide How to Be Invisible, J.J. Luna shows you how to protect yourself from these information predators by securing your vehicle and real estate ownership, your bank accounts, your business dealings, your computer files, your home address, and more.

J.J. Luna, a highly trained and experienced security consultant, shows you how to achieve the privacy you crave and deserve, whether you just want to shield yourself from casual scrutiny or take your life savings with you and disappearing without a trace. Whatever your needs, Luna reveals the shocking secrets that private detectives and other seekers of personal information use to uncover information and then shows how to make a serious commitment to safeguarding yourself.

There is a prevailing sense in our society that true privacy is a thing of the past. Filled with vivid real life stories drawn from the headlines and from Luna's own consulting experience, How to Be Invisible, Revised Edition is a critical antidote to the privacy concerns that continue only to grow in magnitude as new and more efficient ways of undermining our personal security are made available. Privacy is a commonly-lamented casualty of the Information Age and of the world's changing climate-but that doesn't mean you have to stand for it.

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Cliff Stoll

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Total reviews: 156 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I love this book. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

As you can see from the reviews here, many people also love this book.

I love the trip down memory lane that this book provides. Sure is fun to go back to a more innocent time and remember what it was like before the internet became huge. If you remember archie, gopher, kermit, then this is a book for you.

Even if you're too young to remember this time, it would be quite fun to watch WAR GAMES and then read this book. I love the writing style--this is a real page-turner.

Editorial Review:

A sentimental favorite, The Cuckoo's Egg seems to have inspired a whole category of books exploring the quest to capture computer criminals. Still, even several years after its initial publication and after much imitation, the book remains a good read with an engaging story line and a critical outlook, as Clifford Stoll becomes, almost unwillingly, a one-man security force trying to track down faceless criminals who've invaded the university computer lab he stewards. What first appears as a 75-cent accounting error in a computer log is eventually revealed to be a ring of industrial espionage, primarily thanks to Stoll's persistence and intellectual tenacity.

Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics

Morley Winograd, Michael D. Hais

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It happens in America every four decades and it is about to happen again. America's demand for change in the 2008 election will cause another of our country's periodic political makeovers. This realignment, like all others before it, will result from the coming of age of a new generation of young Americans-the Millennial Generation-and the full emergence of the Internet-based communications technology that this generation uses so well. Beginning in 2008, almost everything about American politics and government will transform-voting patterns, the fortunes of the two political parties, the issues that engage the nation, and our government and its public policy.

Building on the seminal work of previous generational theorists, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais demonstrate and describe, for the first time, the two types of realignments-"idealist" and "civic"-that have alternated with one another throughout the nation's history. Based on these patterns, Winograd and Hais predict that the next realignment will be very different from the last one that occurred in 1968. "Idealist" realignments, like the one put into motion forty years ago by the Baby Boomer Generation, produce, among other things, a political emphasis on divisive social issues and governmental gridlock. "Civic" realignments, like the one that is coming, and the one produced by the famous GI or "Greatest" Generation in the 1930s, by contrast, tend to produce societal unity, increased attention to and successful resolution of basic economic and foreign policy issues, and institution-building.

The authors detail the contours and causes of the country's five previous political makeovers, before delving deeply into the generational and technological trends that will shape the next. The book's final section forecasts the impact of the Millennial Makeover on the elections, issues, and public policies that will characterize America's politics in the decades ahead.

The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington

David Sirota

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

An All-Access Pass to the Populist
Insurrection Brewing Across the Country

Job outsourcing. Perpetual busy signals at government agencies. Slashed paychecks. Stolen elections. A war without end, fatally mismanaged. Ordinary Americans on both the Right and Left are tired of being disenfranchised by corrupt politicians of both parties and are organizing to change the status quo. In his invigorating new book, David Sirota investigates whether this uprising can be transformed into a unified, lasting political movement.

Throughout the course of American history, uprisings like the one we are seeing now have given birth to powerful movements to end wars, protect workers, and expand civil rights, so the prospect of today’s uprising turning into a full-fledged populist movement terrifies Wall Street and Washington. In The Uprising, Sirota takes us far from the national media spotlight into the trenches where real change is happening—from the headquarters of the most powerful third party in America to the bowels of the U.S. Senate; from the auditorium of an ExxonMobil shareholder meeting to the quasi-military staging area of a vigilante force on the Mexican border. This is vital, on-the-ground reporting that immerses us in the tumultuous give-and-take of politics at its most personal.

Sirota also offers a biting critique of our politics. He shows how the uprising is, at its core, a reaction to faux “bipartisanship” in the nation’s capital—the “bipartisanship” whereby Republican and Democratic lawmakers join together in putting the agenda of corporate interests above all those of ordinary citizens.

Ultimately, Sirota reminds us that the Declaration of Independence, “America’s original uprising manifesto,” says that governments “derive their powers from the consent of the governed.” Irreverent and insightful, The Uprising shows how the governed have stopped consenting and have started taking action.

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Bruce Schneier

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Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In "Beyond Fear," Bruce Schneier invites us to take a critical look at not just the threats to our security, but the ways in which we're encouraged to think about security by law enforcement agencies, businesses of all shapes and sizes, and our national governments and militaries. Schneier believes we all can and should be better security consumers, and that the trade-offs we make in the name of security - in terms of cash outlays, taxes, inconvenience, and diminished freedoms - should be part of an ongoing negotiation in our personal, professional, and civic lives, and the subject of an open and informed national discussion.

With a well-deserved reputation for original and sometimes iconoclastic thought, Schneier has a lot to say that is provocative, counter-intuitive, and just plain good sense. He explains in detail, for example, why we need to design security systems that don't just work well, but fail well, and why secrecy on the part of government often undermines security. A skeptic of much that's promised by highly touted technologies like biometrics, Schneier is also a refreshingly positive, problem-solving force in the often self-dramatizing and fear-mongering world of security pundits.

Schneier helps the reader to understand the issues at stake, and how to best come to one's own conclusions, including the vast infrastructure we already have in place, and the vaster systems--some useful, others useless or worse--that we're being asked to submit to and pay for.

The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values

Andrew Keen

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Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show

In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.

Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.

Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.


From the Hardcover edition.

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: A Practical Guide to Using Web2.0 Technologies to Recruit, Organize and Engage Youth 

Ben Rigby

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

How to Reach out to the Networked Public - a must-read! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There are books you enjoy because they are entertaining and there are books you enjoy because they make you think. This title is a part of the latter group. Ben Rigby clearly knows Web 2.0 and he also knows nonprofits. This combination make him excellent to convey to others in the nonprofit space how to better take advantage of social media tools to raise awareness, do fundraising and become more effective change agents.

All the chapters are structured similarly, with an opening section devoted to the understanding of the different technologies (blogging, social networking, video/photo sharing, mobile phones, etc.) and how they are being used by nonprofits and the public sector. Following comes a part that walks the reader through the basics of getting setup and running. Strategic considerations and possible challenges wrap up the chapter's core. As a prologue to each chapter there are two outside authors offering their "big picture" view to complement the topic.

Granted that the book goes well beyond Web 2.0, covering mobile technology and Second Life, one should not get too hung up on this subtlety. Mobilizing Generation 2.0 is a must-read for anyone working in a nonprofit or the public sector, wanting to connect to that ironically elusive "networked public," as described by Danah Boyd in one of the "big picture" essays.

Editorial Review:

Use new media to attract and mobilize young people!
Explore and examine the gamut of new media and the ways in which it can be used to recruit, organize, and mobilize young people--who represent the majority of new media users. Answer the questions: What is it? How is it being used? How does it work? How to get started? You'll get concise descriptions, screenshots, case studies, resources, and best practices in language that is easy for non-technical people to understand. You'll also gain a sense of the technology--without requiring any downloads, software or plug-ins.

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Sherry Turkle

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sherry Turkle is rapidly becoming the sociologist of the Internet, and that's beginning to seem like a good thing. While her first outing, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, made groundless assertions and seemed to be carried along more by her affection for certain theories than by a careful look at our current situation, Life on the Screen is a balanced and nuanced look at some of the ways that cyberculture helps us comment upon real life (what the cybercrowd sometimes calls RL). Instead of giving in to any one theory on construction of identity, Turkle looks at the way various netizens have used the Internet, and especially MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions), to learn more about the possibilities available in apprehending the world. One of the most interesting sections deals with gender, a topic prone to rash and partisan pronouncements. Taking as her motto William James's maxim "Philosophy is the art of imagining alternatives," Turkle shows how playing with gender in cyberspace can shape a person's real-life understanding of gender. Especially telling are the examples of the man who finds it easier to be assertive when playing a woman, because he believes male assertiveness is now frowned upon while female assertiveness is considered hip, and the woman who has the opposite response, believing that it is easier to be aggressive when she plays a male, because as a woman she would be considered "bitchy." Without taking sides, Turkle points out how both have expanded their emotional range. Other topics, such as artificial life, receive an equally calm and sage response, and the first-person accounts from many Internet users provide compelling reading and good source material for readers to draw their own conclusions.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man : Critical Edition

Marshall McLuhan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A tremendously original and thought- provoking work 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 12 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the rare works which seem to explain new realities in a way which no one else before has grasped. It is the kind of work that gives a ' whole new picture of what is happening'. And if for this alone this work would be of great value.
I am by no means a media expert and cannot really comment on many of the claims of the work .
Its virtues are in calling attention to the new media( mainly television) and understanding how it changed our perception of the world, and of ourselves.
The basic MacLuhan distinction between hot and cold media between those which give us a lot of information and those which require our own greater participation in creating the reality , seems to me sensible to a degree. But where MacLuhan lost me was in his celebration of the present reality, the new culture.
I for one have the old- fashioned sense of the superiority of the reading world to the television world- the superiority of the kind of minds it produces.
I too think MacLuhan was over- optimistic in seeing the ' global village' as a kind of positive development for mankind. The fact is our world today is tremendously complex politically, fragmented in not necessarily wonderful ways.
It is possible to argue that this work ' foresaw ' the Internet, but even if this were the case it seems to me that we still have to consider the overall question of the meaning, value and virtue of the Internet.
Mankind's situation I want to suggest is much much more complex than ' the media is the message' in the ' global village' suggests.
I do not again think I have even begun to do justice to the richness and variety of MacLuhan's insights.
I just here would like to register the view that I do not believe that he really has given us ' the key' to understanding our world. I would even go farther and say however rich the understanding he provides about the media, and their relation to each other- he too is far from the last word in this. The questions now raised by the Internet world I think are in many ways outside those he considered.
Like all important thinkers he too is limited by the Time which has come after, bringing developments and problems he could not be expected to foresee.