Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson · 631 pages

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years -- as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues -- Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industrie

Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

Ashlee Vance · 396 pages

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs -- a real-life Tony Stark -- and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new "makers." Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned

Yeager: An Autobiography

Chuck Yeager, Leo Janos · 388 pages

Offers a personal glimpse of air pilot General Chuck Yeager. Yeager talks about his life and achievements, expressed in his own words.

Aquarium: The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy

Viktor Suvorov · 416 pages

"We have a very simple rule. It's a rouble to get in, but two to get out." Thus begins the extraordinary chronicle of Viktor Suvorov's early preferment within the Soviet Army which brought him to Vienna as a spy in military intelligence and ended in his defection to the West. Suvorov's path into espionage was a long one, and not one he chose for himself. Throughout this astonishing record of li

MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

John Daniel Barron

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

David E. Hoffman · 577 pages

This riveting narrative history of the end of the arms race sheds new light on the frightening last chapters of the Cold War and the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today. During the Cold War, world superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union secretly plotted to create the "Dead Hand,"

Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.

Kenneth Sewell, Clint Richmond · 305 pages

This book reads like a Tom Clancy novel, but it is all true. Today our greatest fear is that terrorists may someday acquire a nuclear weapon and use it against us. In fact, they have already tried. In 1968 a Soviet submarine sank off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Evidence strongly suggests that the sub sank while attempting to fire a nuclear missile,

The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour

Andrei Cherny · 640 pages

This book is the masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history. Author Cherny brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved mil

The File: A Personal History

Timothy Garton Ash · 256 pages

In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the

iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith · 304 pages

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was one of the most brilliant and daring inventors and visionaries of his time. My Inventions is Tesla's autobiography, with focus on his major discoveries and innovations, including the rotating magnetic field, the magnifying transmitter, and the Tesla coil. His research laid much of the groundwork for modern electrical and communication systems, and his impressive accomplishments in

Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to al-Qaeda

Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger · 480 pages

From two men who know how espionage really works, an unprecedented history--heavily illustrated with never-before-seen images--of the CIA's most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? These may sound like challenges for James Bond's fictional ga

The Wright Brothers

David McCullough · 583 pages

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story of the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly. On a winter day in 1903, on the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, changed history. The age of flight had begun with the first heavier-than-air powered machine carrying a pilot. Far more than a coup

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

Fred Kaplan · 338 pages

"As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers displace terrorists on the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-t

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette Lawrence Drew · 406 pages

Witness

Whittaker Chambers · 808 pages

The moving autobiography and reflective meditation of a communist spy who became a Christian and, to the scorn of the intellectual establishment, witnessed to God's grace.

Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Giles Whittell · 274 pages

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies traces the paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962. It is the story of three men -- William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet s

Only the Paranoid Survive

Andrew S. Grove · 224 pages

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business

Clayton M. Christensen · 286 pages

Black Box Thinking: Marginal Gains and the Secrets of High Performance

Matthew Syed · 322 pages

"Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it's safe to fail, "--Amazon.com.

Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, cheaper than yours

Salim Ismail, Mike Malone, Yuri van Geest

Master of Disguise

Antonio J. Mendez · 351 pages

Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

Tom Clancy · 331 pages

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of Darpa, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

Annie Jacobsen · 568 pages

Since its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown to become the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. Created by President Eisenhower to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency--and its imagination and sc