Books by Frank Rose

NEW: Frank names the five best books on pattern recognition

When Shepherd.com asked Frank to recommend his favorite books on any subject, he chose Pattern Recognition. It’s a thread that runs through nearly everything he’s done in the past 15 years, starting with The Art of Immersion and continuing with The Sea We Swim In and the Strategic Storytelling executive education program at Columbia. The ostensible subject throughout is storytelling—but pattern recognition is what storytelling is all about.

Here’s five books that in very different ways deal with humans’ capacity for pattern recognition and what drives it—our need for some semblance of structure in a (seemingly?) random world. Often this ends with some form of delusional thinking. So first up is Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns’s The Self Delusion, about the most basic delusion of all.

The Sea We Swim In

How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World
The Sea We Swim In

“A brilliant and deceptively simple guide to narrative thinking, and why narrative thinking is changing the way we shop, the way we vote, the way we feel, and the way we perceive the world around us . . . It is such a fascinating and in many ways a new way to look at reality.”

— John Fugelsang, SiriusXM

BUILDING ON INSIGHTS from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, ‘The Sea We Swim In’ shows us how to see the world in narrative terms, not as a thesis to be argued or a pitch to be made but as a story to be told. This is the essence of narrative thinking. Learn more about The Sea We Swim In …

The Art of Immersion

How the Digital Generation Is Changing Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories
The Art of Immersion

“Frank Rose has written an important, engaging, and provocative book, asking us to consider the changes the Internet has wrought with regard to narrative as we have known it, and making it impossible to ever watch a movie or a TV show in quite the same way.”

— Peter Biskind, author of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures”

NOT LONG AGO WE WERE passive consumers of mass media. Now we approach television, movies, even advertising as invitations to participate. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of narrative that is native to the In­ternet. Learn more about The Art of Immersion …

The Agency

William Morris and The Hidden History of Show Business
The Agency

“A cram course on the modern entertainment business as seen not from the cus­tomary perspective of the talent, but from the point of view of the humble appa­ratchiks who doggedly tried to prevent the lunatics from wrecking their asylum.”

— Peter Bart, The New York Times Book Review

FOR DECADES, the Morris agency made deals that determined the fate of stars, studios, and television networks alike. But everything changed after the agency’s president dismissed his own best friend, the man who’d brought Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz out of the mailroom. A multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal in Hollywood. Learn more about The Agency …

West of Eden

The End of Innocence at Apple Computer
West of Eden

“Zesty, highly readable . . . ‘West of Eden’ delivers a bracing keyhole view of a swarm of rich, talented people frequently at each others’ throats. The author . . . has a sharp eye for the painful contradictions in people’s lives that make you glad he’s profiling somebody else.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

IT SEEMS UNTHINKABLE TODAY—but forty years ago, when personal com­puters were still new and the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. And it wasn’t just Wall Street that applauded—it was most of Silicon Valley. Learn ore about West of Eden …

Into the Heart of the Mind

An American Quest For Artificial Intelligence
Into the Heart of the Mind

“A good, acces­sible re­port for the gen­eral reader on one of the most bizarre fas­cina­tions of mod­ern sci­ence.”

— Theo­dore Roszak, San Fran­cis­co Chron­icle

IN A CRAMPED LABORATORY in the Berkeley engineering school, scientists are trying to teach a computer to think—not just to shuffle data but to learn, reason, remember, understand English, and exhibit common sense. But first they have to get it to put on a raincoat before going out in the rain. Learn more about Into the Heart of the Mind …

Real Men

Sex and Style In An Uncertain Age
Real Men

“‘Real men’ are making a come­back. You know the kind I mean: The strut­ting, curly-haired guys whose pec­torals move more fre­quently than their mouths. . . . Isn’t any­one going to call these guys’ bluffs? A new book does.”

— Los Angeles Herald-Examiner

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT BEING MALE. About power and discipline, sex and violence, and the roles they play in the lives of American men. Think of it as a personal and idiosyncratic survey designed to produce not statistical data but individual answers to the question of what it means to be a man. Learn more about Real Men…