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

“It’s a zingier version, then, of the post-Aristotelian story-theory books beloved of screenwriters, with a rich range of reference that takes in the novels of Gustave Flaubert as well as the twists of ABC’s ‘Lost.’ But the analysis has a wider salience. . . . It’s critical thinking for an age of pervasive media.”

— Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal

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

“For anyone even remotely interested in a how-we-got-here-and-where-we’re-going guide to interactive, socially networked entertainment, it’s an essential read.”

— Empire (UK)

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

“This juicy narrative reveals the shark tank at its most lethal and hilarious. The anecdotes come at us at assault-rifle speed, but it’s Rose’s deft use of show-biz vernacular that keeps the pages turning.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

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

“Lucid and authoritative . . . it demystifies a disturbing subject. . . . No one knows how the cognitive areas [of the brain] work: how vision is interpreted, memory is stored, or thought is processed. No one even knows what thought is. Consequently, computer simulations of the brain are attempts to imitate the unknown.”

— The Washington Post

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

“If ‘Real Men’ is an accurate survey of the current state of masculinity in America, then it’s doing just fine, thank you, without John Wayne. But even if ‘Real Men’ isn’t a representative sampling (and it doesn’t pretend to be), it’s valuable as a series of vivid, meticulous portraits—sharply written, insightfully photographed, enthralling as no myth can ever be but reality always is.”

— The Village Voice

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…