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feature list |

broadcast: NPR
column: the Bookshelf
story title: Mark Synnott’s top 5 books.
author: by Mark Synnott
year: 2019

read | feature list

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presented by

card :: NPR

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about |

name: Mark Synnott
bio: author
genre: non-fiction
web: home ~ channel

company: Penguin + Random House
profile :: Mark Synnott

Author Mark Synott is a renowned mountain climber who has written non-fiction articles about nature exploration for top magazines including National Geographic.

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list | Mark Synnott’s top 5 books.

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1. |

book: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: by Mark Twain

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2. |

book: the Singularity is Near
author: by Ray Kurzweil

It’s not often that a book profoundly changes your perspective on life, but I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the world — and my place in it in — the same way since I first read Ray Kurzweil’s masterpiece in year 2006. His central premise is that tech is evolving at an exponential rate — and that we’re currently sitting at the knee of this exponential curve.

He posits that the singularity — a future point in time when machines become smarter than people — will occur in the mid 2040s. I became so fascinated with Kurzweil’s ideas that I profiled him for the magazine Hemispheres by United Airlines. During the interview I asked him a question I don’t think he adequately answered in the book:

“If what you’re saying is true, how are we going to avoid the plot of Terminator?” Kurzweil told me that rather than allowing the tech to exist as its own entity — like Skynet in the film Terminator — we will embed it in ourselves, thus becoming cyborgs.

— Mark Synnott

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3. |

book: the Shining Mountain
author: by Peter Boardman

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4. |

title: the Devil in the White City
author: by Erik Larson

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5. |

book: Alexander Hamilton
author: by Ron Chernow

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— notes —

NPR = National Public Radio