Karim Rashid

Interior Designer; Product/Industrial Designer / United States / KARIM RASHID Inc.

Karim Rashid’s Book List

10 books
Alain De Botton

Being a veteran traveler, I love this positive yet critical view of traveling and how travel is something much deeper than the conscious realizes. De Botton is a brilliant writer and I recommend all his novels and socio-dissections.

J. G. Ballard

Dark, subversive, paced beautifully, with an obsession with the underworld. I was always a fan of Ballard and science fiction. I love all his books as well as those of Sterling, Gibson, and Asimov.

Damien Hirst

If you want to read, books are obsolete. A beautiful, engaging, interactive monograph, this 2003 book is indicative of the only way books will survive: each plate, each page, plays with material, printing methods, inks, and constant change, making the book an artwork.

Stephen Denny

I never liked the concept of killing and I do not mind giants when they are really on the forefront of our human needs and desires, but as Stephen’s stories illustriously examine, most of the time it is the little guy, the entrepreneur, the small businessperson who is most creative, fastest to market, and can really kill the giants (or at least injure them).

Miles Davis

I love autobiographies and this book in particular. It is a very candid exposé of Miles's moving life—one that was full of discipline, perseverance, hard work, and at the same time contradicted by heroin abuse, cars, women, and tragedy—all, in a way, a metaphor for jazz itself, unpredictable, freestyle.

Michel Foucault

Foucault studies knowledge beautifully via language, art, politics, and everything you can imagine in this book. His ideas are ever so inspiring. This is a brilliant book that altered the way I saw life. I feel I owe my career to his writing.

Andy Warhol

Written exactly ten years before Warhol died, his perceptiveness on life, sex, food, culture, money, fame, and even art is very inspiring, funny, and pragmatic. I could read this book over and over.

Italo Calvino

This book exemplifies the study of phenomenology, which has inspired my work. These are Calvino’s lectures, and my favorite is “Exactitude.” A really inspiring poetic read. I love his essays. Invisible Cities is also a fabulous book.

Jean Baudrillard

I have been an avid fan of Baudrillard since I started teaching in the late 1980s. I loved the way he dissects contemporary culture and this my favorite book. The essays beautifully and seamlessly probe deep in the bowels of post-sixties orgies, high and low art, deep culture to pop culture, and the socio-centric politics of Europe and the demise of Communism. He was our 20th-century Nietzsche. Who is the 21st?

Daniel H. Pink

Although this book has a little too much of a pedestrian tone that is better suited for business readers on airplanes, it is written with great enthusiasm. I think it is one of the better business books I have read, and I have read most of them. The fact is that right-brain thinkers are already changing the world. Steve Jobs was one great example.

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