Hannah Arendt: The origins of the totalitarianism
Siri Hustvedt, "Mysteries of the Rectangle"; interesting personal appreciations of Goya, Giorgio Morandi, and Giorgione.
I've been meaning to recommend The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto, and have perhaps mentioned it here recently, but I tend to like non-fiction that delivers as many of the pleasures of fiction as possible. In that regard I also really like And the Band Played On but everyone's heard of that and doesn't need me to recommend it, I guess.
Sorry, that's the subtitle. The title is As Nature Made Him.
"Islands of History", Sahlins. Captain Cook had been accepted into Hawaiian society as a great leader. That's why they killed him. The traditional Hawaiian elite devoted itself to sex and murder, and no one made a big fuss about it.
If you are interested in Asian philosophy, two books by Bill Porter' / Red Pine are recommended: Lao Tzu (the Tao Te Ching) and the Diamond Sutra. "Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits" is easier and more fun.
Porter is a scholar, a writer, and a practitioner. His Diamond Sutra is far and away the best thing in English, and his Lao Tzu is among the best.
Thomas Geohegan's Which Side Are You On was recommended here before, but it remains immensely worth reading.
Martin Gardner, "The Night is Large" is a book I return to again and again. But then you're bound to have it already. If by some accident you don't, this is why you should.
If you are interested in Heidegger and Nietzsche, Nishitani's "Religion and Nothingness" is the best thing I've ever read on Heidegger -- again, a Buddhist interpretation. Nishitani was a student of Heidegger's. (His "Self-Overcoming of Nihilism" discusses XIXc-XXc Western thought in general.)
Stephen Coll, "Ghost Wars"
Daniel Yergin, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power"
I just want to take this moment to mourn the fact that my mind is a sieve, and to say that I wonder whether it's even worth reading non-fiction sometimes, since I read Ghost Wars a year ago, and it's not exactly a difficult book, but even though I do now have an extremely sketchy sense of Afghani history, the passing of a year has left so little of the book in my memory that when Clinton goes on tv and talks about what mistakes he did or did not make in persuing bin Laden, I really don't feel competent to evaluate them, not just because I only read one book, but because I don't remember what that one book said. Actually, I think part of the problem is that when I read detailed works of history I don't read them enough for sweeping arguments; if I had to write about them for school I might do some more synthesizing. Anyway, I feel ignorant, but I also feel that when the little efforts I make to make myself less so don't seem to bear fruit, I kind of want to shrug and content myself with ignorance.
Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content or The Idea of Prose -- the best prose stylist currently working in continental philosophy.
Origen of Alexandria, First Principles, and Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration -- two of the first Christian systematic theologies, the first of which is totally bizarre, compared with what orthodoxy will turn out to be.
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being -- takes seriously Heidegger's claim that if he were to do a theology, which he was "sometimes inclined to do," the word Being would not appear in it.
As I've gotten older I've become less interested in microhistory and books about science, and more interested in books that go deeply into the lives of people 100% unlike me. Here's two:
"Random Family" by 2006 MacArthur SooperGenius winner Adrian Nicole Leblanc.
"The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman
(The Gregory of Nyssa text is most notable for its elaboration of the so-called "ransom theory of the atonement," which had fallen on hard times for about a thousand years, but is now making something of a comeback in liberation theology.)
the word Being would not appear in it
B-but it's right there in the title!
In my not-entirely-uninformed opinion, Quine's Word and Object is the best philosophy book of the 20th century.
Best philosophy book ever: Hume's Treatise on Human Nature.
River Town by Peter Hessler, about the two years he spent teaching English Literature at a teachers' college in Fuling, a small industrial city in Sichuan. Told me more about modern China than anything else I've read. (Though for the long view, anything by Jonathan Spence would be great.)
We're a little wary of Quineans around here.
11: I know exactly how you feel, but I think it's worth reading anyway. Something sticks, and it means that you have some sort of structure to attach the next fact to.
But yeah, recent history and current affairs? I read it and it's in one ear and out the other.
I tend towards scientific books. Two I think are great reads for anyone are Cadillac Desert and Song of the Dodo.
Sometimes I think "ogged" is really the project name for a series of psychological investigations.
Politics, by Hertzberg, is fun. It's interesting to see what a genuine liberal, of moderate voice, thinks of the last several years. And he just writes well. The DFW book, Consider The Lobster--which I got on LB's recommendation, I think--was not that great.
His earlier book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, was better. The essay on television (E Unibus Pluram) is something that I still think about as a structure for analyzing pop culture years after I read it.
18: Who is this "we"? I know you don't like Quine, Emerson, but who cares what you think?
22: I suspect the problem with Lobster is that I read it quickly; too much DFW too fast may be like too much ice cream too fast--enjoyable at first, but a sure-fire way to get a headache.
I'd recommend The Show by Lazenby, too. It's the best NBA book I've read, I think. Lazenby's not the most graceful writer, and I often don't find what analysis he offers convincing. But he's willing to let others settle scores in print, so you end up with lots of interesting information. Turned me around on Kobe, I think.
The two history books I always recommend are Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, about the social and political forces that led to World War One, and Schlesinger's Crisis of the Old Order, about the social and political forces that led to the Depression and the election of FDR. The Tuchman has greater scope, obviously, but it's a lot denser. The Schlesinger is extraordinarily well-written; his prose approaches that of a great novelist.
Recomended non-fiction comics:
Maus, by Art Spigelman.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.
If you've never read Pepys' Diary, you should. It's fun, and it's a seventeenth century slice of life. (And it's basically a blog.)
It's a great book to have around and read bits of, here and there.
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken For Wonders. Did you know that the American in Dracula is really a vampire? Neither did I. Neither did Bram Stoker, argues Moretti, who in this very clever book writes about some famous literature-type stuff from a sort of psychoanalytic/structuralist/left-wing angle. He describes Dracula as a book about the destruction of feudal monopoly by nascent bourgeois capitalism and thus about the American as an unrecognized figure for new American monopoly capital. He also writes about Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, and boys' stories in the sentimental mode. It's a lot of fun.
A History of Private Life, Vol. 4, ed. Aries. Basically from the French Revolution to the First World War. Of course, it's a bit misleading, since it's really French private life rather than private life in general. The parts on the culture of the French Revolution are particularly neat and easy to read, which is important to me since I am lazy.
Chanel and Her World, Edmonde Charles-Roux. A thrift store find. The first half is about the demi-monde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and very interesting.
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson. A memoir of life in a very, very small village in England in the late nineteenth century. Sheds a lot of light on the consequences of the Enclosure Acts. Blood and fire, indeed. Although the book as a whole is pretty peaceful.
26 -- Also, king among nonfiction comix, Barefoot Gen and its sequelæ.
(Or "sequel" -- I thought there were three or more books in the series, but maybe there are just two.)
Perhaps you're a nice Quinean, Zadrack, but the one we usually see around here is a raving maniac.
I have little opinion of Quine per se, though I'm not friendly to that philosophical tendency, especially since it became dominant.
Added bonus: Franco Moretti's son is the Stroke dating the Barrymore girl.
Have you read Edward Abbey, ogged? The MonkeyWrench Gang is funny and famous and sparked the Earth First movement, but his collections of nature meditations are much better. Desert Solitaire is best.
Martin Heidegger: Between Good & Evil, Safranski, 1998, trans. Osers. Very readable bio of Heidegger in which his apparent blind spot vis-a-vis the occurrence of the first world war is revealed.
The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu & The French Defeat In Vietnam, Windrow, 2005. Military history. Describes a world - only fifty years ago - that is almost unrecognisable in terms of the hardships people were willing to undergo. Or not: during the siege, which was Verdun-like in intensity, several thousand on the French side (many of them not French but Algerian, German, Vietnamese, etc.) lost the will to fight and exiled themselves within the valley: when the battle ended, they came out, looking sheepish. Good character portraits of the leading French officers - mostly a tenacious bunch - but less good on Giap and the Viet Minh who beat them.
Superstudio: Life Without Objects, Lang & Menking, 2003. History of the counter-cultural urbanist group and their sustained ultra-sulk.
Logical positivists and vulgar empiricists must be liquidated.
"Best philosophy book ever: Hume's Treatise on Human Nature."
Nein!
Bound and Gagged, by Laura Kipnis.
On the back cover, Berube says, "For anyone concerned with our collective cultural sense of what it means to be human, Bound and Gagged should be required reading."
I confess that I really liked The Orientalist (about a Jew who wrote the great Azerbajani, fled the Soviets to Fascist Germany, and reinvented himself as a cosmopolitan displayed Muslim). The last piece of academic writing not by Hannah Arendt that I remember enjoying was a piece of cult studies about the rise of mass entertainment Victorian America called The Arts of Deception.
Cassanova's diaries are also a great deal of fun.
I'm reading Penrose's The Road to Reality right now, and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in that sort of thing. Math and physics (mixed with history and smatterings of philosophy) in a clear, engaging style.
John McPhee's The Control of Nature is a good read. An excerpt is here.
Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. I also really enjoyed his Baghdad Without a Map and Confederates in the Attic. I've probably missed something as to why only non fiction titles are requested, but I'll do a drive-by fiction shoutout for Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (ok, balance that with his Underground, about the sarin gas attacks in Japan).
I second "The Orientalist". I'm also planning to read the subjects novel, "Ali and Nino".
The period 1900-1932 in Europe had it all over the American 60s for cultural weirdness and political violence. The 60s seemed strange only because the 50s had been so buttoned up.
31: I hardly think that a philosophical work should be judged based the ravings of the Troll of Sorrow.
34: Quine's work represents the transformation of vulgar empiricism into sophisticated empiricism, and the end of logical positivism.
Well, who cares what I think. And you know, I was thinking that maybe Quine has that effect on people. Sort of the same way Wagner and Nietzsche caused Hitler. I don't know a lot of Quineans.
38: the great Azerbaijani s/b the great Azerbaijani novel
Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson.
Ooh. That is an excellent recommendation to anyone. Seriously good book.
Not at the same level, but if you're interested in an engaging memoir with lots of stories of the glory days of American art from the 1950's to the present, Irving Sandler's A Sweeper-Up After Artists is a pretty good read.
Max Beerbohm's collection of essays, And Even Now, is one of the funniest books I've ever read, though it may verge a little too close to fiction for you. It has the definitive takedown of Goethe in it, very amusing.
If you can wait a few weeks, the much-anticipated publication of the late Kirk Varnedoe's Mellon Lectures will occur. That will probably be the most talked-about book on modern/contemporary art of the year.
Anything by Peter Brown is good. I particularly enjoyed The Making of Late Antiquity, though the essay collection Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity has a lot of good stuff and can be dipped into and set aside as you like. Great writer, and it's never a bad time to think about the later Roman empire.
James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State is dead awesome, though maybe somewhat less so if you've already read Jane Jacobs (which I hadn't and still haven't). All about the ways in which attempts to order people "rationally" don't end up working out.
Word and Object has to be the least enjoyable reading in the "must read" books department. Soames' two-volume work on analysis is pretty readable, though.
Recomended non-fiction comics
No mention of Palestine by Joe Sacco? And does Maus really count as non-fiction? The Nazis weren't really giant cats, people.
I would recommend reading zero of these philosophy books unless you have actually studied philosophy or read a layman's introduction to philosophical thought. Otherwise they will appear to be written in a completely different language.
Palestine is, as sj says, excellent, as is Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde.
I'd also second Frowner's other suggestion of Vol. 4 of A History of Private Life. Actually, the whole set is pretty good, but that's a bit of a commitment. To stick with French Revolution-era stuff, Franēois Furet's Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 and Interpreting the French Revolution are both excellect (the latter as historiography, the former as that historiography put to use.)
I have to say that I really suffered through Quine when I first had to read it, but, even though I find the texts excruciating, there's a lot of really good work in them.
Word and Object has to be the least enjoyable reading in the "must read" books department.
It cracks me up that Word and Object is one of the three books recommended so far that I've read.
Why is everyone ragging on empiricist philosophy?
Anyway, random non-fiction stuff...
Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment -- a history of the Englightment and a polemic arguing that i) the interesting stuff was all over fairly early and that ii) Spinoza was a much more important figure than orthodox historians of ideas give him credit for. Overlong, unfortunately. I lost the will to continue somewhere about two-thirds in.
Fitzroy Maclean - Eastern Approaches - boy's own tales of imperialist derring-do during WWII. Maclean was parachuted into Yugoslavia to liase with Tito, and also involved in the campaigns in North Africa and Persia. He was involved with the kidnap of General Zahedi during WWII, for example.
I just finished Who Murdered Chaucer? It's a distant mirror, to borrow a phrase.
Good Lord, am I going to be the first to recommend total fluff?
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams by Darcey Frey and Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season by David Shields are head and shoulders above any other sports books I've read.
The Last Shot in particular is very good, and is a book I've recommended to everyone I know including hard core non-fans and everyone has liked it.
I will second the recommendations for Which Side Are You On? (I just pulled my copy out of a box last week) and Understanding Comics.
44: You're making a generalization from too small a data set. Rand has that effect on people. A. J. Ayer has that effect on people. (He pretty much epitomizes vulgar logical positivism.) Quine, no.
48: Yeah, it's excruciatingly difficult stuff. Nowhere near the difficulty of Kant, though. I personally think the second half of W&O is better than the more widely-cited first half, but that's an idiosyncratic opinion.
49: Maus is definitely non-fiction. The Nazis are merely depicted as cats. And yeah, Palestine is well worth reading.
C.E. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (two volumes) -- quirky, majestic, deeply-felt memoirs of a Briton's two years among the Bedouin in late-19th-century Arabia.
46: Yes to anything by Peter Brown, but if you're seriously interested you should probably read Bryan Ward Perkins: The Fall of Rome, for the other side of the argument.
Ooo! Oo! Ooh! I know!! Pick me!! Pick me, teacher!!
Lisa Belkin, Show Me a Hero, about how the city of Yonkers was forced to integrate low income housing into middle-class neighborhoods. The first half is an amazing political fight, with lots of crazy people. The second half looks closely at how the housing project turned out for its residents and the neighborhood.
William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea, about how the oceans are essentially ungovernable. The first third is about security and piracy. The second third is on ferries, including a minute-by-minute ferry sinking that you will read straight through. The last third is on boatbreaking in India.
Arax and Wartzman, The King of California about the Boswell empire in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Dynasties! Labor fights! Race tension! Cotton! Floods! I've been to the Boswell farm. It is something else.
Bill Buford, Among the Thugs is a very creepy book about Engish soccer fans being fucking insane and mean and awful. I didn't even know it was like that and I wanted it not to be true. I can't say much for the author participating with them, but he gets his at the end, which was gratifying. Very readable.
20 - Reisner's Cadillac Desert is a fun read, but melodramatic and about twenty years behind the times in CA water policy. You'll come out justifiably outraged, but today's problems aren't as black and white as he presents.
to threadjack a bit, has anyone read Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime? I ask b/c I can't seem to find a copy without buying it.
re: 14
Incidentally, Kotsko, can you recommend a good book of historical theology -- something that covers things like the 'ransom theory of atonement'? I've always been interested in theology (even though I'm not a believer) and wondered if there was a good one volume or two volume introduction that was historically inclined?
To go outside my areas of expertise, I enjoyed Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.
re: 63
There's a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_on_the_Feeling_of_the_Beautiful_and_Sublime
In response to a desperate email from regular-occasional poster Minneapolitan, I add these suggestions:
(Note that he uses the word "problematize". Or rather, "problematization".)
You Can't Win by Jack Black. The best hobo narrative ever. Also, check out the rest of the autobiographies in AK Press's Nabat series
Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang, introduction by DJ Kool Herc. An excellent introduction to the origins of hip-hop in Jamaica and New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Virtually all of the major players interviewed.
The Abolition of White Democracy by Joel Olson. A political scientist's problemitization of citizenship in the U.S. The book argues that citizenship has historically been constituted as whiteness and that an unworking of this relationship is necessary in order to progress to a truly democratic society.
I, Frowner, would add:
Street-fighting Years by Tariq Ali. His memoir of the sixties and early seventies. If you're into intra-Euro-left name-dropping (and who isn't?) this is the book for you. (Kind of like knowing that Franco Moretti's child is a Stroke...and dating a movie star, no less. That's European intellectuals for you; they clearly need to emphasize the frumpy a bit more.) He is, incidentally, referenced by Doris Lessing at the end of The Four-Gated City, although not by name.
46: I had no idea that anyone besides my grandmother (from whom I inherited the book) and I had read Lark Rise to Candleford. That part where they talk about how some people had nice furniture and stuff that their familes had bought before the Enclousures, and then compare it with the sort of "bare life" conditions of everyone else...
am I going to be the first to recommend total fluff?
The Sandler book I mentioned is pretty much fluff. It's just a memoir. Lots of stories about old fights, etc.
64: The standard work is Pelikan's The Christian Tradition, of which volume one takes you up to the formation of the orthodox consensus. Then you could skip ahead to volume four, on the Reformation -- but the whole thing is wonderful, a marvel of consicion and clarity. (For the figures I have studied, it has been consistently remarkable to me how he manages to hit all the main points within the small space he has to work with.)
There's a three-volume history by Justo Gonzalez, but it really sucks compared to the Pelikan.
WH Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia, and Jan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages.
And Among the Thugs was interesting, but I couldn't finish it.
"Why is everyone ragging on empiricist philosophy? "
Aren't we all Marxists here? We create our own reality. I am a bit with Tia at 11, too much stuff flows through me without sticking. Recommended blogs:Neiwert on Fascism;Mark Thoma on Neo-Classical Economics;Arms & Influence on Revolution and Insurgency...there is book-length material there. I have learned tons. I think Ray Davies and Stirling Newberry are smart.
Both of the Tuchman overviews are essential, Proud Tower and Distant Mirror. I have a "universe in a grain of sand" attitude. Proud Tower led me to Luxemberg and Bismarck and Mahan. I am finishing Distant Mirror and piling up Medieval books. I am more tolerant of religion than some, I think. Everything connects & relates.
Thucydides and Nietzsche. Like sticking your finger in a light socket.
How about Stephen Jay Goulds `Structure of Evolutionary Theory' ? I've no real background in the area but found it very approachable, albiet long.
If you are interested in reports about the frontiers of human stupidity, i recommend Judith Shapiro *Mao's War Against Nature.*
I especially like Shapiro's description of how Mao ignored his science advisors warnings about the population explosion and other issues. Ma Yinchu told Mao there would be a billion Chinese people by the 1970s and for this entirely accurate prediction was rewarded with a trip to a re-education camp.
Of course, stories of isolated dictators who ignore expert advice resonate these days.
And: Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca, Burton, 1855. An account of a trip undertaken while disguised as a Muslim, with sketches of notable sights and a useful plan of the Ka'ba, which the author goes inside. I have to admit, I put this one down about half way through, so it's in the Paradise Lost category for me.
If you're looking for long, Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, is a right eye opener on one of the most disreputable episodes in human history. The European colonisation of more or less the entire continent took about 25 years, and was led by wild eyed crazies from every country, often operating freelance. 700 pages of OMG.
71: I wouldn't have associated Marx with anything like "We create our own reality."
I can't believe that I read all of Paradise Lost -- twice, the second time with the old-timey spelling.
Why no fiction? Don't read it, or do fiction rec threads devolve into suckage?
77: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.
There have been several mostly fiction threads, but mainly it's because I find I can't read it anymore.
On a more serious note, I don't know how I forgot to recommend The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde, a book that has both greatly influenced my life, and provided the core for a paper that I wrote in college about Internet communities. It is rare to find books that combine the rigor of academic writing with lively writing, an appreciation for the complexity of lived experience, and real wisdom. The Gift is one of the best.
On a similar note I would recommend Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy (though, admittedly, I've only read excepts from it).
You should elaborate. Several of my friends have reached that point, and it perplexes me. They just shrug and say they don't have time anymore, or some vaguely must-be-productive line of argument.
I enthusiastically second the recommendation of W. Langewiesche's "The Outlaw Sea". Wanted to recommend it earlier but couldn't remember the author or the title.
On a similar note, R.Ellis's "The Empty Ocean", about the world's various fishery crises.
Also, Paul Fussell's "Uniforms". His book "Class" was pretty much the only book ever written by the posthumous spirit of Mencken, but it's very dated these days.
73:Over at Thoma's, I read Krugman shredding Gould, chew him into a spitball, and hit the trashcan from 30 feet.
Ricardo's Difficult Idea ...long, and Krugman's point is partly math-phobia among social scientists
Dennett, Dawkins(1989), John Maynard Smith, George Williams, William Hamilton, Ridley(1992) are names Krugman mentions on evolution. The two with dates are popularizing overviews.
You should elaborate. Several of my friends have reached that point, and it perplexes me.
We talked about it here.
11: Tia, does Samuel Johnson make you feel better:
(On advice that books, once started, should be read all the way through) "This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"
Then again - re #78 - I can't believe that I didn't read it, considering that it was a set book. Um, the set book.
Zadfrack, I was totally kidding. We've had a bizarre experience here with a Quinean, but in reality that does not reflect ill on Quine. (He's still not my cup of tea, of course).
"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." I disagree with Marx: earlier philosophers were changing the world too, even if they thought they were just describing it.
This explains the oft-quoted Republican hack's statement. He Republican hack is right, and the "reality-based" Democrats are deluded. Democrats are always getting blindsided by the future because they are working with a cautious version of what's worked up till now on the average. Republicans are always looking for something new, a little short-term edge or a little transient advantage, and that's why Republicans win.
How can it count as making your own reality if you can't make it as you please?
If my recommendation of *Mao's War Against Nature*, doesn't show it, I will say formally that I side with the empiricists and against the Marxists making their own reality.
That said, Quine wasn’t that sophisticated an empiricist, and his predecessors were not that vulgar.
I've seen Krugman's attack on Gould joined to Krugman's attack on Galbraith. Don't know how closely related the two things are, but I don't trust Krugman on Galbraith.
Like Brian Leiter, Krugman is a guy I'd probably have nothing at all in common with if Bush weren't President.
Maus is definitely non-fiction. The Nazis are merely depicted as cats.
Another one for Standpipe's blog. And Ogged, when did you become such a boring old coot? Fiction is fun.
Some of the early logical positivists were addicted to fart jokes. But what's wrong with a little vulgarity?
85: Was he referring to Gould in general, or that book? I think it stands alone, and he made a pretty good faith effort to seperate his ideas from the generally accepted theoretical framework. I'm no expert but I don't know of a better overview. Do you?
80: I've always understood that Marx quote to mean the people are constrained by reality (circumstances they haven't chosen), not that they create it.
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station is very well-written, covering mostly socialism from pre-Marxists to Lenin. Is it dated? I don't care.
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis on postwar Detroit before the riots is very well done.
I'll chime in with the law:
Courtroom 302, Steve Bogira, is very very good. Great non-fiction with some policy, stories, very engaging all around.
I'm currently in the middle of Talking it Through: Puzzles of American Democracy, by Robert W. Bennett, which is one of the more interesting political theory books I've read (admittedly, it's not that long a list). Written in a good conversational tone, very interesting, and it's been influencing everything I say and think about politics for like the last week.
93, continued. That being said, I found Dennit's 'Darwins dangerous idea' interesting, with a much narrower scope. He (Dennit) also has an interesting if speculative book with Hofstadter (the one who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach) called `the minds eye' if I recall correctly.
A really great book about evolution and biology is Richard Dawkins' (yes that Dawkins) The Ancestor's Tale. Walks through the branches of the evolutionary tree in reverse order, from humans to the common ancestor of human and virus. Really, great; and almost free of the trademark Dawkins screed. (Which screed I have some time for.)
Marx was trying to find a middle between determinsim and voluntarism. The thrust of his "not just as you please" statement was againts voluntarism (utopianism, wishfulness etc). The thrust of the Feuerbach statement I quoted was against determinism, or rather the idea the the world is a given thing that we are trying to accurately know, rather than a dynamic thing which we are trying to remake or change.
I think that this is hte strong part of Marx's philosophy.
90, 93:"In fact, if one looks at the favorite economic writers of the non-economist intellectual -- Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, John Kenneth Galbraith -- one realizes that they have in common an aversion to or ignorance of modeling. There are model-oriented economists, like Alan Blinder, who also write for a broader audience, and they don't put their equations in their books and articles; but the skeleton of the models that structure their thought is visible under the surface to those who know how to look. By contrast, in the writings of Reich or Galbraith what you read is what you get -- there is no hidden mathematical structure to the argument, no diagram one might draw on a blackboard or simulation one might run on a computer to clarify the point.
In this the situation in economics is virtually identical to that in evolutionary theory." ...Krugman, from the cited article above
Well, yeah. Krugman is part of the neo-liberal neo-classical economics establishment, reductive, and misses the totality in math and modeling. I think Delong and Krugman and Thoma are more approachable, and maybe need to be approached. But they could be part of the problem.
Krugman likes Joan Robinson, who is the only bridge economist I know. Don't know about Sen, in fact don't know if a mathematical neo-Marxism exists out there. I am just a beginner.
de-lurk/
The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins.
A long book, but excellent. It tells the story of our evolution starting with modern humans and going backward in time - meeting other 'pilgrams' with whom we share a common ancestry along the way. Highlights interesting (I thought so anyway) details of different groups life history, and what our common ancestors may have looked like. Towards the earlier portion of the book he also discusses natural selection of genes and gene groups as opposed to species, interesting to think about evolutionary time in that perspective.
Apologies in advance for grammar 'issues' - I've only begun the daily caffeination.
/lurk
re: 86
I've gone the opposite way in the last few years. Moved away from reading lots of non-fiction to now mostly reading either i) things directly connected with my thesis research or ii) escapist fiction -- i.e. good quality genre fiction, stuff that stands a chance of making me laugh, etc.
Or to get more academic: Walter Johnson, "On Agency", Journal of Social History muse subscription link, findarticles free link is good on the human historical agency question in general (he uses the Marx quote in 80) though specifically on the historiography of slavery.
Dammit!
first post and pwned.
mthrfthernrassinfrassin
93: Gould excites a lot of hostility, and I'm not exactly clear on why. I think he's a wonderful writer of science for the educated layperson -- while god knows where they've all gone, I have at one time or another owned all of his collections of essays, as well as a couple of other of his books. I couldn't evaluate his original scientific work, of course, but he doesn't seem to have been any kind of unambiguous crackpot -- whatever he was doing, he was working within the mainstream of biology.
Still, whenever Gould gets brought up, it tends to be in the context of someone abusing his work as error-filled and intellectually flawed. It's perfectly possible that it is, but I can never really follow the criticisms -- exactly what the errors are doesn't seem to be apparent. The post linked in 85 is a specimen of that. It condemns Gould for being literary and math-phobic. That may be true in some sense I don't understand, but the works of his I've read are riddled with math (I'm thinking of an essay on factor analysis, another on using scaling factors to make deductions about the evolutionary history of the kiwi), the more so the more connected they seem to be to his actual research. It's possible that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way he used math, but he doesn't seem to have avoided it.
I wonder if he was immensely personally unpleasant or something.
Does the fictionverbot extend to memoir -- which is after all not fictional but which is mainly about characters and plots, at least as I experience it? Because if not you would do well to take a look at Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, about his childhood.
89: The adjectives "vulgar" and "sophisticated" are applicable to the overall philosophical research program, not to the individual philosophical works. Carnap was a very sophisticated logical posivist, but logical positivism is, post-Quine, vulgar empiricism.
(Pekar's works, all of which kind of fit "memoir", are of course universally excellent.)
Does the fictionverbot extend to memoir
No, memoir is great.
Does the fictionverbot extend to memoir
I know! Read A Million Little Pieces!
96 mentioned Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I also highly recommend. Hofstadter cuts a few corners in laying out the proofs, but you'll come away from that book with a pretty good understanding of the proofs and significance of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
ttaM, what's the name of the electric guitar box set you mentioned elsewhere?
Gould was an vigorous early opponent of sociobiology, partly for political reasons, and both sociobiologists and conservatives hate him for that. He's accused of playing dirty pool in some cases.
Scientifically, he's a paleontologist and not a geneticist or a population geneticist, and he has found more randomness and discontinuity in evolution that others have. He's also accused of being an anti-Darwinian, but I don't see that; it's based on a few careless statements here and there.
I was getting really into Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change by Stephen Kinzer until I had to give it to someone. (Long story.) I estimate I got about 65% through it, and when I actually get to read again, it's at the top of my nonfiction list. I can't say I enjoyed it, b/c every few pages I had a strong desire to hurtle it and myself against a wall, but it was very well done. It might all be old news to you, but you still might appreciate the details and the presentation.
Oh man, I have been wanting to read Gödel, Escher, Bach for nearly five years now. Someday, I will do it. When I plow through my stockpile of thirty books that I need to read first. Sigh.
112: Stephen Kinzer is awesome; I loved his Crescent and Star. Great, great book about Turkey.
Not to threadjack, but how much time do people here spend reading? There's so much I want to read, and I can't ever seem to find time to do it. I could read more, but I'd have to give up the internet. How do you guys do it? I can only manage about a book or two a month aside from school reading.
re: 104
I have to admit that I haven't read enough of Gould's work to really form an opinion about the scientific respectability or otherwise of his writing, and some of that I have read, I've liked very much. However, his critics tend to point to his anti-adaptationism and his favouring of 'saltations' and other extreme speciation events as problems. Gould's view of evolution is very specifically Gould's rather than a presentation of the 'orthodox' view.
I see that both my favorite recent non-fiction reads have been nominated already, but I second Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang.
Gould's ideas are sometimes misrepresented or caricatured.
114: Spending 2 hours a day on the train to and from work gives me a lot of reading time -- except when I spend it, as I have been the last couple of days, working puzzles in Games magazine.
Honestly, The Family by Kitty Kelley is a very fun but sleazy read and a genuine tragedy - each generation of Bushes is more involved in politics than the one previous and each generation is less progressive than the one previous. It's also deliciously trashy and arguably may break the "no fiction" rule given it's Kitty Kelley.
re: 111
It's called Hitting on All Six.
http://www.amazon.com/Hittin-All-Six-Various-Artists/dp/B00004SBFJ
104: Yes, hence my comment. `Structure of ...' is a *very* different book that his usual `lay' books. I'm well aware of the way parts of his popular books have been abused at various times.
`Structure of Evolutionary Biology' is quite a different book, though ... this is no `the pandas thumb'. I think the best description is that this is an academic labour of love, written at the end of a big career in science, by someone with enough pull to have it published. First off, it's about 1500 pages long, so that alone is enough to limit the readership. It's also more technical (without being technical, per se) than his other `popular' books, at least from what I've seen of them. I'm not quite sure how he convinced Harvard to print it, actually.
The Dawkins book `The Ancestors Tale' mentioned here *is* good, and I can certainly second the recommendations of it being a good read. It doesn't have the same scope as the Gould book, though.
If someone has a criticism of that book in particular, I'd like to see it. I'm objecting, however, to criticicm of Goulds work or approaches in general being applied to that particular book. It really is something unusual in science publishing.
I think he's made a pretty good faith effort to present modern evolutionary biology and its development without to much personal bias ... and then goes on to talk about his own ideas. I found the background stuff more interesting.
I would assume that Gould also gets a lot of hatred from his colleagues because he makes so much more money with his slightly wrong books than they do with their correct but arcane journal articles. If you know any Shakespeareans, ask them what they think of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World; it's really funny how they actually sputter.
re: 117
That's true, and 'anti-adaptationist' papers of his that I have read, 'The Spandrels of San Marco...', etc., have seemed to be directed against what we might call vulgar adaptationism rather than the use of adaptations in biology as a whole.
I could read more, but I'd have to give up the internet.
I'm slowly giving up a lot of the internet, in the short run, at least. I've just gone through a year or so of not reading many books.
115: that's where I would disagree --- for this particular book, at least, Gould is trying to be inclusive
113: GEB is a great book, flaws and all. His approach to Godels proof is a bit problematic, but it is a difficult proof. I think it's much more important that the lay reader can come away with some idea of how & why it works... and think he's done that.
Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang
I read this 'cause I thought I should understand the music I listen to better. But finishing it took work.
The Brethren by Bob Woodward was a gossipy look at Earl Warren's Supreme Court. I like gossip.
Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking was good too, although it was really just a western history of walking.
Following Emerson way up in #5, two more books by Sahlins: How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (1995) and Waiting for Foucault, Still (2002, pdf available here), which reads like a series of blog posts.
122: I've heard people sputtering about Greenblatt long before his recent book. I'm no fan of his (lots of interesting stuff in Marvelous Possessions, but I'm not so convinced by the arguments) but I'm not in English so I don't have to sputter.
gah. 121 should read `Structure of Evolutionary Theory' , not `Structure of Evolutionary Biology' of course. sorry.
122: The late Stephen Jay Gould doesn't get any royalties off his books anymore.
I just found myself thinking that Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 might be a good book to reread. I have not read it since 1986 (if memory serves) so I'm not sure how applicable it is to the contemporary political process. But I think it must be at least a bit.
Also: I am proposing a replacement of "IIRC" with "IMS" since that will generate confusion between "if memory serves" and "irritating misogynist shithead".
Dudes! Y'all are arguing with Krugman. I know nothing of evolution and have little direct interest. I am just Krugman's sock-puppet. Lambchop, I think.
He did recommend Dawkins, with many seconds here, and a half-dozen other evolutionary theorists.
Like this guy Mark Ridley Krugman seemed to know what he was talking about, and had his reasons.
(which latter certainly describes Thompson at times.)
For memoir, Jack London's non-fiction: The Road, which is his life as a hobo, is amazing. John Barleycorn, about his lifelong relationship with alcohol, is less accessible, because it's written from a temperance-movement perspective which is awfully unsympathetic.
People of the Abyss is London investigating what it's like as a homeless person in London. Not all that amazing as literature, but very interesting as journalism, and particularly in the context of Orwell's Down and Out In Paris And London and The Road To Wigan Pier -- the relationship between London's book and Orwell's books seems strong to me. I think it's likely that Orwell used London's book as a model.
(also, "Immigration and Maturation Service".)
111: I recommend Swing to Bop Guitar. All electric, some overlap with your set.
Thinking of Hofstadter, there is also a collection of his columns from SciAm, called `Metamagical Themas'. Some good stuff in there. He replaced Martin Gardeners (pretty much any of his stuff is worth reading) `Mathematical Games' for a time, hence the name of the column and boodk.
115: In fact Gould spent the second half of his career explaining as to a little child that he didn't believe in saltations. But that never stopped his critics. A lot of it was politics.
I hope Ogged is finding this thread as helpful as I am. Definitely bookmarking for future reference.
Another couple of fun documentary pieces: Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness, which borrows its name from the movie, of course, but is actually three case studies from black market economies in the US (the drug trade, illegal alien migrant workers and prostitution, if I remember correctly).
This thread is so helpful, I've got at least three books I'm going to go pick up this lunch break.
The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker is a really great book that just came out. It's an attempt to lay out an evolutionary theory of economics and finance that pulls together a lot of the agent-based and behavioral economics work that's been coming out in the past couple decades and often pointing out a lot of empirical problems with traditional equilibrium-based economics.
He has a great overview of the history and origins of microeconomics, a good look at plenty of interesting current areas of research, and his book made me think rigorously about evolution as a general algorithm capable of amazing results. Of course, he does go into implications for businesses and economies at the end, since his salary is paid by McKinsey (the high-end theoretical side of the company), but I found it pretty interesting and it's not that big a portion of the book anyway.
Either way, I'd say to check it out if anyone on this site actually has any interest in economics.
McManus's once-high political awareness had plunged into the Krugmanian pit of inky gloom. We might as well kiss his ass goodbye.
The Road, which is his life as a hobo, is amazing
All books by Douglas Harper are excellent, including "Good Company" which is his life as an ersatz hobo -- ie aas a sociology grad student writing his dissertation about tramp life.
114: What I really want to know is how people find the time to read the difficult books. I can always find time to read something written at the level of Moretti, for example, where it's pretty lively, doesn't have a high density of lit-crit speak, and mostly talks about specific examples. But honestly, how do people read, like, The Ticklish Subject? Or Deleuze? Or even Marx's drier stuff? I find I can't even get through the more theory-heavy articles in New Left Review, and it distresses me no end.
114: What I really want to know is how people find the time to read the difficult books. I can always find time to read something written at the level of Moretti, for example, where it's pretty lively, doesn't have a high density of lit-crit speak, and mostly talks about specific examples. But honestly, how do people read, like, The Ticklish Subject? Or Deleuze? Or even Marx's drier stuff? I find I can't even get through the more theory-heavy articles in New Left Review, and it distresses me no end.
More! I could do this all day!
I just read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan. Another book where I am definitely the choir, but I thought it was a less heavyhanded look at American food choices than Fast Food Nation.
On California water, but more academic, I really liked Walton, Western Times and Water Wars on the Owens Valley. It's probably best to ignore the theory intro and conclusion and stick to the historical story.
I read GEB when it came out, and enjoyed it. What I got out o it was a little understanding of recursion and self-reference, and a radical distrust of modeling. Or mapping. Or something.
Hofstadter became obsessed with recursion and went crazy, didn't he? Just kidding, tho I remember him getting fired from SA. I look at Godel and Escher and Mandelbrot and I fear Chamaeleonic Dragons of Transcendance lurk in the deeper caves.
"And at the 79th iteration I found Ultimate Being..."
The Organic Machine: a small gem of environmental history by historian Richard White focusing on humans' changing relationship with the Columbia River. Smart, engaging, just over 100 pages long.
Salvation on Sand Mountain: journalist Dennis Covington covers attempted-murder trial involving a snake handler in Alabama, hangs out with more snake handlers, gets in touch with roots and takes up snakes himself. Totally fascinating.
A History of Bombing: Pacifist social history of aerial bombing, meticulously researched and presented in an interesting fragmentary format. Helps to contextualize the horror we're planning on bringing to Iran.
Beyond the appeal of the books in themselves, an additional virtue of this list is that all three taken together are still shorter than The Second Sex.
144/5: If you're looking for Marxism that rocks, Trotsky's "My Life" is a page turner. Good chunks of it are pure fiction, to protect the guilty, but even so.
113: You should! On the other hand, I found Le Ton Beau de Marot acutely painful and couldn't finish it.
122: Do people sputter about "Invisible Bullets"? That (and another New Historicist book that I read, maybe Orgel's?) really influenced how I read as an undergraduate.
Has anyone read Fussell's ex-wife's nasty tell-all memoir? I confess that I'm more interested than I probably should be.
Throwing out a couple other ideas: Chester Brown's Louis Riel comic; Luc Sante's Low Life; and, into the land of pure fluff, Dame Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics.
150: by historian Richard White
Well, duh. It's a history, fathead.
149: I think his SA columns were of mixed quality, but there are some gems in there. I never read them in SA, but read the collection later. As to his currency in cog. sci. these days, I have no idea. I suppose we could ask someone in cog. sci...
Mandelbrot's book is definitely worth a look, if for nothing other than the pictures..... there is some good fractals stuff around, but much of the best stuff is a bit technical.
Under no circumstances should anyone evern read Fussell's Abroad.
152: Oh, I'd nearly forgotten `Le Ton Beau...'. That falls into my neat idea, badly done pile.
Mark Kulansky's `Salt: A World History' was fun
In my extremely uneducated and probably disregardable opionion, one has read enough of GEB when one gets to the big proof, and at that point might be better served to spend their time reading other, shorter books.
Okay, since there appears to be a quorum of logic/philosophy geeks on this thread, I'll recommend George Boolos's Logic, Logic, and Logic. IIRC, it includes his essay "Göel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable."
Oh, and Philosophies of Mathematics by Alexander George and Daniel J. Velleman. It contains a good explanation of the philosophy behind Hilbert's program, which Gödel's Second Theorem destroyed.
Before I realised who wrote this post (the author's name doesn't show up on the rss feed*) I was going to suggest Tom Holland's Persian Fire which I recently read and enjoyed, but you probably know all you want to already about that period of history.
*It can be interesting trying to work out who the post author is. The rosy-toed one's posts are generally the most immediately identifiable, followed by Tia's.
Best book describing the colorful, scheming, gritty rise of an American city in the 1990s: Buzz Bissinger's Prayer for a City. (Yes, he's the guy who wrote the football story Friday Night Lights.)
Best historical, scientific perspective about how the concept of "intelligence" has been misused in the U.S.: Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. (Yes, Gould has detractors, but the book is a stellar background for 80% of the policy discussions we're still having today.)
Best illustrated autobiography: Bill Peet's. Fast read, fun behind-the-scenes info about working at Disney in the very, very early days. Even if you think you don't like drawing or animation or Hollywood, read it. It's quick.
And finally: If you like The Wire, read Richard Price's Samaritan, which features the most cinematic dialogue I've ever read. Price gets the rhythms of urban speech (w/differences of class, race, profession) down better than any other writer I know. The plot is what it is -- I kept reading for the characters more than because I was so terribly fascinated by the investigation. But brace yourself for heartache.
159: Yeah, you can quit after (IIRC) chapter 15, on the Second Incompleteness theorem.
For something completely different, try the Memoirs of Lord Hervey, a courtier and politician at the court of George II: top quality snark in beautifully sonorous prose. Sadly his descendents burned the parts of the manuscript covering his gay affair with Charles James Fox's uncle.
159: you certainly hit diminishing returns in there somewhere....
Paddy Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, his account of the first 2/3 or so of his walk from Holland to Constantinople in the 30's. Amazing stuff, and finally back in print recently (from New York Review Books, which is bringing back a lot of excellent things worth a reccomendation, e.g. Wedgwood's history of the Thirty Years' War, Wilson's To the Finland Station).
And last week I found myself drawn back to Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind, always worth a reccommendation, but especially salient right now.
1491 by Charles Mann. It's about what the Americas were like before Columbus came. Really fascinating. The thesis is that Indian cultures were a lot older, larger, and more advanced than was previously thought. I posted about it here.
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows.
Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion.
Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
I just started Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity and I'm liking it.
I'm sure that this makes me hopelessly unfashionable or something, but I enjoyed Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Don't tell the long sunday crew.
I found The Man without Content kinda annoying, but I should probably read it again.
Emerson's early recommendation reminds me that not only have I stopped reading Stone Age Economics, I can't even remember where I put it.
the author's name doesn't show up on the rss feed
That's a function of your feed reader, because the author's name is in the feed, and shows up in my reader.
Stephen Kinzer is awesome; I loved his Crescent and Star. Great, great book about Turkey.
Serendipity... I'm reading Crescent and Star right now. It's good, although I find myself wishing that Kinzer would provide more evidence for the claims he makes. (It reads a lot like a series of op-ed pieces.)
My recommendations: A Savage War of Peace and The Price of Glory, both by Alistair Horne. A Savage War of Peace is probably the single best English-language work on the Algerian war of independence; it's been out of print in the U.S. for ages, but I see that New York Review Books is reissuing it this month. The Price of Glory is about the Battle of Verdun.
169: on that note, `bury my heart at wounded kneeL: an indian history of teh american west' is interesting, deeply saddening, and unabashedly promoting a view to counter the usual bias presenting the history of the `west'. I remember it being called the story of `how the west was lost'....
Another one came to me - The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Quick summary: how plants have manipulated humans over the course of their evolution together. He goes over apple trees, pot, tulips and geneticially modified potatoes. What's not to like?
Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable.
You know, I read that, and the explanation doesn't really explain a whole lot.
And, of course, Georg Lichtenberg's Waste Books. You'll probably have to settle for the NYRB edition, which renumbers the translated entries so that they're consecutively numbered even though they aren't consecutive entries in the original, unless you know German, in which case you can get the whole things.
"Göel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable."
Ah but Dr. Seuss got there first.
Here's the one-word section of Boolos' paper. After it there's a section called "I wish he would explain his explanation", which helps itself to words of more than one syllable.
Just went and read the essay, and what I want to know is, did Boolos have any connection to Oulipo?
Hey, w-lfs-n pwned me! I was just on the NYRB site looking up The Waste Books. Consider the recommendation seconded. Also in reissue by NYRB is Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, which is as great as it is long.
Second the Chester Brown Louis Riel recommendation, great book.
Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism is a useful, up-to-date introduction to a subject that's of obvious interest these days.
I see Jonathan Spence got a mention early on; his God's Chinese Son, which deals with the Taiping Rebellion, is for some reason one of the most eminently re-readable books I've come across.
I'm not generally a big fan of memoirs but really enjoyed Nelofer Pazira's A Bed of Red Flowers (a CBC journalist and human rights activist writing about her girlhood in Afghanistan).
I just requested a whole bunch of your recommendations from the library. Not one of them had a single other hold on it.
1491 was a good read and an interesting concept, but I don't get the feeling there was a lot of evidence behind it.
I was going to delurk in order to recommend Godel, Escher, Bach, but apparently I've been beaten to it.
I'm currently working my way through A Road to Reality by Roger Penrose. I'm enjoying it a lot, but I'm not sure I could recommend it to anyone who doesn't know at least a bachelor's-degree-ish amount of math; Penrose tries to start from first principles and work his way up, but I suspect that most of what he says would be incomprehensible to me had I not seen it elsewhere first.
Temple Grandin's books on autism (the one whose name I remember is Thinking in Pictures, but there are several) are fascinating.
The one time I saw Gould speak, his lecture was an examination of reasons why, even though evolution is so manifestly correct, people persist in disbelieving in it. This makes the "Gould was opposed to evolution" claim seem even more surreal to me than most ID/creationism.
There's another excellent book called "Discovering my Autism", whose author was named Schneider IIRC.
I haven't read much of this thread, having come in to it busy and late and with little to offer, but I will totally second this:
"The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman
Absolutely fascinating book.
A lot of books I love have already been mentioned ("Random Family", "Botany of Desire", "Louis Riel" and others), but one that hasn't been mentioned yet-- "A Tale of Love and Darkness", the memoir of Israeli novelist Amos Oz.
Oh, some other fun ones: The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero is way, way fun if you're into mathematics at all. Another great read is A World Lit Only by Fire, which I have been told by scholarly friends is not really a very accurate book, being written by a Renaissance scholar who wants to romanticize the darkness of the Dark Ages, but I found it terribly interesting. Another whose scholarship I am intensely unqualified to assess but found a very engaging read is Lost Discoveries, which talks about a number of the fundamental advances in science and technology and how they happened in various places in early recorded history.
In a completely different direction, Pyongyang is a nifty graphic novel memoir of a French animator's stay in Pyongyang to work on a cartoon.
Anybody here read Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks? My friend Bill liked it a lot.
Oh, some other fun ones: The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero is way, way fun if you're into mathematics at all.
Don't confuse this with the other book about zero that came out in 2000. "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" is pretty lightweight and annoying.
Another great read is A World Lit Only by Fire, which I have been told by scholarly friends is not really a very accurate book, being written by a Renaissance scholar who wants to romanticize the darkness of the Dark Ages, but I found it terribly interesting.
Here's a vote against it -- I spent the whole book being righteously indignant on behalf of medieval Europeans. If you don't know a fair amount about the period, you probably shouldn't read the book; you'd be at risk of believing some of it.
Ah, but to the ignorant (such as me) it's just plain fun!
Also, 190: haven't read it, and am glad I didn't just order it.
If you're into bizarre medieval stuff, DG White's "Myths of the Dogman" is great.
A friend of mine here likes Carlo Ginzburg's Night Battles.
Quick Studies, a collection of material from Lingua Franca, ed. Alexander Star. Though you might not think it holds up.
192: I am, of course, a hopeless snob.
Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, only half of which seems to have been translated into English, not that I've read the whole (translated) thing anyway, has various scandalous stories about heretics in a small village in Languedoc. He makes extensive use of Inquisition records. It was a bestseller in France in the 1970s.
But I suppose an academic would tell you to read the chapter in Pathways to Medieval Peasants that criticizes Ladurie's use of sources alongside the book itself.
How dare Ladurie use sources, without thinking of their feelings!
I'm so old-fashioned: M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism.
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech. Painstakingly neutral, balanced attempt to counter romanticization of traditional Indian life without going too far in the other direction.
Facing East From Indian Country by Daniel K. Richter. The story of the colonization of North America from an Indian perspective. Not so much a continuous narrative; more a collection of set pieces.
Racial Borders by James Leiker. The story of the Buffalo Soldiers in Texas, including a lot about the complicated state of race relations at the time. Very scholarly.
A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. How the British fucked up the Middle East during WWI.
Titan by Ron Chernow. The life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Very detailed and fascinating.
I'm going to pipe up and say that if you're like me and you have trouble absorbing really dense histories and taking much away from them after time has passed, and you don't already know at least a little about the Middle East and WWI, I don't think you should read APtEAP.
Speaking of the European medievals, Jean Gimpel's flawed but still classic The Medieval Machine is a great read and a good antidote to stereotypes about the era.
I enjoyed Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
So did I. What's more fun than a guy with an axe to grind going over the last couple of centuries of Continental philosophy, especially with a good dose of aesthetics thrown in? Sincerity and Authenticity is also great, one of my favorite books. I don't know how many times I've read that one. The stuff on Madame Bovary rocks, but the whole thing is wonderful.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, by David Quammen, is a great book - it personifies Darwin and gets into the reasons he waited 20 years to publish his theory of evolution.
Michael Grunwald's The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise is also a good read. Full of information, but not dry.
Oh, Grant's Memoirs -- a spectacular perspective on the Civil War, and Grant emerges as astonishingly likeable. And to go with it, Lee Considered, by Alan T. Nolan, debunking the Robert E. Lee myth.
No on has mentioned the three-volume Caro biography of LBJ? That's pretty awesome, despite the length.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, if you're into the computer-stuff. Best computer-science book evar.
What about Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information? It's fun writing about statistics and visualization thereof, with some gorgeous graphics. Like pr0n, for (some) stats-geeks.
Mark Ptashne's Genes and Signals? (Or the earlier, A Genetic Switch?) -- pretty much sums up the cutting edge in one field of biological research, and well-written to boot.
Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict?
Feyerabend's Beyond Method? (or, better-written and more-widely-misquoted, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?)
Stay away from the Gladwell, or any of the "network" books (Barabasi, etc.)
201 is probably true; it's quite dense for a (relatively) popular history.
The "Education of Henry Adams" is so boring that it's interesting for that. Why did he choose to write in that infinitely tedious way? He was writing about come interesting events, but he flattened them. The man trained himself to have no affect at all.
206: Beyond Method s/b Against Method.
206: And Caro on Robert Moses: The Power Broker. Really worth reading for a sense of the contingency of urban design -- the Bronx could have stayed middle-class, if it hadn't been destroyed.
Best computer-science book evar.
Though I haven't read it (and will on your recommendation) I beg to differ, The Mythical Man-Month is a computer book that can be equalled but never exceeded.
210: Damn, I can't even spell my own pseudonym these days.
The Mythical Man-Month and SICP aren't really about the same thing.
I second (third?) Tia's 201. A Peace To End All Peace was chock-full of good information, but I had a hard time processing it. If anyone can recommend something easier to start with, I'd love to read it.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is online here.
214 -- I realize, but it was partially an excuse to plug Mythical Man-Month. Working with computers, I find that while Mythical Man-Month has almost nothing to say about programming per se it almost perfectly describes the experiences of programming as a job.
So, no, not a "Computer Science" book, but extraordinarily useful for what it is.
MMM would be something along the lines of computer engineering.
SICP is computer science at its best, a beginner's-level intro to programming languages/computer architecture/functional programming/etc. I honestly believe that every major topic in CS research is touched on at least once in that book, somewhere.
And if you happen to like the way that book is written, there's also the Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (available free online!) which is written in the same style, at least. But for physics. SICM I haven't read all the way through yet -- but SICP is justifiably a classic.
FWIW, Bill Burke's Applied Differential Geometry is also really really fun to dive into, although it's a bit rough in places. That's a math book with a sense of humor, for sure. Also (less humor-filled, but equally fascinating) Harley Flanders' Differential Forms with Applications to the Physical Sciences.
Also, any of the Landau and Lifschitz physics books. Or, duh, nearly anything by Feynman.
"...feel free to recommend the best stuff in your field, even if it's a journal article."
I thought this paper, "How to Write a Financial Contract," is exceptionally well-written. Computational finance meets functional programming and type theory, all in the style of SICP. It kind of blew my mind when I first read it a couple of years ago.
And now I'll shut-up...
Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times by Geoffrey Nunberg
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic by Gina Kolata
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
The Fire Never Dies: One Man's Raucous Romp Down the Road of Food, Passion and Adventure by Richard Sterling
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber
218:
The Landau and Lifschitz books are uneven; some are particularly good (classical theory of fields, for example). Same can be said for Feynmans lectures, I guess, but certainly worth a read and parts of it are golden. People I trust tell me Landau was at least as good as Feynman, but this was lost on a generation of physics students due to cold war politics.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is probably the best written technical book I know of. SICM is a good, if somewhat idiosyncratic take on a standard first year graduate school mechanics course. A bit of a jump then if you don' t have some solid undergraduate math & physics.
SICP, on the other hand, is quite accesible. However, it is a book about the nature of computer programs, and really you'll miss more than half of it if you don't write programs as you go along. For that reason, if you are interesting in learning something about programming and computer science, by all means read it. If you aren't, I'd hesitate to recommend it. Every serious programmer should read it. With my background I found the math in it very approachable, but some CS undergrads struggle with that...
For a more lay oriented book about CS that is very readable and fun, try `The New Turing Omnibus' I've forgotten the authors name at the moment.
There are some lovely math texts out there, but we are starting to wander into areas that need a fair bit of background...
62: Lisa Belkin, Show Me a Hero, about how the city of Yonkers was forced to integrate low income housing into middle-class neighborhoods.
Will check it out. Have you read The Power Broker (Caro, 1975)? A history of a man who seems to have devoted his career to implementing segregation in NYC.
One more recommendation: Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power is uneven but quite good (and has an amusing cover).
In particular the three essays on Jimmy Carter, Nelson Rockefeller. and the Meese Commission are classics. They have the wit and energy of Hunter S Thompson with, IMHO, more sustained attention.
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. It's a great volume of women's studies, literary biography, the history of private life, the relationship between work and life, and the stories that people tell themselves—the private myths they create—and how these do and do not relate to reality.
I recently saw The Power Broker on a public library's ¢25 (donation for donated books) shelves.
One great book I read recently is virtuoso polymath pianist Charles Rosen's Piano Notes -- about the nature of being a concert pianist, the history of piano music, practice, art history, aesthetics, musical gossip, everything.
I'm not a piano player -- I can't even play a C major scale on one -- but it's one of the best books I've ever read on music. It's pretty short too. A friend lent it to me and another friend, after reading it on my recommendation, went and bought a copy for his Dad (who is a conductor and music professor) as he liked it so much.
Also, Miles Davis's autobiography, Miles is pretty great.
Are people seriously recommending graduate-level physics texts? Please. Might as well recommend Jackson and Sakurai while you're at it. I can't imagine any worse way to convey the awesomeness of physics to a non-physicist.
And, Feynman? I guess his "stories" might be okay, depending on whether you would have liked RF himself. I suspect I wouldn't have, and similarly, don't like his stories...
I'm often at a loss for good physics books for lay people. In my cynical moments I just don't offer anything.
American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan gives a very good look at the development of slavery as an institution in the colonial era, focusing specifically on Virginia. It's also accessibly written without being too much of a lightweight "popular" book.
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge
Find out why Gramps might have been grumpy.
Correction: Miles Davis' biography is a motherfucker.
the author's name doesn't show up on the rss feed
That's a function of your feed reader, because the author's name is in the feed, and shows up in my reader.
Depends on the feed. Author name shows up in the post feed but not the post+comments feed. That's a feature, not a bug.
229: Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory is accessible to anyone with a solid grasp of basic algebra.
There's some very philosophical stuff in it as well, for those of a philosophical bent.
In the vein of "computer science books interesting to non computer-science people", try Applied Cryptography. I've known a lot of non-engineering/non-sciency friends who enjoyed it. It gets more technical and into code in the second half but the first half, where it talks about the challenges of security and cryptography in almost "puzzle" terms, are very accessible. And it sheds a lot of light on why making things like secure voting machines is so non-trivial.
229: I really like Ballentines book on QM but haven't yet read the widely praised Sakurai. Ballentine does try to explain his own interpretation of QM (check Rev. Mod. Phys. 42, 358 if interested) in some detail in the book which might be a big minus for many but doesn't bother me too much. I can't really think of a good physics book for non-physicists either. A historical account might be accessible but perhaps not very interesting without some prior exposure. Anyway, there's a nice one by Helge Kragh on 20th century physics.
229: Ahhh, you're right. In the same vein, I've given people Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics before, including a very precocious 9th-grader.
I am playing online Scrabble and I have two blanks and two Ss in my rack. If I did not bingo, the Scrabble gods would shatter me into wooden squares. But I am going to go out, assuming no one takes my spot to make "wassail" before my turn.
(I already bingoed this game with pigeons. I'll say one thing for secretarial work; it's giving me time to improve my Scrabble.)
Cf. 231: "Quartered Safe Out Here," by George MacDonald Fraser. Older novelist's memoir of serving in Burma in WW II as a nineteen-year old. Why he can be grumpy, too...
209:In Praise of Irony ...Ray Davies
"For those who have been made self-conscious of hubris in the mere act of expression, irony is pert near unavoidable. Thus, most of the women writers on my shelves are masters of the form in all its moods, from Behn and Austen through Bowles and Barnes to Russ and Fowler, criminy, Brontė & Brontė & Brontė & Olive Moore & Patricia Highsmith & Flannery O'Connor & Edith Wharton, it gets kind of creepy, doesn't it? Thus also the tactic's popularity with such resigned-to-failure types as Stendhal and Flaubert, Romantic rapscallions like Byron and Pushkin, and most sane twenty-somethings.
Here, for example, we actually witness the most beautiful of Nature's tender miracles, the birth of an ironist:
"It is wonderful -- stupendous to consider, how a man who in his own mind is cool, witty, unaffected and high-toned, will disgust and mortify himself by every word he utters or act he does, when he steps out of his skin defenses." -- Henry Adams, age 25
So don't let anyone tell you that irony isn't hip anymore. It's as hip as it ever was.
215: I don't know what historians think of Tuchman's The Guns of August, and by design it's quite limited in scope, but it's very readable and most of what it was trying to provide stayed with me.
The rest of Ray's Pseudopodium stuff on Adams. Damn. H Adams went with LaFarge to Tahiti;I didn't know that. I know this thread is books;but the Internet has made tens of thousands of paintings available, in a lesser form, for the first time in history. LaFarge is neat, especially when compared to Gauguin (subject matter) on the one hand, and Homer as watercolorist on the other. Never mind.
Ray's recent piece on Ruskin was very good.
A recent (in the past few years) issue of Raritan had a very good article on Henry Adams and evolutionary thinking, or so it seemed to me, lacking as I am in knowledge of both subjects.
Also, if you'd like light and fluffy non-fiction entertainment, Joe Queenan's Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon has some great moments. From the Amazon review:
This leads Queenan to coin the term scheissenbedauern ("shit regret") to describe "the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one hoped it would be."
He starts the book with a viewing of Cats, which he describes as "what Grease would look like if the cast dressed up like KISS."
And I think Tuchman's Guns and Proud Tower don't bother academic historians too much, but Distant Mirror does not seem to have been received favorably at all by medievalists. I've read none of the three.
Tuchman's Guns is more interesting, I would say, than "true" or accurate. Ivan Morris's The World of the Shining Prince is a fine alternative to actually reading The Tale of Genji. Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game is a reasonable history of Anglo-Russian imperalism in central Asia. Langeweische's The Outlaw Sea is journalism in book format, and should be read with that in mind. Nothing particularly interesting lately, aside from perhaps Gordon Wood's The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.
Classic American Autobiographies is pretty excellent.
For the low price of $7.95, you get:
A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
Old Times on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, and
Four Autobiographical Narratives of Zitkala-Sa.
The Zitkala-Sa memoir is pretty lame but the other four are awesome.
246 - On the coinage of words, I heard a great one this weekend: procrasturbation.
I recommend reading Frederick Douglass alongside Harriet Jacobs, whose Incidents is amazing.
Okay, just one more, because I have guests to clean for and we're trending into bragging territory:
Poll Tax Rebellion by Danny Burns. If you want to be inspired for the next two years of our long national nightmare, this is the book to pick. I don't know how accurate it is -- perhaps our correspondents from perfidious Albion could comment if they've read it -- but it sure gets the blood racing when you read about all those bailliffs getting their asses handed to them at the poindings.
196: Nothing wrong with that! I'm glad to have it confirmed that I shouldn't take it as gospel truth.
Another fun one: Body of Secrets, a history of the NSA by the author of the awesome (but nearly 25 years old) The Puzzle Palace (likewise about the NSA).
You could always just read me in The New Criterion. Sorry, couldn't resist.
The recommendation of Hopkirk's Great Game is seconded.
250: Wow, that one word describes my entire final two years of grad school.
Just for the record, #248 was mine. I think the info disappeared when I hit preview and I didn't notice it.
Wow. I've been trying to think of something all day, and can only come up with books I hate or books I need to read and am hoping someone will read for me and upload the knowledge into my brain.
229: no, not at all ... I was trying to point out that while SICP is aimed at freshmen, SICM is aimed at grad students, so not nearly as accessible. Some of Feynmans lectures I find pretty good intro, other bits not so much. I don't know any really good lay/intro physics stuff to suggest (but would like to).
Just today, I learned that a young cousin's new book is out. I'm sure it's great fun. Also an older (and more distant) cousin's historical fiction.
For Tia, then, Wordfreak, but I'm assuming she's already read it.
In the vein of logic/philosophy stuff, the standard undergrad textbook here is Enderton's A Mathematical Introduction to Logic which is pretty accessible but probably higher-level than you'd like. For more lay descriptions, however, I'll throw my hat in the ring not just for Godel, Escher, Bach [and Metamagical Themas, too, though I agree that Le Ton Beau De Mareau isn't worth the effort] but any of the logic puzzle books by Raymond Smullyan: What is the Name of this Book?, The Lady Or The Tiger, and so forth. He actually explains the Godel Incompleteness Theorems in the paradigm of knight/knave problems, which is kind of amazing.
Also, the Martin Gardner SA column books (e.g. Hexaflexagons and the other 20-odd compilations of his columns) are awesome, too, even if you just like the mathiness flowing by without wanting to do the problems.
Changing gears, if anyone hasn't read it, America: The Book is great. As is Ordinary Men [though for different reasons], which is (regrettably) pretty much the last book I read for pleasure. Stupid PhD.
Smullyan is great, and so is Thomas Browne, whose works you can read for free online.
Guicciardini's account of the Sack of Rome in 1527 is awesome.
Smullyan is great
As a teenager, I baby-sat for a family with great bookshelves. I used to hustle the kids into bed so that I could spend the evening picking out books that looked interesting (I was disappointed in Lady Chatterly's Lover) and reading. They had a couple of Smullyan's books, and I was fascinated by them.
Heh. Apollo, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. Yes, that Charles Murray. Yes, men on the moon. It's much more of a personal/political history than it is a technological history, no massive reams of numbers or anything, but it gives a good picture of a massive government / personal / engineering effort. Truly bizarre, when you think about it.
>Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
I ordered this book through Abebooks today and the guy just dropped it off at my house because he lived nearby. It was at my house when I got back from work.
I also ordered the "mythical man month" for $4.00 at Abebooks. This thread may have caused a run on copies because the cheapest 4 or 5 copies that were there this morning are gone now.
re: 252
I haven't read it so I can't say, however, I was a poll tax non-payer in 1989, and was threatened with a poinding myself* and it was certainly true that the anti-poll tax people used to turn up and physically prevent poindings -- there were a few locally where that happened.
I'll need to look out that book and have a read.
The anti-poll tax campaign was a pretty shining hour for one Tommy Sheridan -- someone who is currently undergoing a pretty spectacular fall ...
* It was pretty common for an order for a poinding to be issued as a threat. Many many more orders were issued than were ever carried through. I was 17 at the time and ended up paying almost half of my (full-time) wages that year in fines and various other punitive levies as a result of non-payment of the poll tax.
I'm with Bailey on 1491. Couldn't put it down. Secrets of the Sands by Harry Thurston, dealing with the Everlasting Oasis in Egypt. Collapse by Jared Diamond, also his Guns, Germs and Steel. Both recommended. On the music side, Miles' autobiography is very good, as is John Szwed's So What. A more coherent telling of Miles' life. Lastly, if you're a real fan of Miles try Kind of Blue by Ashley Kahn, a bio on the recording of his masterpiece.
171: I read via the comments feed, http://www.unfogged.com/comments.xml, which gives me posts+comments (and updates when there are new comments), but in bloglines at least I don't see the post author. It's there if I switch to another feed.
(On preview I see that links are added to urls automatically, which I never realised and thus have been wasting my time typing them out.)
We are honored to have a poindee among us.
I have read Wordfreak, Anarch, but thanks.
Did the publication of Wordfreak chase the Scrabble players out of Washington Square Park. I've always (since reading the book and having not seen them) guessed that it did.
259: Not all of Feynman's published stuff is lectures -- his letters make for excellent (non-technical) reading, too.
229, subsequent: You may think the physics covered in this book is so superficial as not to even be physics for lay people, or maybe it gets things wrong, but Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb seemed to have a variety of good physics mixed in with the history, though of course it's not good modern physics.
Of Revelation and Revolution, volume 1, by Jean and John Comaroff - historical anthropology, power, and how religion greased the skids for colonization in S. Africa. Wonderful wonderful.
Cognition in the Wild, by Edwin Hutchins. An analysis of navigation on big ships in the Navy, really an attempt to pull cognition away from cognitive psych and back into culture.
Don't know why I'm so enamoured of those anthropologists, but damnation their work is interesting.
The best non-fiction book about fiction I've read is Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson.
Covers the modernist masters: Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Stein, Rimbaud.
Fucking funtastic. Might get you back to fiction, ogged.
It's where I first read that great dandy-defining line of the pure aesthete (by D'Villiers Adam, I think his name is): "As for living, our servants will do it for us."
The most thought-provoking thing I've read this year is Doug Muder's essay "Red Family, Blue Family", available online. His interpretation of conservatism as the idea that obligations are given, not chosen, is fair and fairly explanatory.
http://www.gurus.com/dougdeb/politics/209.html