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.
"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.
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, François 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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 Historymuse 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Hey, Wolfson 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hannah Arendt: The origins of the totalitarianism
Posted by immaculatus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:24 AM
Siri Hustvedt, "Mysteries of the Rectangle"; interesting personal appreciations of Goya, Giorgio Morandi, and Giorgione.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:28 AM
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.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:30 AM
Sorry, that's the subtitle. The title is As Nature Made Him.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:32 AM
"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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:41 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:46 AM
Thomas Geohegan's Which Side Are You On was recommended here before, but it remains immensely worth reading.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:47 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:48 AM
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.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:48 AM
Stephen Coll, "Ghost Wars"
Daniel Yergin, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power"
Posted by Ugh | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:51 AM
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.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 7:59 AM
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.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:12 AM
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
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:12 AM
(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.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:13 AM
the word Being would not appear in it
B-but it's right there in the title!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:16 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:17 AM
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.)
Posted by theophylact | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:19 AM
We're a little wary of Quineans around here.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:22 AM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:23 AM
I tend towards scientific books. Two I think are great reads for anyone are Cadillac Desert and Song of the Dodo.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:24 AM
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.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:25 AM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:28 AM
18: Who is this "we"? I know you don't like Quine, Emerson, but who cares what you think?
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:31 AM
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.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:38 AM
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.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:41 AM
Recomended non-fiction comics:
Maus, by Art Spigelman.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:42 AM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:44 AM
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.
Posted by Frowner | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:45 AM
26 -- Also, king among nonfiction comix, Barefoot Gen and its sequelæ.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:46 AM
(Or "sequel" -- I thought there were three or more books in the series, but maybe there are just two.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:47 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:49 AM
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.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:50 AM
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.
Posted by Charlie Whitaker | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:58 AM
Logical positivists and vulgar empiricists must be liquidated.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 8:59 AM
How about The Second Sex?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:02 AM
"Best philosophy book ever: Hume's Treatise on Human Nature."
Nein!
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:03 AM
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."
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:06 AM
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.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:08 AM
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.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:11 AM
John McPhee's The Control of Nature is a good read. An excerpt is here.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:11 AM
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).
Posted by KJ | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:11 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:12 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:13 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:16 AM
38: the great Azerbaijani s/b the great Azerbaijani novel
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:18 AM
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.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:18 AM
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.
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:19 AM
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.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:21 AM
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.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:21 AM
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.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:24 AM
Palestine is, as sj says, excellent, as is Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:24 AM
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, François 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.)
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:24 AM
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.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:25 AM
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.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:26 AM
Not that I remember fuck all about it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:26 AM
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.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:28 AM
I just finished Who Murdered Chaucer? It's a distant mirror, to borrow a phrase.
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:29 AM
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.
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:31 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:38 AM
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.
Posted by bill | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:40 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:42 AM
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.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:43 AM
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.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:44 AM
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?
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:44 AM
To go outside my areas of expertise, I enjoyed Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:45 AM
re: 63
There's a wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_on_the_Feeling_of_the_Beautiful_and_Sublime
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:50 AM
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...
Posted by Frowner | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:53 AM
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.
Posted by JL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:54 AM
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.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:56 AM
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.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:56 AM
"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.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:57 AM
re: 69
Thanks very much.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 9:59 AM
How about Stephen Jay Goulds `Structure of Evolutionary Theory' ? I've no real background in the area but found it very approachable, albiet long.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:01 AM
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.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:03 AM
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.
Posted by Charlie Whitaker | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:04 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:08 AM
71: I wouldn't have associated Marx with anything like "We create our own reality."
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:08 AM
I can't believe that I read all of Paradise Lost -- twice, the second time with the old-timey spelling.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:09 AM
Why no fiction? Don't read it, or do fiction rec threads devolve into suckage?
Posted by NL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:09 AM
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.
Posted by Karl Marx | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:10 AM
There have been several mostly fiction threads, but mainly it's because I find I can't read it anymore.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:11 AM
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).
Posted by NickS | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:17 AM
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.
Posted by NL | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:17 AM
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.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:17 AM
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.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:18 AM
You should elaborate. Several of my friends have reached that point, and it perplexes me.
We talked about it here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:20 AM
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.
Posted by Charlie Whitaker | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:20 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:21 AM
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.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:24 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:25 AM
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.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:26 AM
Some of the early logical positivists were addicted to fart jokes. But what's wrong with a little vulgarity?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:27 AM
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?
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:32 AM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:34 AM
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.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:36 AM
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.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:37 AM
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.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:38 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:39 AM
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.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:43 AM
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
Posted by Calcixeroll | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:43 AM
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.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:44 AM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:44 AM
Dammit!
first post and pwned.
mthrfthernrassinfrassin
Posted by Calcixeroll | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:44 AM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:44 AM
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.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:45 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:47 AM
(Pekar's works, all of which kind of fit "memoir", are of course universally excellent.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:48 AM
Does the fictionverbot extend to memoir
No, memoir is great.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:50 AM
Does the fictionverbot extend to memoir
I know! Read A Million Little Pieces!
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:52 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:53 AM
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.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:53 AM
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.
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:56 AM
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.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:56 AM
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.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 10:58 AM
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.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:00 AM
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.
Posted by Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:01 AM
Gould's ideas are sometimes misrepresented or caricatured.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:03 AM
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.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:03 AM
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.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:04 AM
re: 111
It's called Hitting on All Six.
http://www.amazon.com/Hittin-All-Six-Various-Artists/dp/B00004SBFJ
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:04 AM
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.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:05 AM
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.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:08 AM
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.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:09 AM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:09 AM
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.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:10 AM
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.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:12 AM
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.
Posted by J | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:12 AM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:13 AM
gah. 121 should read `Structure of Evolutionary Theory' , not `Structure of Evolutionary Biology' of course. sorry.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:13 AM
122: The late Stephen Jay Gould doesn't get any royalties off his books anymore.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:13 AM
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".
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:14 AM
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.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:16 AM
(which latter certainly describes Thompson at times.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:16 AM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:17 AM
(also, "Immigration and Maturation Service".)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:18 AM
111: I recommend Swing to Bop Guitar. All electric, some overlap with your set.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:19 AM
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.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:19 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:19 AM
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).
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:21 AM
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.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:22 AM
McManus's once-high political awareness had plunged into the Krugmanian pit of inky gloom. We might as well kiss his ass goodbye.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:24 AM
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.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:24 AM
131: I Must Say
Posted by Ed Grimley | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:24 AM
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.
Posted by Frowner | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:24 AM
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.
Posted by Frowner | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:25 AM
(...Er, oops)
Posted by Frowner | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:25 AM
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.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:26 AM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:27 AM
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..."
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:27 AM
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.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:27 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:28 AM
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.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:28 AM
150: by historian Richard White
Well, duh. It's a history, fathead.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:31 AM
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.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:32 AM
Under no circumstances should anyone evern read Fussell's Abroad.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:32 AM
ever
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:32 AM
152: Oh, I'd nearly forgotten `Le Ton Beau...'. That falls into my neat idea, badly done pile.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:33 AM
Mark Kulansky's `Salt: A World History' was fun
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:37 AM
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.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:37 AM
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.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:37 AM
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.
Posted by Emir | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:38 AM
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.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:38 AM
159: Yeah, you can quit after (IIRC) chapter 15, on the Second Incompleteness theorem.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:39 AM
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.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:41 AM
159: you certainly hit diminishing returns in there somewhere....
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:41 AM
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.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:41 AM
159: Tia is teh hero!
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:42 AM
163 see 131
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:43 AM
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.
Posted by bailey | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:45 AM
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.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:48 AM
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.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:48 AM
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.
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:49 AM
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'....
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:49 AM
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?
Posted by KJ | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:49 AM
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.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:51 AM
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.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:53 AM
"Göel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable."
Ah but Dr. Seuss got there first.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:55 AM
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.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:57 AM
Just went and read the essay, and what I want to know is, did Boolos have any connection to Oulipo?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:58 AM
One-syllable.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 11:58 AM
Hey, Wolfson 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.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:01 PM
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).
Posted by Doctor Slack | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:03 PM
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.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:06 PM
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.
Posted by Micah | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:09 PM
There's another excellent book called "Discovering my Autism", whose author was named Schneider IIRC.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:10 PM
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.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:12 PM
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.
Posted by peep | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:15 PM
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.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:15 PM
Anybody here read Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks? My friend Bill liked it a lot.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:15 PM
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.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:17 PM
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.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:17 PM
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.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:21 PM
If you're into bizarre medieval stuff, DG White's "Myths of the Dogman" is great.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:22 PM
A friend of mine here likes Carlo Ginzburg's Night Battles.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:22 PM
Quick Studies, a collection of material from Lingua Franca, ed. Alexander Star. Though you might not think it holds up.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:24 PM
192: I am, of course, a hopeless snob.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:27 PM
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.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:28 PM
How dare Ladurie use sources, without thinking of their feelings!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 2-06 12:30 PM