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Ugh. If Only Meyer Had Ever Read…
A great many men have been dubbed, “The Last Man to Know Everything.” Indeed, the epithet is apparently a mildly popular sub-genre of biography. Well, I don’t know everything or anything close to it. Never will, either, which — depending on the mood — is either depressing or exciting. Regardless, I have personal and professional reasons to want to learn more stuff about things, particularly on subjects for which I’m either ignorant or poorly informed.
So, Ricochet, here’s your chance to influence this pundit’s thinking and/or make me a better human being: my next book will be chosen by you, based on whichever suggestion receives the most likes in this thread, and I will write at least one post on the subject. The winning selection must be new to me, in English, be under 400 pages, and be available for less than $25 through Amazon or iBook. Fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, history, science, biography, religion … I’m yours to influence.
For background, I was a History and English double major at a school with a reasonably traditional curriculum in those departments and my interests since have tended towards science and economics. For pleasure, I tend to read historical and science fiction, and I’m a late convert to comic books/graphic novels. For more detailed reference, my Goodreads account is a reasonably accurate account of my reading since I created it in 2009 (there are earlier entries, but they were added after the fact, usually to round-out series).
So, Ricochet, have it at. Set me straight. Educate me.
Published in Literature
Sam Delaney’s Dhalgren.
Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there….
It doesn’t meet your page criterion, but it makes up for it by coming in under half your price criterion.
Eric Hines
Along these lines, BF Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. You can get it free, as a pdf.
Eric Hines
“The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt” by Pascal Bruckner. The best book on the Leftist War on Civilization ever written.
Kim, Casey (on sabbatical for Lent) runs a Ricochet club over at Goodreads.
So many possibilities, so many that may already have been read. One strikes me that, if missed, must be added to anyone’s list:
A Life on the Road, Charles Kuralt.
Bridging the eras from print, to radio, to television, Kuralt both describes the evolution of how America got its news, and the rise of the “narrative”, as the journalistic working stiffs were pushed out by the groomed gatekeepers. I read it so long ago, yet still remember his puzzlement with what he regarded as poorly informed analysis by Cronkite, that went something like, “I wonder what Lt. Soon would have thought of that”?
Thousands of titles to recommend, but if I had to choose one: Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger.
There’s a reason he’s advised Presidents of all stripes and this book changed my opinions of realpolitik 180 degrees.
Now that’s a gutsy move with a new girlfriend!
Pears just came out with a new novel.
We need to talk sometime about Scipio. I haven’t run into anyone else who’s read the book and as I said in the link, I found it very unsettling.
I would suggest he focus his attention on the injustice of “someone” having chosen February — the shortest month of the year — as Black History Month. Rather shocking, don’t you think?
The other idea deals with pop culture. It’s amazing and awesome that Kanye West is in debt for a mere 53 million dollars. He shows such a stunning humanitarian influence on society. Anybody like Jennifer Lawrence, who donated 2 million dollars to a children’s hospital, can throw their money around. (Bernie Sanders probably put her on an enemy list.) Kanye and Kim have made this a better world, don’t you think?
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard and/or The Adventures of Gerard which are available in a single volume as The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.
These memoirs of a delightfully vain French Hussar officer during the Napoleonic era are even more adventurous and more humorous than Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Although an inspiration for the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, unlike Flashy, Gerard is genuinely concerned with honor and glory and achieves them with great self-satisfaction.
“In attack the French are more than men, in defeat they are less than women.”
I suggest Chaos: Making of a New Science by James Gleick. Read it when it first came out. I was in college, and passed it around to my classmates. We then coded the Mandelbrot Set in Pascal just to see if we could do it.
Not sure how it holds up all these years later, but I found it a solid layman’s intro to chaos theory.
I would pick Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State: My Report To the World. It’s a quick read, a true story that reads like an Alistair MacLean suspense novel. Karski was a young man of the Polish intelligentsia who went off to war with Germany in 1939, as if it was a lark, and was quickly thrown into the dangerous resistance movement, caught between the Nazi’s on one side and the Soviets on the other. He escaped from brutal Nazi torture and captivity. He was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and a concentration camp, and was the first to report the many atrocities there personally to President Roosevelt and the US Government. His true accounts were not believed as too fantastical. The book ends before the Warsaw Rising of 1944, while Karski is still hopeful for his native Poland. It’s an amazing book of courage and steadfastness.
This is almost the exact experience my father and I have had with Pears.
Funny story: I read Fingerpost, loved it and thought I’d try it out on him for his birthday. A few months later, I received a package with copies of every book Pears had written with a note saying “PLEASE READ THESE SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT THEM!”
Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick
Perhaps the best philosophical summation of my style of libertarianism and the perfect counter to the intellectual foundations of the modern redistributive justice movement.
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry
This is a great book that looks at the science and medicine of the time and the roles of the military in spreading and fighting influenza. Barry puts the pandemic in a historic and social context.
Addendum: The page total is over your limit(546), but the Notes, Acknowledgements, Bibliography, and Index sections are nearly 100 pages so it isn’t as long as it appears.
Out of all the books I’ve read in a lifetime, the one I most earnestly recommend is John McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize Annals of the Former World (Amazon, hardback, paperback, Kindle, used & cheap). Unfortunately, Annals is way over your word limit , but, fortunately, it can be purchased in several shorter sub-books, of which it is comprised: Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California, Coming into the Country, and Suspect Terrain. This book got me looking at the world with new eyes and made me want to go back to school. I think that recommending it to someone is like giving them a present.
I second the books by McPhee. Very eye opening.
Sounds like I may prefer ZAAMM, then, but I’ll still give it a try. (I read ZAAMM at least twice and even thought it was possible to synthesize it with Objectivism, if you can imagine.)
Thank you again to everyone for the recommendations.
As there is a two-way tie — and a very worthy one at that — my next books after I finish The Evolution of Everything will be Orthodoxy and Knowledge & Decisions. Congrats and thank you to Western Chauvinist and Richard Fulmer.
Oh, gee, now I know what a matchmaker must feel like before she knows if the marriage will “take.” ;-)
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to give an update here. I expect to finish the book I started shortly before this post this evening and should be starting on Orthodoxy within the next few days.
But, but–what could possibly cause such a delay? If you’re finishing the book this evening, what’s to stop you from starting Orthodoxy later this evening?
Inquiring minds….
Eric Hines
Durn it–I just found this thread. I love Pears, too! An Instance of the Fingerpost is my favorite.
Having said that…my vote goes to Pilgrim’s Progress. Absolutely every Westerner should read it…and I say that as an Orthodox Christian. :)