PPR Book Recommendations

Post Reply New Topic

Sort of cliché, but Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, both by Jared Diamond, are both excellent reading. I particularly liked Collapse because it presented environmentalism in a way that I could relate to, rather than trying to guilt trip me into hugging a tree.

I just went on Amazon.com and bought The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Joseph Ratzinger (ie Pope) and Jürgen Habermas. Mainly I'm very curious to read Habermas after hearing so much about him in Novak's book, and from what I can tell he has a pretty good set of books on one of Sand and Ouinon's favorite topics which is the epistemology of language and its implications on our sense of reality. From the reviews it sounds like people are saying that Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has a hell of a good head on his shoulders as well and has written his essay with a great deal of clarity. Greatly look forward to reading both sides of the debate .

The last book I read was The Five Thousand Year Leap by K. Clion Skousen in which he writes about the 28 fundamental ideas that made the United States and its constitution as successful as it was/has been. He references back a lot to the involvement if ideas from Cicero, Montesque, Smith, and has a great in-depth analysis of the kinds of thinking and arguments that went back and forth between the founding fathers as far as what needed to be in government structure, what needed to be avoided in it, and also all kind of other societal and human nature issues considered.

I would recommend Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It is a modern alternative to 1984 and shows not only the techniques of control but also of resistance in this time. It is fiction.

Also: Send in the Waco Killers by Jeanne Suprynowicz, Vin Suprynowicz, and Deke Castleman. It is one of the things which made me a libertarian.

Last but not least: Just for fun by Linus Torvalds. I think he does show interesting insights in philosophy.

How to Win an Argument by Michael A. Gilbert. It outlines a few very useful things to think about in these type of forums, and argumentation in general.

I'm reading Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel. I'd recommend it. The prose style is very unusual but once you get into it, it's quite a gripping tale.

Just finished reading The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. He was a chess prodigy who then decided to do Tai Chi Chuan, and won the world championship for that. It has a lot to say about strategy, reading an opponent, mastery, psychology, and so forth. He explains all this by relating it to episodes of his life story.

I'm about 60 pages from finishing Voltaire's Bastards - The Dictatorship of Reason In The West by John Ralston Saul (its 585 pages in total). Definitely a heavyweight read as I noticed early on - that is its not something you can just skim through. Very rich in content, seems like almost every page had at least 4 or 5 items that I hadn't previously been familiar with (he delves into French history, British, Canadian, as well as American on myriad levels such as leadership, legislature, judiciary, public works projects, military history, elite universities through history, medieval origins of some modern concepts, European coupes of the 18th century, etc.).

One note right off the top - despite the title its not a pro-religion or pro-authoritarian book. It mainly describes the problems and the mistakes that we've made since the Enlightenment, the results of which are still reverberating and thickening around us today in such a way that's choking out reality and causing our self-governing abilities to stagnate. Its a very good read if you want to get a sense of what's going on in the world today, why things seem so divorced from reality, and why it seems like general tension in society is growing thicker even while we live in the most sanitary, comfortable, and relatively free era that humanity has seen to date.

The Creators is a non-fiction work of cultural history by Daniel Boorstin published in 1992 and is the second volume in what has become known as the Knowledge Trilogy'. It was preceded by The Discoverers and succeeded by The Seekers.

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson

The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

Principia Discordia by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley

Liber Null by Peter Carroll

The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm by Peter Carroll

Aldous Huxley was brilliant beyond his dystopia Brave New World. He also wrote a commentary on religion/spirituality called The Perennial Philosophy.

The Bhagavad Gita is an essential. It is basically a conversation on various meanings of life between Lord Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna utilizes a system of small lists or categorizations to describe different paths of life. Eknath Easwaran produced an excellent translation and interpretation which has a style similar to a Today's English Bible. The "Gita" is also quite beautiful in King James prose.

As far as fiction goes, Heinlein produced some excellent, award winning classics. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about a libertarian(with a lower-case "l") coup by the people of Luna against Earth. Also, Stranger in a Strange Land follows the story of Valentine Michael Smith- a human raised by Martians- as he struggles to adapt to life amongst humans. He becomes a 60s counterculture type, pseudo-Christ-like figure.

Paradise Lost by John Milton - incredible achievement (he wrote it by dictating to another, he was blind - I think anyway). Read in conjunction with Heidegger's 'technological world view' it demarcates the emergence of this world view. A lot of peope seem to read at as a sort of allegory of the English Civil War but it is far richer than that alone.

Violence Slavoj Zizek - one of his smaller books, very readable. Mixes intense philosophy with commentary on jokes, culture, art etc. Radical stuff.

Revolution at the Gates ed. Slavoj Zizek - letters written by Lenin in the run upto and just after the Russian Revolution, the sense of history in the lived moment is tangible - with extremely detailed notes by the editor. Afterword by Zizek covers everything from Stalinism, the envrionment to Fight Club, a man on form. Required revolutionary reading.

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky - will write more later, got to go out now!

Book it list topic

Yertle the Turtle, by Dr. Suess

Unknown Soldiers, by Matthew Carr

In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka

Origin of species, by Charles Darwin

Federalism and the French Canadians, by P. E. Trudeau

Words, by J.P. Sartre

The philosophy of J. P. Sartre, by himself

The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir

the mismeasure of man by stephen jay gould.

I highly recommend Sinclair Lewis books.

Especially Elmer Gantry,

but also Babbit and Main Street.

Also Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.