WG’s Provocative Book List
or
Have you questioned an assumption today?
(Updated as of April 1, 2012)
A list of non-fiction books of general interest which I have found thought-provoking and topical, providing new insights or unexpected propositions about how the world operates. This list is sorted by date of publication, newest first, and then randomly within year of publication.
For further comments, see my blog at http://wg-observations.blogspot.com/
Coming Apart: The
State of White America, 1960-2010
Charles Murray 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-45342-6
In 1994 Charles Murray, with the
late Richard Herrnstein , wrote “the Bell Curve”, a
book widely derided by the politically correct for a simple statement of fact about
racial differences in intelligence scores (not surprising, since such tests are
culture biased). That missed their
essential point, which was that forces were already at work in
The World
Rober Kagan, 2012, ISBN 978-0307961310
Robert Kagan's
new 2012 book The World America Made is well worth reading. He argues
that the world is the way it is today (largely democratic, largely liberal,
largely at peace) because of
Of course
The World in 2050:
Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
Laurence C. Smith, 2011, ISBN 978-0452297470
Laurence Smith's book The New North: The World in 2050 is about the best, most accurate, and most concise exploration of the major forces likely to shape the world over the next 40-50 years that I have read. Smith deals with human population growth and migration; growing demand for resources such as energy and water; globalization; and climate change. He argues that these forces will shape a new world in which, for geological and climate change reasons, the nations in the higher latitudes of the north will gain at the expense of the rest of the world. Fascinating to read.
Niall Ferguson, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59420-305
Chuck Pfarrer, 2011, ISBN 978-1250006356
Chris Hedges, 2011,
ISBN 978-1568586403
Mary Roach, 2011,
ISBN 978-0393339918
Surviving in space for long periods, as will be required for a trip to
Mars, is difficult. But we have already
been preparing with our near-earth space station, the shuttle flights, and the
Apollo moon flights. And it isn’t all that glamorous, seen up close. Mary
Roach, whose previous books are Stiff:
The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,
and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science
and Sex, has a wonderful talent for entering a field and describing it with
wit and humor, as she does in this book.
Ever think about the problem of defecating in zero gravity? Ever wonder what the astronauts eat (and
whether they like it)? Ever wonder why
airline passengers don’t have parachutes?
This is the book that will explain it.
A wonderful, entertaining but highly educational read.
Richard Paneck, 2011, ISBN 978-0618982448
This is a wonderful book about the history leading up to the theory of
dark matter and dark energy, the personalities of the people who contributed to
this theory, and the theoretical struggles and battles along the way. Well
worth reading to get a sense of today’s world of physics, astrophysics and
cosmology.
The Information
James Gleick, 2011, ISBN 978-0-375-42372-7
An exploration of the evolution of information from the earliest steps of
translating spoken language to writing symbols up to present day quantum
processing. Gleick
leads us through the evolution of information, exploring the personalities of
the key players – Einstein, Shannon, Turing, and many others – while explaining
the increasingly complex ideas in terms (mostly) accessible to the layman, but
still of interest to the expert in the field.
A very good book.
The Next Decade: Where We Have Been…and Where We Are Going
George Friedman, 2011, ISBN 978-0385532945
George Friedman’s 2008 book The Next 100 Years dealt with the likely
shape of the world driven by the impersonal forces of geography, geopolitics,
demographics, culture, and technological advances. In this book he pulls his
focus in to the next decade, arguing that while in the long run impersonal
forces shape history, in the short run personalities make a big
difference. He assess
the problems we face in the next decade, and the leadership qualities needed in
our presidents to face them effectively and realistically This is quite a good
book.
Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What
They Reveal About the Future
Ian Morris, 2010,
ISBN978-0-374-29002-3
Ian Morris’s new book, Why The West Rules – For Now, is a dense,
well-researched review of history from the emergence of modern humans to the
present, directed toward answering the question “Why did the Western world end
up ruling instead of the Eastern world?”
After all, the East had advanced civilizations in
The Father of US All:
War and History
Victor Davis Hanson,
2010, ISBN 978-1-60819-410
We are cursed, as have been
civilizations all through history, with those unrealistic idealists who think
war can be eliminated if only reasonable men would talk, and those equally
unrealistic idealists who think war is an ideal way to solve disagreements
between nations. Neither group understands history very well, according to
Hanson. He argues that war is an inextricable part of human experience, and the
nation would be better off if we all studied the lessons of history. This book is a collection of various essays
he has written, most of the expanded for the book. They are very good, and his
views are worth thinking about.
God Is Not One: The
Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter
Stephen Prothero, 2010, ISBN 978-0061571275
Stephen Prothero's book God
Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the
World is a useful introduction to the eight largest religions in the world.
In particular, he makes the point that despite ecumenical attempts to argue
that all religions are simply different paths to the same God, the eight major
religions differ at a fundamental level - they see different problems in the
world and seek different solutions to their different problems. Christians, for
example, worry about sin and seek salvation, while Buddhists worry about
suffering and seek nirvana (without any god) and Hindus worry about getting off
the wheel of reincarnation.
Any book about religion is of course going to be contentious, but I think this
is a useful approach to understanding the core of each of these major religions
-- what they see as the problem in the world and how they try to address that
problem.
The Age of Absurdity: Why
Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy
Michael Foley, 2010, ISBN 978-1847375247
Michale
Foley, a British academic with a wry sense of very British humor, but an impressive
span of intellectual resources, has written a book every American should read
(but almost none will). I believe he has correctly identified the fatal flaws
in our collective Western world cultural psyche, the
very flaws that seem to be making it impossible for us to pull ourselves out of
the mess are the same flaws have put us into the mess. I cannot write as good a
review as has already been written by Phil Hogan of The Guardian in his
piece The
Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy by Michael Foley,
and so I refer you to that review.
By all means get this book and read it. The writing is witty, but the message
is profound.
Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of
Discovery
Stephen J. Pyne, 2010, ISBN978-0-670-02183-3
The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are the first man-made objects to escape
the gravitational pull of the sun and begin to travel to the stars. In their
journey they have done a “Grand Tour” of the outer planets and sent back enough
new data on them to keep astronomers busy for a lifetime. Pyne
tells the story of these remarkable spacecraft, from the early political and
scientific battles to fund them through to their last planetary encounter,
though they are still operating and sending data back and may continue to do so
until about 2020. He sets their exploration of the solar system in the context
of the two previous great ages of exploration, the First Age led by intrepid
Portuguese explorers at the time of the Renaissance and the Second Age, in the
18th century, that coincided with the
Enlightenment. This is a wonderful book, part science and part history/philosophy,
that shows the continuity of today’s explorations of space with previous
periods of great explorations.
Economyths:
David Orrell, 2010, ISBN 978-1848311480
If there is one thing that is painfully
obvious these days, it is that the grand economic models that have won some
economists fame, fortune, and even Nobel Prizes, are shams. All those fancy
models didn't accurately model the risks in the derivatives market. All those
fancy models didn't forecast the current global financial crisis. The stimulus
steps those models predicted would stem the recession and limit unemployment
well below 8% have failed, and failed miserably. Economists are quick to
explain away these failings in all sorts of ways, but the test of a scientific
principle is that it works, and their models clearly don't work.
Aftershock: The Next Economy and
America’s Future
Robert B. Reich,
2010, ISBN 978-0-307-59281-1
Reich is a professor at the
Joseph Heath, 2010, ISBN 978-0307590572
Joseph Heath is not an economist, as he readily admits. He is a
philosophy professor at the
The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The
Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy
William Pfaff, 2010,
ISBN 978-0-8027-1699-6
The radical Islamic militants dream of and fight
for the imposition of Muslim faith and Sharia law
across the entire world. It is self-evident to them that this would be best for
everyone. It is an impossible dream, at odds with history and human
nature and cultures. Pfaff argues that
the American dream of imposing democracy across the entire world is just as
impossible a dream, just as unrealistic, just as much at odds with everything
we know about history and human nature and cultures. Just as the Islamic
militants are blinded to reality by their faith, so too Americans are blinded
to reality by their own largely Christian-based faith. It is a powerful book, well argued and
thoroughly researched, delving back into the beginnings of the Enlightenment to
understand how we came to this condition, and how it has led us to a tragically
expensive and ineffective foreign policy.
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated
Human Evolution
Gregory Cochran
& Henry Harpending, 2009, ISBN 978-0-465-02042-3
The conventional wisdom is that
evolution is a very slow process, and as a consequence humans today are not
much different than humans 5000 years ago. Chochran
(a physicist) and Harpending (an anthropologist)
argue, from recent DNA evidence, that this is not so. “Deep” changes (changes
requiring mutations in many genes), such as development of an eye, may indeed
take a very long time. But “shallow” changes (meaning changes in just one or a
couple of genes) can occur quickly, can produce profound changes in physiology
and behavior, and if they increase fitness and survival, can spread through a
population in relatively few generations. The example has been before us all
the time – the evolution of domesticated plants and animals in just a few
thousand years. The authors argue that
civilization over the past 10,000 years has had a profound selective effect on
the gene pool, and is still driving human evolution at an unusually rapid
pace. A fascination
book to read.
Piercing the Fog of War: Recognizing Change
on the Battlefield: Lessons from Military History, 216 BC Through
Today
Brian L. Steed,
2009, ISBN 0760335230
Steed examines in some detail six "aberrational" battles in history, from Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC) to the Russian's debacle in Grozny (1994-95),and examines how each involved one side "thinking out of the box" to defeat the other side. He discusses the importance of initiative and maneuver and isolation and other tactical concepts, but he emphasizes especially the importance of understanding the opponent, of understanding how the opponent sees things and expects to operate, of empathizing to the point of being able to see out of the opponent's eyes and walk in his shoes and understand his thinking, both tactically and strategically.
The Dead Hand
David E. Hoffman, 2009,
ISBN 978-0-385-52437-7
The title refers to the doomsday
machine the Soviet Union built in the 1980s to automatically launch its nuclear
missiles toward the
My Stoke of Insight
Dr. Jill Taylor,
2009, ISBN 978-0-452-29554-4
Dr Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a
stroke in her left hemisphere, yet was able to “watch” the whole process from
onset to recovery with her right hemisphere and eventually write about it. A profound book about the nature of the human
brain, and about how to help stroke victims recover.
The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the
Challenges to American Power
David Sanger, 2009,
ISBN 978-0-307-40792-4
Sanger is the
Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign
Policy
Leslie Gelb, 2009, ISBN
978-0-06-171454-2
Gelb is a past president of the Council of Foreign Relations, a onetime
journalist, and has served as a senior official in both the State and Defense
Departments, so he knows what he is talking about. Somewhat along the lines of Machiavelli’s The
Prince , this book tries to winnow through all the
unrealistic idealism and ideology that pervades our political system and home
in on the common-sense realities of the relations between nations. As he says, “Power rules, still, and there
still are rules on how best to exercise it”
The Devil We Know: Dealing With
the New Iranian Superpower
Robert Baer, 2009,
ISBN 978-0-307-40864-8
Robert Baer spent 21 years in the CIA until he retired in 1997,
and was awarded the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal for his service. Most of
that time was spent in the
The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby, 2009, ISBN 978-1400096381
Susan Jacoby, who also authored Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004) examines the cultural history of the past 40 or so years that has led America to its current anti-intellectualism, in which even supposedly well-educated politicians don't believe in evolution and climate change, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide on these issues. Recent Pew polls show an astounding level of ignorance about science among Americans (one in five still believe the sun revolves around the earth!!), and an almost complete lack of knowledge about history. This is a disturbing book to read -- one fears for the future of the nation. But it is important, nevertheless, to understand the roots of this problem, and the effect it is having on our children.
Engaging the Muslim World
Juan Cole, 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-60754-58
Juan Cole, a professor of
history at the University of Michigan
who has written several other good books on the Middle East, makes a persuasive
case in this book that Western political leaders and Western media have
seriously misread the situation in the Middle East, reducing extremely complex
and subtle relationships to jingoistic one-liners that fit their political
biases. This book is well worth
reading. By the way, Juan Cole’s blog,
“Informed Comment” is also worth following.
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern
Hooman Majd, 2008, ISBN
978-0-385-522344-9
Majfd is the grandson of a well-known Ayatollah and the son of an Iranian
diplomat. He tries in this book to
explain the complexities of the Iranian society and culture. A
fascinating book, writing with elegance and humor and a great deal of insight.
Deadly Decisions: How False Knowledge Sank the Titanic,
Blew Up the Space Shuttle, and Led
Christopher Burns, 2008, ISBN 978-0-385-51705-8
Christopher Burns has examines how
groups of people make erroneous decisions.
Reviewing the sinking of the Titanic, the Three Mile Island nuclear
incident, the USS Vincennes mistaken attack on an Iranian airliner, the loss of
the two space shuttles, the missed signals that the 9/11 attacks were coming,
the collapse of Enron, the incorrect intelligence about Saddam Hussain’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and a
number of other recent disasters, he tries to explain how organizations full of
supposedly very intelligent people so often find themselves led to incorrect
decisions by a combination of human mental habits, organizational expectations,
and an inability to detect or recognize bad data.
The Next 100 Years
George Friedman, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59102-660-0
George Friedman is the founder and
CEO of STRATFOR, a leading private intelligence and forecasting service. In this fascinating and provocative book he
lays out his predictions for the major geopolitical shifts in the next 100
years. He readily admits that predicting details is impossible, but argues that
the overall sweep of history can be forecast with fair confidence from
fundamental demographics, geopolitical factors, and historically stable
cultural biases, prejudices, hatreds and affinities. And he proceeds to use these to lay out a
probable future for the next 100 years. Well worth reading and pondering.
The
Eurene Jarecki, 2008, ISBN 13: 987-1-4165-4456-1
Jarecki
is the creator of the excellent 2005 documentary Why We Fight. President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address
warned us of the growing danger that the “military-industrial complex”
(originally the “military-industrial-congressional complex” in early drafts of
his speech) would wield undo influence on American policy. In this book Jarecki argues that the excesses of the Bush-Chaney
administration were not an anomaly, but rather the natural culmination of a
process that started in George Washington’s time, and has accelerated sharply
beginning with the Roosevelt and Truman administrations - a process of a
growing coalition between the military services (for whom new weapons programs
offer career advancement), defense contractors (who want the business) and
Congressional representatives (who want the jobs in their districts, and the
lucrative defense company positions when they leave Congress). This book will
make you think.
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59420-192-9
Niall Ferguson, author of several
other books in this list, has taken his title from Jacob Bronowski’s
wonderful 1973 BBC TV series The Ascent
of
The Age of the Warrior
Robert Fisk, 2008, ISBN 13:978-1-56858-403-4
Robert Fisk is a well-known foreign
correspondent who lives in
Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of
National Security Disaster
Richard Clarke, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-147462-0
Richard Clark worked for thirty years
in the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the National Security Council,
serving under three presidents. He has seen the transformation of the
military from the inside, from the post-Vietnam reactions to the Iraqi
invasions. He is dismayed, even
outraged, at what the civilian leadership has done to the military, and at the
failure of some senior military leaders to speak up and oppose the naïve and
misguided directions of civilian leaders, and he has detailed his arguments in
this book. It will make your blood boil, and it should.
Zbigniew Brzezinski –
Brent Scowcroft: American and the World
moderated by David Ignatius, 2008, ISBN 978-0-465-01501-6
Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter’s National Security Advisor; Brent Scowcroft
was the National Security Advisor to Gerald Ford and then the elder President
Bush. Both are considered among the brightest minds in
The Post-America World
Fareed Zakaria, 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-06235-9
As in his previous book The Future of Freedom (see 2003), Zakaria gives a brilliant analysis of a difficult and
complex subject,
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
Robert Kagan, 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-26923-2
Kagan is an insightful and erudite historian, nominally right-wing in his
views but in fact actually more a pragmatist than an ideologue. In this short
little book he assesses today’s world in light of Francis Fukuyama’s claim 15 years ago in The End of History and the Last
Man that we are entering a post-modern
age when liberal democracy would finally sweep through most of the world, and
concludes “I don’t think so….”. After
short but very good summaries of how the world looks to each of the major
powers in today’s world – mainly
Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent
Fred Burton, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4000-6569-1
In places this book reads like a James Bond novel, but in fact I am
told by acquiesces who should know that it is a fairly accurate look and feel
of the inside world of counterterrorism.
And it will not make you sleep easy at night. In fact, there are dark,
unpleasant things going on in the world, as 9/11 showed us. Well worth reading.
The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby, 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1
The Age of American Unreason
is not an easy book to read. It jumps a bit from topic to topic, and at times
the author's sarcasm wears a bit. Nonetheless, it is well worth reading,
because her arguments are persuasive and important to
Death by Black Hole:
And Other Cosmic Quandaries
Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2007, ISBN 978-0393062243
This is a wonderful, witty, highly readable collection of essays
astrophysicist Neal Tyson has written for Natural History,
the
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a
Alan Greenspan, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59420-131-8
Alan Greenspan, recently retired
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has written a wonderful book - part
autobiography, part academic analysis of the world's economy based on his
decades of experience and study of detailed economic data, and yet very
readable. The end section, in which he discusses the likely future of the world
and American economy, is brilliant, but it rests on the detailed analyses
presented throughout the remainder of the book. He makes a strong and
persuasive case for allowing free markets to operate with a minimum of
government regulation, despite the constant political pressure for popularist politicians to interfere in the name of
"saving jobs" (translation - "gaining votes"), and he shows
from masses of worldwide data that excessive government regulation and central
planning is always counterproductive in the end.
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape
the Twenty-First Century
Ralph Peters, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8117-0274-4
Ralph Peters, a retired army lieutenant-colonel and author thus far of
some 22 books and innumerable articles (see for example Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph, 1999, below),
discusses in detail all the ways today’s politicians misunderstand the nature
of war, with uniformly disastrous results. War, he argues, ought not to be
entered into except as a last resort, and then only with overwhelming force and
a fierce determination to win. He has nothing but contempt for those naïve
politicians, most with no military experience at all, who are seduced by
promises of “surgical strikes” and “limited war”, and who as a result cause far
more carnage and loss of life than is necessary. He finds it ludicrous that in
order to be “politically correct” military training avoids discussion of the
nature and motivations of religiously-based (ie –
Islamic) opponents, even though those are exactly who we are now fighting, and
who we will probably be fighting in the future. Worth
reading.
Cool It: The Skeptical
Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming
Bjorn Lomborg, 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26692-7
Bjorg Lomborg’s two previous books, Global Crises, Global Solutions (see
2004) and The
Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (see
2001) have made the point that supporters for an issue have a tendency to
exaggerate their issue into a crisis in order to draw attention to it and gain
support and leverage, but that the public perception built on the exaggerated
claims, hyped by the press, frequently lead to bad or ineffective policy. In
this book he takes on the “Global Climate Crisis”, arguing that although global
warming is certainly real, it is nowhere near the crisis that supporters claim
for it, and that a clear-headed look at the data would suggest that there are
lots of other issues we could spend money on that would have more drastic and
more immediate effects in terms of saving lives and improving the quality of
life for people around the world. It’s
not that he thinks global warming isn’t a problem; it’s that he thinks the
billions we might spend to make a small dent in the CO2 level in 50 years could
make a huge difference to billions of people tomorrow in better health, better
nutrition, education, and the like, and that we ought to be more thoughtful in
ordering our priorities and not get stampeded by exaggerated claims of
crisis. As in his previous books, his
arguments are solidly backed by facts from reputable sources, and deserve
serious consideration.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
Jeffrey Toobin, 2007, ISBN 978-0-385-51640-2
Toobin, a
staff writer for the New Yorker and
CNN senior legal analyst, interviewed not only the justices themselves, but
also some seventy five of their law clerks to build a comprehensive picture of
the Supreme Court, how it operates, the issues it deals with, and the
personalities of the justices themselves. The entire decades-long conservative
battle to “capture” the court and turn it to the conservative agenda (first and
foremost, to overturn Roe vs Wade) is documented in detail, along with a
brilliant and fascinating analysis of why, despite all the supposedly
conservative appointment to the court, Roe
vs Wade has yet to be overturned. Also included
is a detailed description of the Court’s participation in the disputed Bush vs Gore election.
This might seem like an arcane subject, but once I started it, I
couldn’t put this book down.
How Doctors Think
Jerome Groopman, M.D., 2007, ISBN 13:978-0-618-61003-7
Dr. Groopman
teaches at
The Wisdom of History (Audio lectures)
Prof. J. Rufus Fears, 2007, The Teaching Company, course 4361
Professor Fears, who also gave the brilliant lecture series "A History of Freedom", (see 2001 below), explores Santayana's dictum that "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it", arguing that the catastrophes of the present day, such as the two world wars of the 20th century, are simply repetitions of similar historical catastrophes that could have been avoided had the leaders of the day understood the lessons of history. This lecture series questions some of our basic American beliefs (or myths), and proposes some fundamental lessons that history teaches those who will bother to study it.. Very good.
The Only Three Questions that Count: Investing By Knowing
What Others Don't Know
Ken Fisher, 2007, ISBN 10:0-470-07499-X
Fisher, a highly successful manager of his own investment fund, argues that much of what "every investor knows" simply isn't true, and seeing through the investment myths gives one an advantage in the market. He proceeds to examine some of the "common knowledge" of investors, and show that they are not supported by the data. The importance of this book comes from his three questions: (1) What do I believe that is actually false? (2) What can I fathom that others find unfathomable? and (3)What the heck is my brain doing to mislead and misguide me now? These apply as well to life as to investing, and his use of these three questions in exploring investing myths is instructive.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2
Taleb was the author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life (see below 2001), which exposed how poorly most of us understand uncertainty. The Black Swan expands on this theme, and in particular on the huge impact that unpredicted and unpredictable events have on the course of events. Talib argues that we (including the highly paid experts) know far less about the world than we think we do; that we fool ourselves with narrow models that don't allow for the inevitable unexpected and improbable perturbations. He also offers some interesting strategies for minimizing exposure to the bad effects and maximizing the probabilities of capitalizing on the good effects of unexpected events. This is a wonderful book that needs to be reread a number of times to extract all the brilliance.
The Silence of the
Stefan Halper & Jonathan Clarke, 2007, ISBN 10: 0-465-01141-1
Halper is
a Senior Fellow at
Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian
Chet Raymo, 2006, ISBN 0-8027-1494-3
It is a rare art to be able to
weave together the history of science, the history of the world, and the life
histories of the scientists involved and make it all fascinating. In this
little book Chet Raymo does exactly that, and the
result is wonderful. It will take only
an afternoon to read it, and you will be very glad you did.
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost
Our Future - and What It Will Take To Win it Back
Jeff Faux, 2006, ISBN 10: 0-471-69761-3
Faux argues that global affairs are controlled by a relatively small group of largely American corporate and government elite, of both political parties, all of whom are either wealthy or powerful (or both), whose primary objective is to preserve their wealth and power in the short term, with little regard either for the long term implications or for the consequences of their policies on the rest of the population. He has harsh things to say, for example, about NAFTA and about our balance of payments problems, arguing that in the long run our elites have adopted policies that will be very painful indeed to the rest of us (though the rich will probably manage to avoid most of the consequences themselves.) His arguments are well documented, and worth considering.
The Foreign Policy Dis-connect:
What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get
Benjamin Page & Marshall Boulton, 2006, ISBN 10:0-226-64462-6
Based on a series of surveys taken
between 1974 and 1988 by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations, this book
makes two points: (1) despite some relatively minor party, regional and
religious variations, the American public has a remarkably consistent view of
what they want in American foreign policy, and (2) they differ significantly
from the views of the ruling elites of the past few decades, irrespective of
political party. For example, the
Dangerous Nation:
Robert Kagen, 2006, ISBN 0-375-41105-4
Kagen is
the author of
This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel Levitin, 2006, ISBN 978-0-452-28852-2
A wonderfully readable book that explores the amazing neuroscience behind our experience of music. As usual, things in nature are endlessly more subtle and complex than we think they are at first glance. Lots of fun to read.
Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, 2006, ISBN 13:978-0-80509-7721-6
Based largely on some 91,000
interviews worldwide between 2002 and 2005 by the
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape The Future
Vali Nasr, 2006, ISBN 13:978-0-393-06211-3
Nasr is a professor of Middle East
and South Asia politics at the
The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself
This book takes its title from an astute quotation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Harrison, author of Culture Matters (see 2000 below), argues with considerable data that cultural traits are a major factor in whether or not a society prospers in the modern world. And we can certainly see dramatic examples all over the globe these days. He then makes the liberal case for using the political process to change dysfunctional cultures in ways which improve their prospects in the world. A good book.
Mark Steyn , 2006, ISBN 0895260786
Mark Steyn
has regular columns in such publications as the London Telegraph and the
Atlantic Monthly. This is his first full-length book. Although his tone
is jocular and witty, his message is deadly serious. Much of the first world
(Europe,
Letter to a Christian Nation
Sam Harris, 2006, ISBN 0307265773
Sam Harris’s previous book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (see 2005 below), argued the case against religious belief in more measured, philosophical tones. In this little book Harris argues that our own nation’s religious beliefs are making us a real and present danger to the world, probably even more of a danger than the irrational beliefs of Islamic terrorists. Those who are unwilling to question their beliefs and expose them to critical analysis of course won’t read it. But the rest of us ought to pay attention, if only for the long-term safety of our own offspring.
The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It and How to Get it Back
Andrew Sullivan, 2006, ISBN 0060188774
Andrew Sullivan, as editor of the
Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
Richard Posner, 2006, ISBN 13: 978-0-19-530427-5
Posner is a Federal Appeals Court
judge, lecturer at the
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery
David Warsh, 2006, ISBN 978-0-393-05996-0
A wonderful and quite readable book about the search in Economics for a means to model and explain the effects of the growth of knowledge, and the role that knowledge plays in explaining why some nations are progressing economically so much faster than others. Along the way it also gives a good picture of how academic theories evolve amid the tensions and rivalries of different schools and departments.
The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International
Order Create the Politics of Empire
Harold James , 2006, ISBN 0691122210
Harold James is Professor of
History and International Affairs at
American Theocracy : The Peril
and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury
Kevin Phillips, 2006, ISBN 067003486X
Kevin Phillips, nominally a Republican political strategist, argues that “a reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money….now constitute the three major perils to the United States in the twenty-first century”. Hard to argue with that!
Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Daniel C. Dennett , 2005, ISBN 067003472X
Danial Dennet is a professor of philosophy and the director of the
Center for Cognitive Studies at
Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against
Walid Phares , 2005, ISBN 1-4039-7074-2
Phares,
who is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an
MSBBC/NBC correspondent, argues that most academics who interpret the
The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Revised Edition)
Richard Heinberg, 2005, ISBN 0-86571-529-7
Heinberg
is on the faculty if the New College of California in
Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare
Colin S. Gray, 2005, ISBN 0-29784-627-2
Colin Gray is Professor of
International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of
1491: New Revelations of the
Charles Mann, 2005, ISBN 1-4000-4006-X
Like the (now discredited) myth that chimpanzees are peaceful creatures, environmental activists have long believed that Native American tribes were small, primitive, and lived lightly on the land in ways we ought to emulate. Mann summaries the recent research that challenges all these views, painting instead a picture of an American population (before European diseases wiped out most native Americans) perhaps larger than Europe’s in 1491, of technological advances in some areas beyond those of the Europe of 1491, and of very substantial human modification of the landscape and ecology. Not only a good book, but yet another reminder that all knowledge is tentative, and subject to revision in the light on new data.
The
Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Andrew Brown, 2005, ISBN 0745633692
Tzvetan Todorov is Director of Research at the CNRS (
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven Levitt, 2005, ISBN 0-06-073132-X
Yet another author who demonstrates that the data often don’t support what we would like to believe. Levitt is an unusually bright guy who is adept at teasing out from the data underlying causes and effects. His studies of why the nationwide crime rate has dropped so precipitously, whether the quality of schools really make a difference in how kids do in life, and whether sumo wrestlers and school teachers cheat are all fascinating and fun to read. A great book.
God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It
Jim Wallis, 2005, ISBN 0-06-055828-8
Religion, generally Christian, has been entwined within American history and American politics since this nation was born. We have been through many phases of emphasizing religion, and a few recent phases of denying altogether the place of religion in our national life. Wallis argues that God does have a place in our national life, but that neither the fundamentalists on the political Right nor the secularists on the political Left have a viable view of what that place should be. An important book to read for those on both sides of the current national debate.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Sam Harris, 2005, ISBN 0-393-32765-5
In polite society it is considered
impolite to discuss religion, and downright rude to subject someone else’s
religion to rigorous intellectual inquiry. Harris argues that when millions are
slaughtered each year and billions (the majority women and children) are
systematically oppressed, exploited, abused, denigrated, mistreated, and even
murdered as a result of various religious beliefs, it is highly immoral not to
subject these beliefs to critical rational examination. Moreover, when
fundamentalist believers now have the power to kill hundreds of millions in the
name of their faith (think of a nuclear exchange between
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, 2004, ISBN 1-59420-008-4
Buruma
and Margalit are professors at
America’s Secret War: Inside the
Hidden Worldwide Struggle between America and its Enemies
George Friedman, 2004, ISBN 0-385-51245-7
The American political system isn’t
very good at understanding “the big picture” in world events,
and the media even less so. George Friedman, the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a
leading private intelligence and forecasting service, has written a brilliant
discussion of our “terrorist” enemies and their tactics and goals, and a
brilliant dissection of the problems with our political and intelligence
systems which make them less than ready to deal with these sorts of
threats. Well worth reading.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
Susan Jacoby, 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7776-6
In this age when right wing
religious fundamentalism seems to be a growing force in
Against All Enemies: Inside
Richard A. Clarke, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-6024-4
Richard Clarke held high-level
position in defense and intelligence from the presidency of Ronald Regan
through the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the second Bush, so he saw from
the inside most of the decisions that lead up to 9/11, and many of the critical
decisions made after 9/11. As he makes plain
in the introduction, this is his first-person eyewitness account of the events
– others may have seen things differently. Still, the story he tells is
enlightening, revealing both the smart things the government did, and the
really dumb things that bureaucratic inertia and turf fights produced. Well worth reading.
War, Terror, Peace and War:
Walter Russell Mead, 2004, ISBN 1-4000-7703-6
Mead is a senior fellow on the Council for Foreign Affairs, and author of several other respected books, some with a slight liberal slant. In this small book he offers a relatively non-partisan perspective on the changing balance of power between four major political views of the American public (economic nationalists, idealistic internationalists, isolationists, and popularist nationalists) and the political elites, and the resulting shifts on the American approach to foreign policy. He also explores the ongoing shift from what he calls Fordism to Millennium Capitalism and the impact that is having on foreign policy. A good, thoughtful book with some new perspectives.
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
Niall Ferguson, 2004, ISBN 1-59420-013-0
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond, 2004, ISBN 0670033375
As in his previous book, Guns Germs and Steel (see 1997 below), Jared builds from a central question. In this case the question is “what makes some societies succeed for thousands of years, and others collapse?” There is no single answer, of course, but Diamond homes in on five basic causes which, alone or in combination, seem to be the key drivers for social collapse. Very good.
Don’t think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
George Lakoff, 2004, ISBN 1-931498-71-7
This slim little volume is an action-oriented condensation of Lakoff’s Moral Politics (see below, 2002), which focuses on the role of metaphors and cognitive frames in political debate. Lakoff’s view is that conservatives have understood cognitive frames and made good use of them, while liberals (aka “progressives”) have not. As a result, conservatives control the language and content of current political debate, which is why liberals are out of power. Conservatives have learned, for example, to reframe “tax cuts” as “tax relief”, thus bringing into the debate all the unconscious frame references that go with “relief” (from pain, from oppression, etc.). If liberals are to reclaim power and restore the traditional conservative-liberal political balance, they need to learn how to reframe their own essential values in ways which resonate with the electorate’s existing frames and metaphors. A very good book by a brilliant linguist.
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Richard Dawkins, 2004, ISBN 0-618-00583-8
Evolution by natural selection, with the gene as a major player, is by now pretty well accepted, except for a minority who are emotionally committed to a literal interpretation of their sacred texts. But, as is almost always the case in nature, the whole story is much more subtle and wonderfully complex that it first appears. In this book Dawkins unravels some of these subtleties and complexities in a well written and interesting “Canterbury Tale” of evolution’s progress, using the tale of this species or that to explain some of the finer points of evolution’s machinery, some of the innovative techniques that have been developed for untangling the evolutionary process, and some of the ways we can easily misinterpret or misunderstand what is actually happening.
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic
Chalmers Johnson, 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7797-9
Johnson’s thesis is that over the past half dozen administrations of both parties, the shaping of American foreign policy has increasingly moved into the hands of the military and unelected elites, and out of Congressional oversight, and as a result we are in danger of losing our republic. Although Johnson’s far-left ideology forces him to assume the worst possible motives for all American actions, he nevertheless makes an arresting case, buttressed with considerable research, and it’s worth considering his claims seriously.
Where the Right went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency
Patrick Buchanan, 2004, ISBN 0-312-34115-6
Buchanan, nominally a conservative, is the odd man out in American politics: opposed to most of the positions of both the current political left-wing and the neoconservative right-wing. Nevertheless, he lays out some compelling arguments in this book that ought to be thought about seriously. His main contention is that the policies of the past 50 years are leading America into a decline not unlike that of the British Empire in the last century, and driven by many of the same mistakes.
The Story of Human Language (Audio lectures)
Prof. John McWhorter, 2005, The Teaching Company, course 1600
McWhorter, now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has also authored a number of good books and articles on linguistics and on black culture (see for example Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America, under 2001 below). This 36 lecture series is easy to listen to and wonderfully informative for those of us who weren’t quite sure what the field of linguistics really encompasses. It is also instructive in the way it displays the enormous range and variability of human language structures – yet another example that helps to lift us out of our parochial view of the world.
The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West
Gilles Kepel, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01575-4
A wonderfully thorough, and quite readable summary of the intricate twists and turns in American foreign policy towards the Middle East, the Arab world and the many Islamic jihad movements from Roosevelt’s 1945 meeting with king Saud of Saudi Arabia to the present, with particular attention to the origins and influence on foreign policy of the American neoconservative movement in recent years.
The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Barnett, 2004, ISBN 0-399-15175-3
Barnett is a senior member of the
Pentagon’s pool of strategic researchers, and a professor at the
Global Crises, Global Solutions
Bjorn Lomborg (Ed) 2004, ISBN 10-521-60614-4
See Lomborg’s previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001). This volume documents the results of the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of the world’s leadings economists and specialists attempted to prioritize the critical issues currently facing the world, and then address the top 10 items on their list, documenting the current state of knowledge and proposing and critiquing possible solutions. The emphasis is on finding cost-effective solutions, since too often radical solutions are proposed that sound good, but are not economically sound and hence not politically viable. Very good.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
By “Anonymous”, 2004, ISBN 1574888498
This is the second book by this author (see below in 2003 for the first book), and it extends the content of the first book with a brilliant and deeply troubling topical analysis of our policies. According to the author we are in for a very long and very bloody confrontation, not the quick and sanitary conventional war envisioned by our political and military leaders, and our current very naïve policies are not helping the situation. Nor does the nation or its political leaders in either party seem to understand the true nature of the problem or be ready to pay the bloody price which the author assures us we will have to pay – whether we like it or not – to survive this war intact.
Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History
Lee Harris, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-5749-9
Harris’s book is about forgetting – how we in our modern first-world comforts have forgotten that through most of history, and still today in many parts of the world, most people never knew when their crops would be plundered and their children sold into slavery by the next passing tyrant or pack of brigands – “we have forgotten the face of the enemy”. This book is about how a liberal, progressive civilization deals with ruthless enemies who don’t play by the same rules. Very relevant to today’s issues.
Military Power : Explaining
Victory and Defeat in Modern
Stephen Biddle, 2004, ISBN 0691116458
Biddle is one of the most
outstanding current defense analysts in the
The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
Thomas X. Hammes, 2004, ISBN 0-7603-2059-4
Hammes, a
full Marine colonel still on active duty, has spent much of his career training
(
The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know
about America’s Economic Future
Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, 2004, ISBN 0—262-11286-8
Explores in great detail the changing American demographics, and the implications these changes have for our economic future, including especially the effects it has on such large government programs as social security and Medicare.
Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam
& the Future of
by Anonymous, 2003, ISBN 1574885537
This book, by “Anonymous”, an active senior US intelligence analyst with extensive Middle Eastern experience (the Washington press quickly identified “anonymous” as Michael Scheuer of the CIA), is of profound importance in the current debate over how best to deal with Islamic terrorism. Fundamentally the author thinks we Americans are badly mistaken to think of Osama and his followers as “terrorists”, rather than recognizing that they are exceedingly intelligent, well organized and patient warriors battling us from a profound sense of religious duty to protect their religion, a sense which is widely shared and applauded throughout the Islamic world. This first book traces in some detail all that is known about Osama’s evolution into our implacable enemy, and into the inspiration for much of the Islamic world.
Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of
the 21st Century
William Bonner and Addison Wiggin, 2003, ISBN 0-471-44973-3
Bonner is a contrarian investment advisor, and this book argues that structural factors will soon bring an end to the long American prosperity. Interesting enough for its main thrust, what really makes this book a gem are the many philosophical byways Bonner takes in exploring why crowds do what they do, and how groupthink creates realities.
The Decline of American Power: The
Immanuel Wallerstein 2003, ISBN 1565847997
Wallerstein
argues that despite
Theater of War: In Which the Republic Becomes an Empire
Lewis Lapham, 2003, ISBN
1-56584-847-0
Lapham’s
thesis is that most of
Younger Next year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond
Chris Crowley & Henry Lodge, MD. 2003, ISBN 0-7611-3423-9
We used to think growing into doddering, drooling old men and women was “natural” and unavoidable. However biochemical research over the past decade has established that most aging effects are not natural, and are to a large extent avoidable, so that while we may still have a natural limit to our lifespans, barring accidents or comparatively rare diseases we can live almost all of that lifespan as fit and active individuals. This is a very practical and readable book about how to achieve that lifestyle, based on good science and sound advice.
Ripples of
Victor Davis Hanson, 2003, ISBN 0-385-50400-0
Hanson, a prolific and brilliant writer (see as well below Carnage and Culture, 2001, and An Autumn of War, 2002), analyzes the profound effects some key past battles have had on the evolution of our ways of life and of thought. In some ways, this is a continuation of the analysis theme he started in Carnage and Culture.
A Declaration of Interdependence: Why
Will Hutton, 2003, ISBN 0393057259 (also
printed in
A very cogent and well-reasoned appeal by a somewhat left-of-center British journalist, sometime editor in chief of The Observer, who argues for a more European view of the world, with more focus on the long-term social contracts and less on short term shareholder value so important in America. Quite good, and especially important as it gives a somewhat different view of the world than we get from the American press and writers.
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
There is substantial evidence that
much of the rest of the world is increasingly distrustful of
Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill
Jessica Stern, 2003, ISBN 0-06-050532
Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on terrorism. In her search to understand the roots of terrorism, she has interviewed terrorists – domestic and foreign – in their homes, in prison, and in their hiding places. What emerges is a complex picture of the motives that drive terrorists, and the social forces that keep terrorist organizations together. Her conclusions at the end about how we must confront the terrorist threat are of particular interest.
Global Disorder: How to Avoid a Fourth World War
Robert Harvey, 2003, ISBN 1-84119-838-2
This is an update of
Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
Al Franken, 2003, ISBN 0-525-94764-7
Although this is not a heavyweight book, but rather a humorous look at the far right by someone who is openly liberal, it nevertheless serves an important purpose. While Goldberg’s book Bias (see 2002 below) argues that the media biases the news (and it does, but not necessarily politically), Franken argues, and documents, that some of the right-wing idols tell outright lies, and get away with it! No doubt there are liberal liars in the media as well. The real point is to alert us once again that the media is not a wholly trustworthy source of information, and on important issues we need to go back to original sources!
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
Fareed Zakaria, 2003, ISBN 0393047644
There is a durable American myth
that giving people the right to vote for their leaders automatically brings a
desirable, democratic state. Fareed argues that
in the absence of a liberal tradition in a culture -- a rule of law, separation
of powers, and effective protection of individual rights, democratic elections
are as likely as not to install autocratic leaders or simply legitimize
theocracies, kleptocracies or dictatorships, as has
happened often in recent years. In fact, Fareed
argues that democracy does not always work, and that even where it does work it
requires strong limits to work effectively, and he explores the problems that
have come from democratic popularization in the
20:21 Vision: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-first Century
Bill Emmott, 2003, ISBN 0-374-27965-9
Bill Emmott is Editor in Chief of The Economist. In this book, arguing from past history, he posits that the two primary questions that will determine how the world goes in the Twenty-first century will be (1) will America continue to lead the world and guarantee the peace, and (2) will capitalism continue to spread, or be challenged by a new alternative economic order. He examines both of these questions in detail, exploring factors that might influence the answers to these key questions. A fascinating analysis of the political and economic history of the Twentieth century.
Of Paradise and Power:
Robert Kagan, 2003, ISBN 1-4000-4093-0
This brilliant and cogent little
book is an expansion of Kagan’s article “Power and
Weakness” in the June/July 2002 issue of Policy Review – an article that
caused a good bit of controversy in the diplomatic world. In it he explores the
differing world views of
Why Things Break: Understanding the World by the way it Comes Apart
Mark Eberhart, 2003, ISBN 1-40000-4883-4
The study of fractures in materials sounds like a fairly esoteric field, yet Eberhart, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, has written an engaging little book about his personal journey from childhood to the present trying to understand why some things break under stress and others just bend. Along the way the reader will also learn all sorts of interesting little facts, and get some insight into how science and the scientific community really works. A good read.
Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservative Think
George Lakoff, 2002, ISBN 0226467716
Lakoff, a professor of Linguistics at UC, Berkeley, approaches the question of the chasm between liberals and conservatives by assuming that each side is wholly consistent within its own world view. He then attempts to develop a cognitive model that explains the differences in the two world views. He argues that these are more than just partisan differences – they are deeply rooted in differences in family life. Useful not only for its main argument, but also for once again showing that culture can shape two people’s fundamental world views in such diverse ways that when they look at exactly the same event or situation, they actually perceive different things.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
Kevin Phillips, 2002, ISBN 0-7679-0534-2
A very detailed,
scholastic, and non-partisan historical review of wealth in
Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.
Stephen Webb, 2002, ISBN 0-387-95501-1
With about 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, each containing about 100 billion stars, it seems almost inconceivable that there are not other intelligent species in the universe. But to date we have detected no evidence of them, and that is the Fermi Paradox that has engendered decades of speculation. Webb, a physicist, has assembled fifty of the more interesting speculations for discussion. The result is a fascination book ranging widely over astronomy and cosmology, mathematics and statistics, the nature of civilizations, the nature of planetary formation and evolutionary processes, and many more topics. Truly a mind-stretching book.
An Autumn of War: What
Victor Davis Hanson, 2002, ISBN 1-40003-113-3
A series of essays and articles written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which Hanson brings his profound classical scholarship and historical perspective to the unfolding events. Americans in general see events in the moment and are largely blind - even profoundly ignorant – of the historical context within which they are occurring. Hanson tries to remedy this a bit.
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
Niall Ferguson, 2002, ISBN 0-465-02328-2
Although it offends American
sensibilities to say so, the truth is that the
Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World
Ralph Peters, 2004, ISBN 0-8117-0024-0
Ralph Peters is also the author of
“Fighting for the Future” (1999 – see below). In this book, a collection
of his recent articles, he examines
What Does a Martian Look Like: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life
Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 2002, ISBN 0-471-26889-5
Most respected speculations about extraterrestrial life are made by astrobiologists, and that name, according to Stewart and Cohen, summarizes the major deficiency in their views - they are extrapolating from our astronomy and our biology. Hence they come to the conclusion that life, as we know it, can only survive under rare circumstances. Stewart and Cohen argue that view is far too narrow, and that life of some sort, and even intelligent life, is probably far more adaptable and varied than our small earthbound samples. Full of their usual wit, as well as penetrating analysis, this book greatly broadens the field of xenoscience (their own choice for a better word to describe the field as it should be studied).
The High Cost of Peace: How
Yossef Bodansky, 2002, ISBN 0-761-535799
Bodansky
is the Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare. In addition, he is the Director of Research at the International
Strategic Studies Association and a senior editor for the Defense and Foreign
Affairs group of publications. In Michael Chrichton’s
novel Rising Sun there is a wonderful scene early in the book,
faithfully portrayed in the movie as well, when the audience suddenly realizes
that things are not as nearly simple as they appear, and that in fact there are
layers and layers of complexity and hidden agendas to the Japanese characters
that are invisible to the naïve American. Bodansky’s analysis of the
Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11
Thomas L. Friedman , 2002, ISBN 0374190666
Friedman, who is the foreign
affairs columnist for The New York Times, won his third Pulitzer prize with this book. It is important for two
reasons. First, it counters much of the politically correct fuzzy
thinking that has gone on since 9/11 about how it was somehow
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World
Margaret Thatcher, 2002, ISBN 0-06-019973-3
Onetime Prime Minister of Britain,
Margaret Thatcher provides her perspective on the world, and on the roles
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 2002, ISBN 009-1882737
This book is a second volume follow-on to The Science of Discworld, in which a delightful, humorous and insightful Terry Prachett science-fantasy story is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with Stewart and Cohen’s scientific and philosophical observations on the same subjects. Whereas the first book dealt with the physical processes by which the cosmos and our own home planet evolved, this second book deals with the evolution of human thought. Stewart (a mathematician) and Cohen (a reproductive biologist) offer an extraordinary range of perceptive ideas and hypothesis (See also their books below: Figments of Reality, 1995, The Collapse of Chaos, 1994, and What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, 2002)
The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
David Pryce-Jones, 2002, ISBN 0-06-106047-0
The author argues convincingly that the apparently pathological activities of the Arab world are driven neither by the religion of Islam nor by nationalism, even though Arab leaders appeal to both in their media statements. Instead, he argues that all Arab relationships are in fact fundamentally driven by a family or community “shame and honor” response, which drives each individual to such actions as will elevate the “honor” of his group at the expense of everyone else. These arguments bear remarkable similarity to the “amoral familism” described by Edward Banefield in the 50's (see his book below under 1958). He also argues that we will never know how to deal with Arab problems as long as we continue to see them through romanticized and idealized “Eurocentric” viewpoints.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell, 2002, ISBN 0-3163-46624
A fascinating discussion of why fads get started, how epidemics work, and why some ideas or products just suddenly take off while others, apparently equally appealing, don’t. Discusses the importance of “connectors”, mavens, and “stickiness” in this process.
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology
James R. Chiles, 2002, ISBN 0-06-662081-3
Human (as opposed to natural)
disasters have a pattern - they tend to come from a string of small failures
that are not noticed or at least not correctly interpreted until matters have
gotten beyond recovery. From the sinking of the oil
Does
Henry Kissinger, 2001, ISBN 0-648-85567-4
Kissinger approaches a wide ranging review of the current world state with a great deal of attention to the historical, social, economic and cultural contexts within which today’s foreign policy issues are embedded. He is a brilliant scholar and an engaging writer, with both a strong academic background and significant practical experience in the field. Whether one agrees with his views or not, the underlying message is clear - most foreign policy issues are nowhere near as simple as passionate but uninformed activists think they are. Kissinger’s other books about his time in office, such as The White House Years, Years of Upheaval and Years of Renewal are also worth reading for both the sense of how diplomacy really works, and for his keen insights into the character and culture of the world’s leaders and their peoples.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
Victor Davis Hanson, 2001, ISBN 0-385-72038-6
Hanson, a military and classical
historian of some note, argues that western powers rose to dominance largely
because they learned to wage war in a more disciplined manner than their
opponents. He analyzes nine key battles, from the battle of
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2001, ISBN 1587990717
Humans don’t understand probability very well, as the markets, the media, and many other facets of our world and lives prove. Nassim points out some of the fallacies we live with in a very readable and entertaining manner. This book will interest and is accessible to both the trained statistician and mathematician and the ordinary untrained lay person. But some of the implications are quite profound, both for investment strategy and for life in general.
A History of Freedom (Audio lectures)
Prof. J. Rufus Fears, 2001, The Teaching Company, course 480
Freedom, which we largely take for
granted in our society, is actually a complex process which few societies in
history have mastered. In a series of 36 brilliant lectures, Professor Fears
traces the development of the ideas of individual and social freedom from its
birth in
Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom is (almost Always) Wrong
Robert J. Samuelson, 2001, ISBN 0-8129-9164-8
We (the general public) believe many things which just aren’t supported by the facts, even though we would like to believe them because they support our current belief set. Samuelson’s columns over the years have found this a fruitful field. This is a collection of some of his most pointed columns.
Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
Bernard Goldberg, 2001, ISBN 0-895-26190-1
That the media impress on the news their own liberal or conservative agendas and biases is hardly surprising - they do exactly what the rest of us do. What is surprising and instructive, however, are the more subtle and even unconscious manipulations made in the interests of making the news “more interesting” or “more palatable” or “more saleable” to the listening/viewing/reading public in the ongoing battle to win market share.
The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the
Bjørn Lomborg, 2001, ISBN 0-895-26190-1
Lomborg,
a former member of Greenpeace and associate professor of statistics in the
Department of Political Science at the
Special
Walter Russell Mead, 2001, ISBN 0-375-41230-1
Mead’s central argument in this
book, well supported by his historical review, is that despite the conventional
wisdom that America didn’t even have a foreign policy until World War II, and has
been largely inept ever since, actually America has had an active foreign
policy since its inception, and in general our foreign policy has been far
wiser and far more effective that most other nations, from following our
“Manifest Destiny” to sweep across the continent and unite the whole land into
one nation (think how much less powerful we would be if what is now America
were still divided up into separate Spanish and French and English and American
nations) to our maneuvering in World War II that left us a superpower. As Mead argues,
The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics
John J. Mearsheimer, 2001, ISBN 978-0393323962
In foreign
affairs, there are liberals and realists. Liberals view foreign affairs from an
optimistic ideology that believes that reasonable people can always negotiate
successfully, and that there is a better world ahead with world peace. Realists
have a darker view that human nature hasn't changed appreciably in the past
several thousand years, and so we need to deal with the world the way it really
is, not the way we wish it were. John Mearsheimer is
a foreign affairs realist (as are Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinsk), and makes a
very good case for this position in his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics. As he points out, the evidence of history is heavily on the side of
realists and against the liberals. This is quite a readable book, but an
important one.
Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black
John McWhorter, 2001, ISBN 0060935936
McWhorter, an African-American himself
and a professor of linguistics at
Hubbert’s Peak:The Impending World Oil Shortage
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, 2001, ISBN 0-691-09086-6
Geophysicist M. King Hubbert used analysis in 1956 to predict that
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization
Thomas L. Friedman, 2001, ISBN 0-374-185522
There is a good deal of debate about whether the driving force, the single “big idea” at the root of today’s global trends, is Huntingdon’s “clash of civilizations”, the power realignment between Europe and America after the Cold War, or some other factor. Friedman makes the case for globalization as today’s most significant factor. In particular, he argues that the “electronic herd”, those trillions of dollars of investment capital that now move around the world electronically at the click of a mouse button, are a powerful force in reshaping national economic and political systems, since they reward with cheap investment capital open, honest, rationally-run societies, while inefficiency, dishonesty and non-rational government policies cause this same capital to flee nations in hours.
Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions
Peter D. Ward, 2000, ISBN 0-231-11862-7
This is an update and expansion of Ward’s 1994 book The End of Evolution: On Mass Extinctions and the Preservation of Biodiversity. Ward makes a gripping tale of the research that has uncovered a series of at least 15 mass extinctions in earths past, including at least three that destroyed most existing species. He argues that we are in the midst of yet another mass extinction that started a few thousand years ago as humans spread over the earth, and indeed that we humans are the cause of this one.
The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind
F. David Peat, 2000, ISBN 0-7382-0205-3
Peat, a physicist with an extraordinary range of interests across science, the arts, philosophy and psychology, explores the essential nature of creativity in the context of some of the most fundamental questions of physics and the nature of the world. A delightful book worth picking up and rereading every few years.
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present
Jacques Barzun, 2000, ISBN 0-06-017586-9
Barzun, a French-born American, student of law, history and culture, one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history, and sometime professor, dean of faculties and provost of Columbia University, has produced a massive 800-page summarization of his studies of Western history and culture from its emergence at the Renaissance and Reformation to the present day, outlining the cultural and intellectual threads which run through this period. Besides giving a new perspective on many of the issues and key players (Cromwell, for example, wasn’t at all the monster that popular myth makes him out to be), this study shows the intellectual roots of many of the cultural ideas we now take for granted (but perhaps ought to question).
Fleet Tactics and Costal Combat
Capt. Wayne P. Hughes Jr, USN (Ret.), 2000, ISBN 1-55750-392-3
Whatever one’s personal views of war, it is not possible to understand the past or rationally assess the available options in the present without understanding warfare. Hughes’ book is an excellent introduction to modern naval tactics, which are markedly different from the tactics of either air or ground warfare. In the process of exploring naval tactics, especially in the newly-important area of projecting effective force into costal waters, he teaches a good bit about the nature of tactical thinking in general.
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being
George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, 2000, ISBN 0-465-03771-2
Lakoff and Núñez are cognitive scientists fascinated with the field of mathematics. This book explores where mathematics comes from, starting with some primitive counting and quantity skills in infants and progressing, by means of increasingly complex cognitive structures, to the full expanse of advanced mathematics. The authors argue that mathematics is a wholly human mental construct (meaning that mathematics only exists in human consciousness – there is no “ideal” or Platonic mathematics out there in the universe waiting to be discovered), and that it is tightly coupled to our perceptual and motor experiences. This raises the interesting possibility that alien intelligences, with different perceptual and motor experiences, might well develop an entirely different mathematics – unrecognizable to us (and vice versa).
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe
Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, 2000, ISBN 0-387-98701-0
Some decades ago Frank Drake and Carl Sagen proposed the “Drake equation” to estimate the prevalence of intelligent life in the known universe. The substance of their argument was that even if the odds of intelligent life around any given star were vanishingly small, the number of stars in the known universe is so immense (appx. 1021) that there surely must be millions of intelligent races, albeit perhaps none near us. Ward and Brownlee offer a counter argument. Although they assume simple life (viruses, bacteria, and perhaps even single-celled organisms) probably arise anywhere conditions are favorable, they suggest that a number of special conditions must occur for these simple life forms to have time enough to evolve to higher plant or animal forms before large-scale stellar incidents (like large asteroid hits or intense radiation from catastrophic processes in nearby stars) exterminate them, and that these special conditions are exceedingly rare in the universe. A fascinating and well thought out contribution to the debate. However, see also Cohen and Stewart’s rebuttal in What Does a Martian Look Like, (2002)
Culture Matters
Lawrence Harrison & Samuel Huntington, Eds, 2000, ISBN 0-465-03175-7
A collection of essays on the effect of culture on social progress. The editors have taken pains to assemble contrasting, differing, and even conflicting views in this collection. However, as a whole they challenge the current politically correct thinking that every culture can move into the modern world, and if they haven’t, it is someone else’s fault (colonialism, great powers, exploitation, etc.) rather than their own.
The New Prince
Dick Morris, 1999, ISBN 1-58063-079-0
In 1513 Niccolo
Machiavelli published his book The Prince, a book still in print which
any serious student of history or diplomacy ought to have read and
re-read. Dick Morris offers a similar theme in this book - practical
advice for American politicians on what works and what doesn’t these
days. As the architect of
Fighting for the Future: Will
Ralph Peters,1999, ISBN 0-8117-0651-6
An exceedingly important book, dense with common sense. Although nominally Peter’s focus is on the nature of the military we will need in the future, the essence of his message is that it is more important to understand the minds and cultures of our enemies than to invent yet more esoteric weapons systems. Peters argues persuasively that American will remain hugely dominant in the world for the foreseeable future, but that future will be increasingly bloody as failed states around the world return to Hobbsian brutality. This will require from us clear-eyed calculation about where military intervention is really needed and can really make a difference, and where it will just be a waste of American lives – something markedly different than our current media-driven reflexive drive to try to right all the world’s wrongs.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman
1999, ISBN 0-7382-0349-1
Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel prize in Physics, was an extraordinary man. This collection of short works, interviews and speeches is full of fresh new outlooks on a diverse range of topics by a man who was a master of “out of the box” thinking.
The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability
Eugene Linden, 1998, ISBN 0-684-81133-2
Books on impending apocalypses or
the immanent decline of
Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report
Newt Gingrich, 1998, ISBN 0-06-019106-6
Politician’s books are generally ghostwritten, long on generalities and short on substance. This book is different. Gingrich, who is also a reputable historian and author of several other books, discusses frankly what he learned from his days in Congress, mistakes and all. Whether or not one agrees with his conservative bent, there is lots of good, sound information and advice in this book, and Democratic Party strategists would do well to read it for pointers on how to move their own party out of the minority.
Condemned to Repeat It: The philosopher who flunked life and other great lessons from history
Wiek Allison, Jeremy Adams & Gavin Hambly, 1998, ISBN 0-670-85951-6
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, a quotation from George Santatyana, is the focus of this book. The authors use lessons from history to drive home a set of basic principles for succeeding. Very good.
Figments of Reality
Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 1997, ISBN 0-521-571553
Stewart & Cohen argue that the traditional scientific approach to understanding everything in reductionist terms (dissecting a process in detail down to its most primitive elements) doesn’t work - too many natural processes in the world are not only interdependent, but actually co-evolve, each changing the evolutionary history of the other. Hence evolutionary changes in prey drive evolutionary changes in the predators, which in turn drive changes in the prey... etc. For example, according to these authors, neither the evolution of human speech nor of human culture can be understood alone - each shaped the evolution of the other. A profound work, much enlivened by the authors’ wicked sense of humor.
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Samuel Huntington, 1997, ISBN 0-684-84441-9
A book of profound importance to
anyone trying to understand today’s world.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond, 1997, ISBN 0-393-03891-2
A friend of Diamond’s in
The Trouble with Testosterone: and other essays on the biology of the human predicament
Robert Sapolsky, 1997, ISBN 0-684-83409-X
A wonderful, witty, and informative series of essays on science by a respected evolutionary biologist and neurobiologist, who also wrote another series of good essays under the title Why Zebras Don’t get Ulcers. Although the topics of the essays are matters dealing with human behavior, and the ways in which biology may or may not influence this behavior, an underlying point of these essays is the way in which good scientific method and clever researchers can tease out the subtleties in complex natural systems.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Carl Sagan, 1996, ISBN 0-394-53512X
In this, the last book that Carl Sagan wrote, he argues passionately and convincingly for the role of true science in modern life, and worries about the cultural tendency to denigrate scientists, to cast them in the role of unfeeling, insensitive, slightly mad “Dr. Stangeloves”, with the result that less and less of our young people find it appealing to go into the sciences, and more and more of the population appears to be reverting to the superstitions and prescientific thinking that we thought we had left behind in medieval times.
The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World
Dominance in the 21st Century
George and Meredith Friedman, 1996, 0-517-70403-X
George Friedman and his wife
Meredith are the founders of STRATFOR, a leading private intelligence and
forecasting service. In this book they
examine the evolution of weapons from their infancy, when they revolutionize
the battlefield,
through to senility, when the cost of defending the weapon long
enough for it to perform its mission exceeds its usefulness. Walled castles,
armored knights, tanks, manned aircraft, battleships and aircraft carriers have
all gone through this cycle. The Friedmans argue that new technologies such as intelligent
precision munitions, GPS-guided cruise missiles, and space-based surveillance
are revolutionizing warfare again. A fascinating book to read.
The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Errors in Complex Situations
Dietrich Dörner, 1996, ISBN 0-201-47948
First published in German in 1989, this translation was published in 1996. Based in part on studies of how people attempt to manage computer simulations of complex environmental problems, Dörner then shows how the same operator errors have appeared in real catastrophes, such as Chernoble. Has some very illuminating ideas about how people misperceive complex situations, and how they lock in too quickly on a fallacious model of what is happening, and then refuse to abandon that model even as evidence accumulates that their decisions are making the situation worse.
Making Movies
Sidney Lumet, 1996, ISBN 978-0679756606
Sidney Lumet, director of such
successful movies as Serpico
(1973) Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Q & A (1990) ,
has written a wonderful insiders book about movie –making., This is not an
exposé of the lives of famous actors, but rather a discussion of what goes into
the making of a movie from the director’s point of view. Fascination for those of us
who have watched movie-making from the outside.
Fields of
John Keegan, 1996, ISBN 0-679-42413
See the other John Keegan books
listed later in this list. This most recent work is not only a good
analysis of how the geography of the Eastern United States shaped the battle of
the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is also
an insightful and largely complementary view of
The Neurological Origins of Individuality (Audio lectures)
Prof. Robert Sapolsky, 1996, The Teaching Company, course 179
These eight lectures (the new
expanded second edition is now 24 lectures) are quite accessible to the
non-biologist, and very well done. They illustrate that
individual variations in our neurobiology account for much of what we
think of as our own unique personality. And they force us to re-assess how our
society handles some deviant behavior - we have advanced enough to stop burning
epileptics as demon-possessed, but we still jail and punish as criminals many
people who actually suffer from biologically-based disabilities.
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Thomas Sowell, 1995, 0-465-08994-1
Sowell’s argument is that the
ruling elite, not only of
Sowell identifies four typical stages: (1) The “crisis”, wisely discerned by
the elite even though the masses (that's us) are clueless, (2) the “solution”,
a massive government program of some sort, (3) the result – more often than not
leading to all sorts of unintended and detrimental effects, and (4) the
response, in which the elite explain to the masses why it is that their wise
policy really was right even though the results were disastrous.
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition in the Forces of History
Howard Bloom, 1995, ISBN 0-87113-664-3
Bloom uses a wide range of studies to show how “memes” (ideas) organize groups of people into super organisms (believers in Democracy, or Christianity, or Islam, or....) which behave in many ways similar to gene-driven individuals. He then looks at the “pecking order” phenomena as it applies to these super organisms and draws some interesting conclusions. At the core of his argument is the view that most of the things that we think of as bad or evil about humans (like aggression and war) are, in fact, wired in natural behaviors which serve clear evolutionary purposes. A very sobering and thoughtful book
About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution
Paul Davies, 1995, ISBN 0-671-79964-9
Until Einstein’s time, physicists assumed time was “just there”, another natural attribute of physical processes and objects. Most of us still make that assumption, but in fact there are difficult and unresolved questions about time - does time really flow from future to past or is that just a quirk of the way we humans perceive things? Is the arrow of time reversible just as almost all other physical processes are, or does time always flow in just one way, from future to past. Davies has produced a very readable book in this subject, exploring some difficult and abstruse philosophical and scientific questions in quite an understandable manner.
.
Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Jean Heidmann, 1995, ISBN 0-521-45340-2
There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies, comprised of some 1021 stars in the observable universe out to the current cosmological horizon of about 14 billion light years. Therefore, even if the probability of a planet supporting life around a given star is vanishingly small, and the probability, given life, that it will be intelligent life is also vanishingly small, there are almost certainly millions if not billions of intelligent life forms is the cosmos. Of course, none may be near us, or if they are, we ourselves may not be advanced enough to know how to recognize them. However, the international SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) effort is trying, and Heidmann's book, translated from the French, is a good technical introduction to the current theoretical and technical state of this effort, which has moved in 40 years from Drake's single-channel study of two nearby stars in 1959 to Horowitz's current attempt at Harvard to deploy the BETA billion-channel radio telescope search system. Technical, but quite accessible to anyone with a reasonable science background.
If You Came This Way
Peter Davis, 1995, ISBN 0-471-11074-4
One of the most difficult social issues of our time is that posed by the growing underclass who lack the skills, ability, and/or work attitudes required to make a living in our increasingly complex culture. Peter Davis has traveled the country talking to these people in an attempt to understand who they are and how they got where they are, and his findings suggest that many of our middle-class views of this underclass are seriously flawed, so that our attempts to solve the problems they pose are likely to be similarly flawed.
The
Bernard Lewis, 1995, ISBN 0-684-80712-2
Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near
Eastern Studies at
Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics
Edward Rothstein, 1995, ISBN 0-8129-2560-2
Music and mathematics have at least one characteristic in common: they evolve in complexity, or unfold more of their possibilities, from generation to generation. Rothstein, a noted music critic with formal training in mathematics, explores these parallel evolutions, and the similarities in the minds of those who labor in these fields, in a delightful and thoughtful way.
Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices, Histories (Audio lectures)
Various lecturers, 1995, The Teaching Company, course SA600
Whatever one’s personal views about religion, it is not possible to begin to understand any society or culture, including our own, without studying its religions - the religion of a culture shapes its attitudes, its expectations, its education, its social contracts, its political system, and its fundamental world view. This set of 50 lectures, given by brilliant scholars and lecturers who are specialists in each religion, gives a good introduction to each of the world’s major religions
Diplomacy
Henry Kissinger, 1994, ISBN 0-671-6599-1X
The seminal text in the field - Kissinger discusses in depth the historical roots of diplomacy and the competing political views on foreign policy that emerged with it, as well as describing some of his practical experiences in the field in his capacity as both the National Security Advisor and as the Secretary of State for two different presidents.
Government’s End: Why
Jonathan Rauch, 1994, ISBN 1-891620-49-5
Rauch argues that our government has reached the normal, mature, “demoscloratic” end state of a democratic government, an equilibrium state in which myriad special interest groups essentially paralyze its ability to act. He explains the asymmetric processes -- similar to Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” process - that leads to this state of affairs, and argues that it is no one’s fault - not the liberals nor the conservatives, not the Democrats nor the Republicans -- or rather, that we are all at fault, as we each pursue our own individual agendas with the best of intentions! His conclusion is that the result need not be dismal, but like the effects of human aging, has to be accepted and managed. The logic seems to me to apply as well to large corporations as it does to our government.
The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World
Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 1994, ISBN 0-670-84983-9
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, both highly respected in their fields (mathematics and reproductive biology, respectively) take on the whole issue of understanding complex systems - systems whose individual operating rules may be simple, but whose emergent behavior can be highly complex or even chaotic in the technical sense. They argue that much of interest in the world, including the evolution of human thinking, can never be understood by the common scientific approach of decomposing processes to their simplest level - rather one must look at how all these processes interact.
Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth
Christian de Duve, 1994, ISBN0-465-09045-1
Christian de Duve won the Nobel prize for Biology in 1974 for his work on cell structure. In this wonderful book he traces the steps (known to date) that were required for life to arise on our planet, and for it to develop from its simplest form to its present complexity, showing how living processes adapted to one environmental challenge after another, and how these challenges shaped evolution.
Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
Randoloh Nesse & George Williams, 1994, ISBN 0-679-74674-9
Medicine has traditionally focused on the proximal cause of disease - what condition or organism is immediately responsible for the present illness. But starting about 1990, some medical leaders began to ask the more fundamental question: what is the evolutionary nature of both the infecting organism and the body’s response to it. Looked at in that light, many of the things we do to try and treat diseases, like reducing fevers, may actually interfere with effective defenses the body has evolved over eons.
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions of Writing and Life
Anne Lamott, 1994, ISBN 0-385-48001
As the title says, this is a book about the craft of writing, and also about life. Anne Lamott is witty, insightful, and very practical. Anyone who has ever had the desire to write ought to read it. Also recommended, for either writers and/or new parents, is her 1993 book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year.
In Defense of Elitism
William A. Henry III, 1994, ISBN 0-385-46899-7
Henry's thesis is that since World War II, most domestic issues have been fought around the balance of egalitarianism and elitism, and that the balance has swung too far towards egalitarianism. In our concern to "make people feel better about themselves" by "dumbing down" everything from school textbooks to the nightly news, Henry argues, we are in danger of shortchanging our best and brightest, and thereby endangering our entire society. Multiculturalism and affirmative action are discussed at length in this context. Note that Henry is not a right-winger, but rather a staunch Democrat and card-carrying member of the ACLU. Though-provoking reading!
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of
Robert Hughes, 1994, ISBN 0-446-67034-0
"Values" are a political battle-cry these days, usually as a code word for single-issue campaigns like abortion or welfare. Hughes, an Australian who has lived in this country for over 20 years, looks at us, and what appear to be our real values, from the outside with perception and humor, spearing equally both the left and the right, and wondering, like most of the rest of the world, why we are so preoccupied with our "Inner Child" that we seem to have forgotten our "Inner Adult". In his view, we have gotten so wound up in seeing ourselves and each other as victims, and demanding "rights" and "compensation", that we have lost sight of essential truths.
West of the Thirties: Discoveries Among the Navajo and Hopi
Edward T. Hall, 1994, ISBN 0-385-42421-3
Hall, who is also the author of The Dance of Life (1983), listed later in this list, began his working career among the Navajo and Hopi Indians, and this little gem of a book shows us his growing awareness, and a young person, of how their world-view differs radically from ours.
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel prize in Physics for his work leading to the discovery of the quark, is a member of the Santa Fe Institute (see Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, 1992, below). This book explores the roles of "complex adaptive systems" in settings ranging from the simple (the quark) to the complex (the jaguar). Fascinating, but "information dense", this is a book to be read slowly and pondered.
Up to Your Armpits in Alligators? How to sort out what risks are worth worrying about.
John and Sean Paling, 1994, ISBN 0-9642236-0-0
We are spending millions across the country to remove asbestos from schools, when the lifetime risk of a child getting lung cancer from that asbestos is about 5 x 10-6, yet the annual risk that the child will die from a home accident is about 1.1 x 10-4. Clearly the popular conception of what risks are worth worrying about is flawed. The Palings propose the "Paling Perspective Scale" of risks, a sort of Richter scale for risks. At one end, +6 is 1 chance in 1 (1 x 100) -- such as the chances of dying at the end of one's life. At the other end, -6 is 1 chance in 1,000,000 million (1 x 10-12) -- something that happens one time to one person in the entire history of the human race. This book shows where many common risks fall on this scale, and the results are not always what one would expect!
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
Mary Pipher, 1994, ISBN 0-345-39282-5
Our current American culture is very destructive to the self-esteem and self identity of young girls - from the obvious and brutal sexual harassment in schools to the insidious sex-object messages in media and advertising to the pervasive weight the culture puts on looks. Anyone who has a daughter or granddaughter yet to go through adolescence should read this book to learn how to help shelter and support them through the truly horrifying assault they will have to survive.
The
Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, 1994, ISBN 0-02-914673-9
Throughout history, "politically correct" thinking has repeatedly led to national folly. This book, by a distinguished pair of academics, is highly controversial because it attacks the foundations of some of our most cherished politically correct beliefs. It is important, because if the research is valid (and the reader must decide that for her/himself from the evidence given), then the authors argue that despite the best of intentions, our nation is on a path toward increasing inequality, and many of our current social programs are exacerbating the problems rather than solving them. It has been attacked for a passing comment about slight observed average differences in measured IQ among races (and European whites are not the highest), but those criticisms miss entirely the main point of the book.
How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare for the Post-Cold War Era, Third Edition
James Dunnigan, 1993, ISBN 0-688-12157-8
Dunnigan argues in the preface to this book that politicians and the public would be less inclined to go to war if they understood what war was really like, and what it really costs. This book provides, in exhaustive detail, the real numbers on warfare - what are the expected losses for different forces under different conditions, what are the resupply and maintenance problems with our new exotic weapons systems, why and how western strategy differs that of the old Soviet Union, and all the current third world states the Soviets trained and equipped.
The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama, 1993, ISBN 0380720027
An expansion of a widely-discussed article that appeared in National
Interest (Summer 1989). Fukuyama, onetime deputy director of the State Department's Policy
Planning Staff, argues that history has been
moving toward an inevitable endpoint, which he asserts is capitalist democracy,
and that since we have now reached that point in most of the first world,
history has, in a sense “ended”. This book launched a series of discussions,
still continuing, about the nature of the political and philosophical shifts
now going on in the world. See
Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science
Alan Cromer, 1993, ISBN 0-19-509636-3
If we think about it at all, most of us assume that humans arrived at the scientific method of thinking as a logical evolution of our culture, and that if the Greeks hadn’t discovered it, some other culture surely would have. Cromer argues the startling position that scientific thinking is a very unnatural thing for humans to do, because it requires that we learn to give up entirely the egocentrism that is central to our personality, and see the world for what it is rather than what we would like to believe it to be. He argues that a particular, highly unlikely confluence of ideas and influences present in the Greece of Alexander the Great allowed scientific thinking to begin to arise (it took many centuries to fully develop), and that this unlikely combination of influences has not been present in any other culture since, so that the rise of true science was an unlikely event that to this day requires training in a strenuous discipline to practice properly.
A History of Warfare
John Keegan, 1993, ISBN 0-394-58801
Keegan, probably Britain's leading writer about warfare, is also the author of a number of other important books in the field, including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, and The Price of Admiralty. This latest book is not only about the history of warfare through the ages, but also about its changing place in the social and political structure. He shows conclusively that Caluswitz's adage that "war is the continuation of policy by other means" is much too simple a view
Exploiting Chaos: Cashing in on the Realities of Software Development
Dave Olson, 1993, ISBN 0-442-01112-1
Olson argues that the entire software development process, from requirements gathering to delivery, is a chaotic process in the formal sense that small changes in initial conditions can produce large, non-linear changes in the process. For example, the very act of gathering requirements from a customer probably itself changes the requirements in unpredictable ways. He proposes ways to improve the development process to account for the "areas of disorder".
Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
Len Deighton, 1993, ISBN 0-06-092557-4
Deighton is most widely known as a writer of thriller novels, such as The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. However, he is also a recognized historian of the second world war, and author of several books about the war. This latest book is perhaps his best. It is a quite readable survey, not only of the war itself, but of the attitudes and perceptions (and misperceptions) of the participants as they entered and prosecuted the war, and of the unfounded myths that have grown up in the years following the war.
A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age
William Manchester, 1992, ISBN 0-316-54556-2
Not at all dry and academic, this fascinating book fulfills it's promise of providing a portrait of an age, and it is an age which shaped many of today's basic (unspoken) beliefs in western culture. It is especially interesting to read this book, and then read the series on the Islamic world in the August 6, 1994 issue of The Economist. In many ways, the Islamic world is struggling to move into its own renaissance, and the parallels with Western experience are striking.
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal
Jared Diamond, 1992, ISBN 0-06-098403-1
We share 98% of the genetic material of our nearest animal relations, the chimpanzees, yet what a powerful difference that last 2% makes. Jared investigates such questions as why we die, why we use drugs, why we wage war, and how language evolves, all in the context of our ape/chimpanzee family relationship.
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
M. Mitchell Waldrop, 1992, ISBN 0-671-76789-5
A very readable account of the emergence of the Santa Fe Institute, a cross-fertilization of Physics and Economics that produced, among other things, the "law of increasing returns", a principle that drives systems (physical, biological, economic, cultural) toward increasing structural complexity.
Ishmael
Danial Quinn, 1992, ISBN 0-553-07875-5
This was an underground cult book in the environmental movement for a while. A powerful Socratic dialog about the nature of civilization, thinly disguised as a novel. Calls into question some of the most fundamental assumptions upon which the "civilized societies" of the world (including us) base their beliefs.
Teambuilt: Making Teamwork Work
Mark Sanborn, 1992, ISBN 0-942361-54-7
This is a good book about teams and how to make them work, but in addition it has scattered all through it little gems of general wisdom, such as "Wisdom is the ability to discern between the significant and the trivial".
The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works
David Owen, 1991, ISBN 0-679-74144-5
Humorous and informative, this little paperback is good for anyone who aspires to do home remodeling or home building, or who just gets turned on by buying power tools and making great holes in walls. Answers such essential questions as "why shouldn't I use on my house the same paint used in nuclear power stations?", and "just how many different kinds of sheetrock are there?"
The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle
Robert Leonhard, 1991, ISBN 0-89141-532-7
Much is made today in the military literature of asymmetric warfare as a departure from our normal “strength meets strength” theory of battle. Leonhard argues that effective maneuver warfare always seeks to establish an asymmetric threat, and that our current military doctrine is badly flawed by failing to recognize that.
A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73566-6
An exploration of the biology and evolution of our five senses by a very accomplished poet and writer. Beautifully written; a joy to read.
The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists
Barry Strauss & Josiah Ober, 1990, ISBN 0-312-05051-8
We can look at ancient military undertakings objectively, without the intellectual baggage we carry about more recent events, so the authors analyze these historical wars to extract strategic lessons that are as applicable today as they were then. A fascinating book to read, especially if one thinks about today's events in the same light.
The Grace of Small Things: Creativity and Innovation
Robert Grudin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-58868-5
This little book is very hard to summarize. It is about the place of creativity and innovation in our society, and the ways in which our Western society helps and hinders these processes. Insightful and well worth reading.
From
Thomas Friedman, 1989, ISBN 0-374-15894-0
In general, we Americans are naive
about the
The
Jerry Harvey, 1988, ISBN 0-669-19179-5
Although this book is ostensibly
about management issues in organizations, the topics really apply to much
larger social issues as well.
The Power Game: How
Hedrick Smith, 1988, ISBN 0-394-55447-7
A classic about how the
The Art of War
Sun Tzu (translated), 1988, various publishers, but one is ISBN 0-440-55005
A little classic through the centuries, with insights on conflicts that apply as well today as they did in Sun Tzu's time.
Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Ecologists, Economists, and the Merely Eloquent
Garrett Hardin, 1986, ISBN 0-14-007729-4
We always simplify the world to understand it, and in so doing we introduce unavoidable bias into our understanding. Hardin argues, with many interesting examples, for a process to counteract this, and so protect us from our own folly, especially in social and environmental policy. Hardin was the author of the seminal article The Tragedy of the Commons that appeared in Science in December1968
The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully.
Gerald Weinberg, 1985, ISBN 0-932633-01-3
Full of pithy aphorisms (example: "Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't") and sage wisdom. As with all of Weinberg's books, delightful and funny as well as enormously instructive.
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
Lewis Thomas, 1984, ISBN 0-553-27580
A fun book to read, as are several others of his: The Fragile Species: Notes of an Earth Watcher (1992), and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1984).
The March of Folly; From
Barbara Tuchman, 1984, ISBN 0-345-30823
Barbara Tuchman defines national folly as pursuing a policy which can be clearly seen at the time to be self-defeating. Nations have done this repeatedly, and she examines examples through history in an attempt to understand how this comes about.
The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time
Edward T. Hall, 1983, ISBN 0-385-19248-7
Hall's older classics (The Hidden Dimension, The Silent Language) deal with the cross-cultural differences in the perception and use of time and space. This later work builds on the earlier insights to explore in more depth the different ways time is perceived, not only across cultures, but even within a culture.
Augustine's Laws and Major System Development Programs
Norman Augustine, 1982, ISBN 0-915-92862
A good book, fun to read, with insights about large system procurement that are still pertinent today.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1979, ISBN 0-394-74502-7
A fascinating exploration about the similarities between mathematics, visual arts, and music, built around the theme of self-referent systems.
On the Design of Stable Systems
Gerald and Daniela Weinberg, 1979, ISBN 0-471-04722-8
A serious topic dealt with by a wonderfully humorous author. Topics include "The Piddling Principle", "the Kool-Aid Fallacy" and "The Aspirin Illusion". Ever want to know why minimizing error/variation in a feedback system (mechanical, electrical, social, biological) is the WORST thing to do? This is the book that explains it.
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
Gerald Weinberg, 1975, ISBN 0-471-92563-2
A companion volume to Weinberg's On the Design of Stable Systems, listed above. An excellent survey of how to recognize systems, and think about how they operate, with examples drawn from a very wide range of fields. Some of the "Questions for Further Research" at the ends of the chapters are quite intriguing.
The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1975, 1982, ISBN 0-201-00650-2
An old classic that every engineer and software developer ought to re-read every 10 years or so to see that George Santayana was right: "Those who will not study history are doomed to repeat it".
Myths to Live By
Joseph Campbell, 1972, ISBN 0-14-019461-4
Famous now for the series he recorded with Bill Moyers just before his death, Joseph Campbell in this early series of lectures to the Cooper Union Forum in New York given between 1958 and 1971 lays out most of the his brilliant foundation on the importance and place of myth in cultures.
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society
Edward Banfield, 1958, ISBN 0-02-901510-3
Banfield and his wife studied a small Italian village in 1954-55 to try to understand what kept societies locked into essentially feudal states. His conclusion (summarized roughly) is that so long as a society trusts only family (or tribe) -- a condition he names “amoral familism” -- it cannot progress. This is a particularly interesting observation in the light of the third world problems of the new century.
The Evolution of Political Thought
C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958, ISBN 0-02-901510-3
Parkinson is better known for Parkinson’s Law, a humorous but insightful little book listed below. However, he wrote serious material too. In this almost unknown book Parkinson argues that each political system - dictatorship, aristocracy, democracy, etc. - carries in it the seeds of its own destruction, and that societies move through a reasonably predictable sequence of political systems, albeit occasionally skipping a step or two. Worth pondering for an assessment of how long our own system will last, and what will finally replace it.
Parkinson's Law
C. Northcote Parkinson, 1957, ISBN 1-56849-015-1
Parkinson's first law is that "work expands to fill the time allotted to it". From that starting point Parkinson shows, with much humor, how bureaucracies evolve. This is an old, but very good, classic.
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