Help me out, suggest a good book
Posted in Commentary on March 25th, 2006 by Sacha PeterSomebody suggest a good book that I can borrow from the library and read. I tend to read non-fiction, although I’m looking for something that will get my mind thinking. It can be fiction or non-fiction.
Most of the time I end up borrowing books and read them in an airplane. I did a lot of flight time in 2005 (some 50,000 miles or so) and thus I got quite a bit of reading done. This year has been less active, but I’ll still need some good material to read. A few books that I’ve read in the past:
I also enjoy books concerning gender relations, human psychology and other sociological issues. Usually I can tell if a book is garbage from the first 20 minutes, so thankfully I can spend my reading time productively.
Suggest a good book!
You’ve probably read it, but I found “zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” interesting
What did you think of Collapse?
philip k. dick books are pretty good. a scanner darkly, do androids dream of electric sheep (blade runner), flow my tears the policeman said. i also liked the forever war, don’t remember the authour and starship troopers by robert a. heinlein. these are all basically sci-fis but they make you think. i’ll have to think and remember the non fiction ones that i’ve read lately.
Collapse was a long book, but full of information. It’s certainly not light reading, but it’s filled with all of the detailed history concerning examples of where societies screwed up or succeeded, mainly due to externalities and how they dealt with it. There is a heavy environmental bend on the book in that the author almost implies that the society is completely dictated by the environment. What’s kind of interesting is that the book makes you look at western civilization and wonder whether we’re living sustainably or not even though very little is written about it.
Thanks for the description of Collapse. Sounds interesting – but for my money, the large majority of societies collapse due to invading tribes, where the weakness can be more easily explained by factors outside of environmental determinism in a direct sense – but perhaps I’ll have time to read Diamond’s book and see his case for the opposite (if that is in fact the case he makes).
My suggestion would be The Iliad in conjunction with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
More in line with your other books, however, how about Non-Zero? Game theory, economics, and evolutionary theory.
Diamond does address external invaders as well (obvious ones being the South American civilizations that got exterminated by the Spanish), but he also analyzes societies that collapsed because of their own doing (prototypical example was Eastern Island).
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll add them to the reading queue.