Book Recommendations
A few days ago I was asked on another social media platform for suggestions on some non-fiction books- a top ten suggestion list, I suppose. So here goes, in no particular order, with some fiction suggestions as well.
CURRENT EFFECT/EVENTS
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson. Delves into embedded nature of extractive policies which undermine prosperity.
The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara E. Mattei. the title speaks for itself.
Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. A weighty tome, but the most important book on economics since Keynes’ “General Theory.” Piketty bring back “rent seeking” which has largely been ignored by economists with disasterous results for society.
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy by Stephanie Kelton. Explains MMT and actually illustrates why MMT really does have the economic answers to our modern economy which both Keynesian and Classic economics canno.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Pair this with The Capital Order and you easily see who is manipulating our societies and economy.
Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko
HISTORY
Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose. Did you know that before planes could even hop from the US to Caribbean Islands, luxury zeppelins were traveling from Frankfurt Germany to Morroco to Brazil to New York and back to Germany?
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. Rome had levels of society from the elite down to the plebians. In the middle were a level of society called “equestrians” (and not for the horse) but this level evolved into the middle ages as ‘knights’.
“A Few Bloody Noses”: The Realities and Mythologies of the American Revolution by Robert Harvey. A British historian’s perspective on the American Revolution.
The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 by Thomas Pakenham. Colonialism.
Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 by Richard Overy. Per Overy, WW2 actually started in 1931 with Germany, Italy and Japan wanting the same kind of colonial empires that the British, French and USA had.
The Famine Plot by Tim Pat Coogan. An indictment of the British government policy toward the Irish during the An Gorta Mor (Great Hunger, otherwise known as the Great Famine).
PHILOSOPHY-RELIGION-SCIENCE
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek
The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics by Elaine Pagels. The concept of ‘the devil’ evolves over time due to human interpretations
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Prof Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong. One of the best explanations of evolutionary biology in a very accessible form.
FICTION
Trinity by Leon Uris. This was the book I read as a teenager that got me interested in my Irish heritage.
The Assassins by Elia Kazan. The daughter of an army man joins hippies, shattering his ordered life leading to violence.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney. Really good edition of this classic. Old is very Germanic.
The Illiad by Homer translated by Stanley Lombardo. Another good edition and translation of a classic.
Sum of all Fears by Tom Clancy. I was a big fan of his books but they sort of went downhill starting with Rainbow Six (1998) as he and his publisher began creating the Clancy industry. Sum of all fears plays into Palestinian/arab terrorism, US hegemony and of course our intelligence apparatus. The Ben Afflek version of the movie was okay.
Without Remorse by Tom Clancy. Hollywood cannot seem to make a Clancy novel well and they muck every movie up with ludicrous fight scenes or such that never appear in the novel. But this book, which doesn’t even feature Jack Ryan, is a book which screams to be made into a well done film! Grieving John Kelly just lost his wife, picks up a hitchhiking drug addicted young woman, helps her get clean but then in a careless moment, exposes her whereabouts to the drug gang costing her life. Kelly goes on a murder spree of drug dealers and pimps in Baltimore on his evolution to becoming the John Clark CIA operative of Clancy novels.
