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Reviews/Just For Fun
(books & films; updated August 2005)
Just for fun I've tossed together a list of books and films which I think are of interest.
My qualifications for assembling yet another list on the Web? Absolutely none. It's just for fun--mine,
and hopefully yours.
I've set this up following my First Rule of Capitalism: Always Lose Money. (At least that's been my experience.)
Some of these titles are out of print or difficult to find, so on the off chance that a
visitor might actually want a copy, I've put in some links to Amazon.com.
Should a hapless visitor be gripped by a momentary madness and actually buy something from
Amazon (e.g. your local public library doesn't own a copy), then as an official Amazon Associate I get 5% of sales,
which works out to about 1.25 minutes of my annual web hosting expenses; a very solid loss
on both time and expenses, as per my typical business acumen.
Hopefully you'll enjoy
scanning the lists and the occasional commentaries. Here is a complete list of
Recommended Books linked to
Amazon.com. For a variety of unlinked books and films, check out the following lists:
Books
serious fun (non-fiction)
fun fiction
unrepentantly guy books
Films
Favorite Japanese Films
unrepentantly guy movies
New category: French Tough-Guy films
Non-Fiction Books
(serious fun) back to top
Recent Additions (2005)
The Dragon Syndicates: Global Phenomenon of the Triads
by Martin Booth (1999)
Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin
The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson
A Brief History of The Great Moguls
by Bamber Gascoigne
Hawaii: An Uncommon History
by Edward Joesting
Napa: Story of an American Eden
by James Conaway
History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape
by Emilio Sereni
Codebreakers' Victory: How the Allied Cryptographers Won World War II
by Hervie Haufler
For God and Glory: Lord Nelson and His Way of War
by Joel Hayward
The Ravens: Pilots of the Secret War of Laos
by Christopher Robbins
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
by James D. Hornfischer
Recent Additions (2004):
Please read
Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage
by geophysicist Kenneth S. Deffeyes. It will change your
view of energy and our future.
What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
by Bernard Lewis
Of Paradise and Power
by Robert Kagan
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
by Christopher Alexander
Streets for People: A Primer for Americans
by Bernard Rudofsky
Global City Blues
by Daniel Solomon
The New Transit Town
edited by Hank Dittmar & Gloria Ohland (16 contributors)
Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886)
by Edward S. Morse
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes
A premise so astonishingly original that I immediately bought a copy despite my abject
poverty at the time (I believe it was first published in '71, when I was a senior in high school).
Even if you go in firmly convinced that his thesis is pure rubbish, you will
probably find yourself reconsidering received wisdom about the human mind and human culture.
Against Method
by Paul Feyerabend
A radical critique of the premise that "science" is actually done in a "scientific" fashion.
Feyerabend has a good time whacking away at the holy edifices of Science, Positivism and a few other
"philosophic foundations."
Creativity and Taoism
by Chung-yuan Chang
I used to see Professor Chang doing Tai Chi Chuan very late at night on his front lawn in Manoa Valley
(Honolulu), as he lived a few doors from the Friends (Quakers) meeting house. I took a number of his
seminars, and still marvel at his thesis that the key to understanding Heidegger is to view
his writings as fundamentally Taoist in nature. He was deeply erudite and a rather august personality in class.
A fellow student in Professor Chang's graduate seminar on Taoism had the chutzpah to
turn in a one-page paper; Professor Chang gathered himself up and stated in his heavily accented
English that "even Lao Tsu managed to write 5,000 characters." I received a B, as I recall, perhaps because I
always went for a psychological rather than an ontological interpretation...
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
By Hernando De Soto
The failure of either socialism and capitalism to alleviate poverty, inequality, corruption and
oppression in the developing world has created one of the greatest and most vexing problems of the post-war era.
Although "paradigm shifts" are bandied about rather freely nowadays, this book has truly fundamental insights into the role of property rights and the intellectual, legal and poltical
infrastructure needed to establish them in developing societies.
The Future of Life
by E.O. Wilson
It's all too easy to become desensitized to the ecological crises our planet faces;
this eminent scientist/writer encapsulates the dire global situation in clear, persuasive prose.
Great Wall and the Empty Fortress:
China's Search for Security
by Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross
Amidst all the chaff and hysteria written about China, this little book is a breath of fresh air. By explicating the Chinese worldview,
much sense is made of heretofore inexplicable blunders and threats made by the Chinese leadership.
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
by Iris Chang
It's virtually impossible to understand the East-Asian geopolitical situation without reading this book (or an equivalent
source about the brutality of the Japanese occupation). China, Korea, et. al. have not forgotten, and a re-armed Japan
will not go unanswered. This book helps explain why a strong and enduring U.S. presence in Asia is essential.
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
by V.S. Naipaul
Although it was published 20 years ago, this remains a powerful and accessible exploration of the Islamic
world and Islamic worldview. Naipaul has been criticized as unsympathetic; I would hazard that he is simply unsentimental about failed cultures
(see India: A Wounded Civilization for another
example); he raises hackles because he refuses to be an apologist to the "multicultural" view
that all cultures, belief systems and power structures are equally worthy. This is of course pure balderhash.
Big Story: How the American Press and Television
Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington
by Peter Braestrup
A thorough critique of the press coverage of the Tet Offensive. Amazingly, the press almost
universally got it wrong. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) actually won the battle;
the Viet Cong were decimated and never recovered as a fighting force (The regular North Vietnamese Army
shouldered the major fighting from then on). It took the NVA (North Vietnamese Army)
four years to build up enough strength for another major offensive (1972), which led to the
Christmas bombings of Hanoi and the "peace accords."
Written by a journalist, this book is critical but not ideological; the press is not "the bad guy" here.
There is plenty of blame to go around. The military misrepresented the strength of the Viet Cong,
for its own reasons, and the press went on to misrepresent the battle for its own reasons.
The real heresy of this book is revealing how the ARVN and U.S. forces aquitted themselves
exceeding well on the battlefield. Was the war "win-able" on the ground? It certainly
wasn't "win-able" politically, but perhaps credit should be given to the "grunts" who did in fact
win the battle tactically and strategically.
The original edition was published by Westview Press in 1977; Yale University Press issued an
abidged version in 1983 and 1986; another edition was published by Presidio Press in 1994.
About Face/the Odyssey of an American Warrior
by David H. Hackworth
Hackworth describes in detail how not to fight a war--combine a dysfunctional, bureaucratic military
with incompetent, politically directed policies. This is also a primer on leadership and
how to fight and win a guerrilla war (take the tactics of the enemy and do them one better).
The stupidity of the U.S. policies and military, and the resultant costs in blood and lives,
are truly anguishing in this account.
I have read numerous histories of the War--The Best and the Brightest, etc., but this
book covers the incompetencies and costs on the ground like no other.
Dispatches
by Michael Herr
The best general account of the Vietnam War, and certainly one of the best on war, period.
What Herr gets especially right is the powerful attractions of war. Although it's not "politically
correct" to bring this up, the experience of war holds a deep fascination to the human mind.
This is rarely noted as a "cause" of war.
Commentaries to follow (as inspiration strikes)
The Kimono Mind
by Rudolph Rudolfsky
The Politics of Experience
&
Sanity, Madness & the Family
by R.D. Laing
Unpopular Essays
by Bertrand Russell
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
by Daniel Bell
Sociobiology
by E.O. Wilson
Neurosis and Human Growth
Karen Horney M.D.
The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine
by James Le Fanu M.D.
Search for a Method
by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Crisis of European Sciences
by Edmund Husserl
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vols. 1, 2 & 3)
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Minds, Brains & Science
by John Searle
New World of the Mind
by J.B. Rhine
On Escalation: Metaphors & Scenarios
Herman Kahn
Diet For a Small Planet
by Frances M. Lappe
Magic & Mystery in Tibet
&
Six Months in the Sandwich Islands
by Elizabeth Bird
The Loss of El Dorado
by V.S. Naipaul
Who Am I?
by Steven Reiss
Civilization & Capitalism, 15th - 18th Century
by Fernand Braudel
There are various pretenders to the throne of explaining globalization, such as Thomas Friedman's recent The
World Is Flat, but all such efforts seem shallow and pallid compared to the masterwork of the genre,
Fernamd Braudel's trilogy Civilization & Capitalism, 15th - 18th Century:
The Structures of Everyday Life (Volume 1)
The Wheels of Commerce (Volume 2)
The Perspective of the World (Volume 3)
I do not lightly suggest tackling almost 1,800 pages of reading, but there is simply no substitute (short of a
master's degree) if you aspire to a true understanding of global trade's role in the social, political and economic history
of our world. It is not a boring read--anything but, for Braudel's depth of research, breadth of knowledge
and his appreciation for the limits of current scholarship are matchless. Where authors like Friedman incautiously
grind whatever axe they set out, drawing upon work which supports their thesis, Bruadel is ever-cautious about
drawing hard-and-fast conclusions from the data he has culled from archives' dusty pages.
What Braudel reveals is a world which has been disrupted by far-reaching trade for hundreds of years. Capital
has flowed across the great oceans of our globe for far longer than most people realize, destroying local
industries in favor of distant ones in the process. It is impossible to summarize such a rich, vast work, but
reading even one of these volumes will give you a deep insight into the long history of globalization, and how
entire industries and financial centers have been displaced time and again in the Arab Levant, in Asia, and in
Europe. You will also come to understand the rise of European economic dominance, and how it cannot be so neatly
attributed to guns, steel and germs, as appealing and powerful as Jared Diamond's thesis may be.
Braudel does not work to create over-arching explantions so much as present the archival facts he so
assiduously assembled. (The books were written in the late 1970s; Braudel died in 1985 at the age of 83.) For
example, he shows that prosperity, since at least the 1400s if not earlier, is inevitably found in those
cities and regions where prices are highest. It is counter-intuitive at first--since shouldn't money go farther where prices are low?--
but the same is obviously true of our era. The most prosperous nations are those with the highest costs, and
the poorest are those where prices are lowest.
At a minimum, this sheds light on the centuries-old exodus from rural to metropolis, and on the nature of
prosperity itself. I recommend these volumes not just for their vast erudition but for the enjoyment gained from
his unparalleled mastery of everyday life in distant lands and distant times. Not much has changed, it seems,
except the speed of the ships and the communication between traders.
Fear and Loathing: Campaign Trail 1972
Hunter S. Thompson
Tristes Tropiques
by Claude Levi-Strauss
The Autobiography of U.S. Grant
Although Grant doesn't blow his own horn, a close reading of his campaign accounts supports
the "revisionist" view that far from being a butcher of men and Lee's inferior, Grant's victories
(other than Shiloh) were tactical in nature, not brute force charges. (OK, there was Cold Harbor,
but that was one mistake in a year-long campaign to destroy the South before the North lost its
will to fight. Time was not on Grant's side.) Furthermore, Lee, Jackson, Johnson, et. al. always had the
easier side of the equation, playing defense and disrupting the North's long lines of suppy and
communication.
This is also an interesting study on how an apparently unremarkable person find greatness within
himself when he is in his element, and how a great general can fail as a president because the
leadership roles are quite different.
There is a dry wit in much of Grant's writing which makes it a fun read even if you don't want the
details of his capture of Vicksburg and his eventual destruction of the South's Eastern armies.
Books
(fun fiction) back to top
The Enigma of Arrival
by V.S. Naipaul
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Typee & Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
by Thomas Mann
Kokoro
&
Light and Dark
by Natsume Soseki
The Makioka Sisters
by Junichiro Tanizaki
The Counterfeiters
by Andre Gide
The Fall
by Albert Camus
Notes From the Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Rainbow
by D.H. Lawrence
The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
Books
(unrepentantly guy books) back to top
A General History of the Robberies & Murders
of the Most Notorious Pirates
by Captain Charles Johnson (1726)
A surprising number of pirates seemed to have been caught while cleaning barnacles
and such off their ship's hulls. A good read if you like 1) pirates or 2) antiquated English prose.
Roughing It
by Mark Twain
If you thought the collapse of the NASDAQ was unique, read Twain's account of
making and losing a million in the silver mines of 1860s Nevada Territory. Inimitable.
The Long Walk
Slavomir Rawicz
While some critics have claimed that this is fabricated--the party should have crossed
certain railways, but the author never mentions doing so, etc.--it is still a rousing adventure.
Perhaps the story has been embellished, but perhaps not. Either way, a gripping tale of
escape from the Soviet Gulag in Siberia and a trek on foot across the steppes, deserts and
mountains to freedom in India.
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