The only one I've read is "The Feeling of What Happens."
As you type, the feeling of your hands on a keyboard may be deeply familiar, so much so that, as the philosopher Frederique de Vignemont points out, you barely notice the sensation of touch as you translate thoughts onto a screen. Every aspect of this experience, however, might rightly amaze. How do you remember where your fingers should go? Why might you notice intently the expansion of type across the screen, but barely register the clicks of keys? How do you extract “experience” — what seems like the whole of conscious life — out of such moments?ADDED: Here's the Amazon link for Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens." If you asked me what book influenced me the most in the last few decades, I might name another book by Damasio, "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain." But that's a bit more than 2 decades old, so perhaps the Chronicle's respondent named the other book because of the past-20-years limitation.
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114 comments:
I would say "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe.
Darnit, that's now 30 years old.
I would say a book like Salt. There seems to have been in the past 20 years an explosion of books that completely dissect a single topic. Salt was one of the first, I think. Maybe The Secret House (Wow! 1977!! Seems like yesterday) was a forerunner of Salt. I'm not sure.
I don't think fiction was explicitly excluded, but the respondents seemed to have all taken it that way.
So question: Is this a question of most influential new book written in the last 20 years?
Because it seems to me the most influential book would have to be a choice between the Koran and the Bible; in terms of what book has influenced the most people. Of course, they are a bit older than 20 years.
If you were to answer the question for just books published in the last 20 years, it would probably be the Harry Potter series, which has turned into a quasi religious text for lots of people.
I've switched to reading fiction books this year (or memoirs), mainly because I read so many nonfiction articles that I don't want books that feel like more and longer articles. I want something distinctly different and with more beautiful and worthy language. I am going blind (until next February) so I do my books as audiobooks and go for long walks near home. That's my main activity when I'm not reading articles on line and blogging. I should make a list of what I've read this year, in the order that I enjoyed them.
I read a lot of books and am always looking for more. I will always click through to any list of books to see if any seem interesting enough to download the Kindle sample.
On this list I not only didn't see anything I'd read, I didn't see any titles or authors that I recognized besides Steven Pinker and Bowling Alone.
Nothing on the list seemed the least bit interesting to me. I don't care how "IMPORTANT!!!" a book is. Life is way too short to read uninteresting books. Especially when there are so many interesting ones out there to purchase through the portal.
Agree about Bonfire of the Vanities. Great book, though I don't think many intellectuals liked it. I liked the movie too. Again, one of the few.
John Henry
I was just wondering about the surgery date. Waiting 'til February seems like a long time. But why get sight just as Dark-month approaches! This way you'll get sight just when the days get long enough to appreciate the view.
Seems about what I would imagine a list put together by progressive academics would contain. Lots of screeds bemoaning the presumed failures of the free market and the like, hand wringing about social immobility in academia, critical race theory, black activism ect.
I got it.
"The Black Book of Communism" by Courtois et al.
Darnit, first published in French in 1997 -- 21 years ago. Missed it by that much.
MM,
I don't think I'd heard of Salt before.
I like books like this so downloaded the sample.
Thanks for the tip.
Do you read John McPhee? He writes a lot of books that my be in this vein. Who else could make a multi-volume geological history of I-80 from NJ to SF interesting? Or his book about birchbark canoes? Or oranges?
John Henry
Maybe The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright [2006].
Zero for 20 here. However, I would definitely read "Bowling Alone" and am putting it on my list.
I think it's about Mookie Betts.
We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields.
My emphasis.
A book by a Scholar that I've read in the last 20 years that influenced me is Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz.
But a lot of books I have read that have influenced me are either way too old, or not written by scholars. Was Eric Hoffer a scholar? Edward Abbey? Jane Duncan? George Herriman? Nassim Nicholas Taleb?
Most of the comments on that page are dreck. You could have a lot of fun mocking the book blurbs. What strikes me most about the list in toto is how few books are empirical. Bowling Alone sounds to be, but others are anecdotal at best; one book has a section on the author,s relationship to her cat. An influential book ought — ought — to be solidly grounded in facts, in what can be proven. The introduction mentions several, such as Dawkins or Darwin. Most of these seem not to be.
Books don't matter anymore.
If I were a crazy cat woman, I'd say "50 Shades of Grey" by EL James.
For myself I can think of a few books in the past 20 years that influenced me a lot, and that I would urge others to read.
Fooled by Randomness, Taleb.
Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet. Herman.
Quest for the Historical Mohammed. Ibn Warraq
A recent book I am chewing over is The Book of Why by Judea Pearl. I will also read his technical book. This might be a bit inside baseball but if you are a data person at all this seems like enormously important stuff.
Do read Taleb.
I think it's about Mookie Betts.
Heh.
BAG
That belongs atop the should have been influential but wasn’t list.
In general, I don't read books that were published less than 400 years ago.
Autocorrect changed ehrman to Herman. Bart D Ehrman, Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the new Millennium
Inga autocreect, just inga it.
"Back to Blood" by Tom Wolfe followed by "The Plague of Dreamlessness" by M. Reese Kennedy.
Autocorrect changed ehrman to Herman. Bart D Ehrman, Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the new Millennium
Inga autocreect, just inga it.
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
I say this only because should his prediction turn out to be true the magnitude of the importance of that book will realized, and his historical profile would be raised to that of a 20-21st century Nostradamus or Pascal.
Mockturtle
That's a great book, everyone should read it. But it seems few have huh? Or at least very few learned anything.
Lucid-Ideas said...
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
If you like that one, I'd recommend Nick Bostrom's
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Man, I just scrolled thru the list. Holy Smokes! There's only 2 possibilities:
1. The entire list sucks -- mostly pointless twaddle about unimportant stuff.
2. I am hopelessly out of touch with the modern-day literary community.
You decide!
Another excellent book:
"The Company" by Robert Littell (2002)
And, if you can believe it, the TV miniseries of this book was excellent, largely accurate and portrayed the CIA in a reasonably good light, despite its many historical fuckups.
"An Anxious Age" by Jody Bottum. His prose is so lyrical, and he's one of the few writers who can change my mind about a topic.
The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had great influence, although things did not turn out quite as intended.
It’s not an “influential “ book, by one of the best I have read in 20 years. Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes. Very free translation of parts of the Metamorphoses. Superb.
BAG
Hopelessly = mercifully
Git-R-Done, by Larry the Cable Guy
Insightful treatise on existential struggle of modern man, philosophy of "state" and the Sisyphean quest for meaning through "doneness", choosing your path to "Git", finding your "R", predicted rise of Twitter, and some fine one liners all distilled into language of the vernacular: a penny Viktor Frankl.
I read twenty or thirty books a year. They just wash over me without too much effect. I don't know if it's my age or the age in which we live, but books don't seem to be that influential. There are no more literary lions like Byron or Hemingway or even that jerk Mailer telling us what to think.. We look to Kanye and Dylan for our jeremiads.......I'm reading a biography of Lord Curzon. So far I've learned that he played lawn tennis with Oscar Wilde. Both players played the match butt naked. That's an interesting little known fact, but I doubt that it will have much influence on my life.......I mostly collect useless facts in reading. That's probably better than reading some useless theory about how these useless facts all make sense.
The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994 Published 2003.
"The Audacity of Nope" by Barack Obama.
Get it? Bah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!
Thinking about it I would not be surprised if the most influential “book” was the Google white paper on Hadoop. Big data dwarfs much of the stuff that list prattles over, and that was the key publication in Big Data.
Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard, is from the '70s, but it and his follow up writings are crucial. The present moment of ever-intensifying scapegoat-hunting cries out for it.
Books like this one, How to Program in C++, are the most important books of the past 50 years.
C++ is an object oriented programming (OOPs) language.
OOPs is the programming language of the gods. With OOPS, the gods can created objects with properties. These are passed through a hereditary structure, like DNA.
OOPs combined with AI will one day produce a working Holodeck.
The only one I have read is "Bowling Alone," although there are two or three others I have heard of. I would say that if I, a well-read urban professional, haven't heard of a book, it can't be very influential, and indeed several of the books (e.g., on critical race theory) are certain to be little read and soon forgotten. Although I suppose that one could argue that several books of that nature have been influential in persuading the academic left to distance themselves from the American mainstream and absent themselves from participation in the American project, which is a moderately noticeable change in American life during my time.
Of that list, my first pick to read would be What Art Is.
I did read thru the list. None of the titles attracted me.
The Big Think literary thing seems exhausted to me. I no longer see the glamour because that end of the publishing biz, like the music biz, is sickeningly corrupt. The butt kissing needed for yard of gain in that biz is not worth the trouble.
A new story telling paradigm is needed to make the Holodeck functional. The tech side is being resolved step by step.
The day of the audience wanting to be the observing third person narrator is almost over. The audience wants to be the first person hero.
How about The Bell Curve? It certainly produced more angst among educators than any other book.
And the predictions that the authors made have held up pretty well.
For me I have to go with From Dawn to Decadence by Barzun (published in 2000). Masterful and often provocative telling of the West's history since 1500. I return to it often.
A book like "Recommitting to Truth" is only useful to someone who's left the truth behind. To anyone who hasn't, it's just a reminder of what a shitty generation we live with. I don't like this list.
I vote for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.
Strongly typed languages are for weak minds. Mike Lesk on C++
As I expected, I have read none of them. Influential to whom? Not to me.
I'd pick one of a number of important writings on advances in computing.
Confused: Couldn't agree more. The day I finished reading it, I started it again. Magnum opus indeed.
I declare everything pointer to void and use casts.
American Neuroticism of the Last Twenty Years, A List
I scrolled through their list of influential books. I only heard of about two or three of them. None of them sound very appealing......The editor maintains that Darwin, Marx and Freud were influential thinkers. They sure were. The lesson to be gleaned from this is to take influential thinkers with a grain of salt. Darwin has help up pretty good, but the wonder of Marx and Freud is why their menagerie of weird insights was considered scientific and deferred to by several generations of the kinds of academics who have written this new crop of influential books.
C has all the power of assembler with all the convenience of assembler, the saying is.
Guns Germs and Steel. It confirmed my belief in the superior utility of deterministic thinking in problem solving.
I just put Dawn to Decadence on my reading list. Thanks!
C has all the power of assembler with all the convenience of assembler, the saying is.
Years ago I wrote an app for a client. He asked what language I used. C I told him. He asked how to spell it. Honest.
I loaned my first edition of The C Programming Language to my daughter when she went to school, and she seems to have lost it. I may never forgive her.
Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard, is from the '70s, but it and his follow up writings are crucial. The present moment of ever-intensifying scapegoat-hunting cries out for it.
Well, as soon as AA mentioned "The Chronicle" as a source[arbiter] of the "most influential book in the last 20 years" I knew that we would get books which are worthless. Also, what is the criteria for "influential" number of books sold, specialized books, etc.
I've come across two books over the past 20 years which had a impact on my views.
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
I'm sure everyone has their favorites - guess not surprised AA would pick a academic journal to tell us what is influential!
Some years ago (I think it was around 2007), you were recommending Damasio and so I read two of his books (Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza). You had a blog or two about him back then, and that generated commentary from a lot of us (not sure how many are still around from that long ago). My impression was that, when he was writing about what he knows -- mostly neuroscience -- he was good. When he veered into more general topics, not so much.
Here's a short book that I found more rewarding in getting at some of the philosophical issues: Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind & Language (Columbia Univ Press). It consists of extended versions of presentations by three leading philosophers and one scientist/doctor at a symposium at Columbia from about 2008 or so. Hacker (the foremost keeper of the Wittgensteinian flame) and Bennett (the scientist/doctor) have published together widely on the philosophy of mind and neuroscience. They take a very different view from Dennett and Searle, who have also published widely on the same topics but have a more materialist bent (as does Damasio). They give each other's views and premises a real challenge.
If you're doing fiction this year, it will keep until next.
My old man taught me to write code in APL when I was in the third grade. The only thing I remember is the iota function. My Dad used me as a parlor trick at cocktail parties when he had programmer colleges over to the house because APL was Greek to them.
Well, 'Hells Bells' both of my picks are more than 20 years old. My Bad!
OOP is nice.... but the world is going functional. Getting rid of unwanted side effects is huge! Plus, smaller, more composable code, easier to maintain.... so nice.
And getting away from manually managed memory is also huge.
Actually a strongly typed language is great and convenient if it supports type inference. Haskell does this.
Vance
Yes. It is now becoming practical to do functional programming, and we are getting better languages.
I don’t quite agree about memory being so big. Java lost a lot without dtors because there are other resources that need to be freed too.
John McPhee
"The Complete Far Side"
"The Bell Curve"
"The C Programming Language"
Daniel Dennett
If I ever give a party will youse guys come over and pretend to be my friends?
Some wag proposed compiling Trump's tweets into a small volume which everyone could carry at all times, with a red MAGA cover...
The most influential book in the last 20 years has been the Bible. More people worldwide have read the bible or have read certain portions of it than any book. Damasio and ilk are rousseau in new clothes and ultimately lead to the basement( Nietzsche).
Aww... Ferdie,
Any time and I won't even have to pretend.
John Henry
Read 3.5 of them. Not too bad!
Anyway, I'd nominate Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (ought to be influential), and Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions (revised edition 2007, so hey -- a bit influential among conservatives).
Maybe not influential (among nerds? don't know) but one of the most challenging books I have ever read, sort of: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age.
Almost nobody realizes how they ride a bike even if they try to notice. It's thoroughly out of view. A physicist has to reason his way to the answer, rather than introspecting on the matter.
There is something odd about academics who know that academics were wildly wrong about the future fifty years ago, but believe they are right about the future 50 years from now.
They completely missed the rise of neoliberalism, for example, and they say that it is the governing political mode of the world.
On the other hand, everybody takes the wrong answer as gospel about how airplanes fly, not having any intuition one way or the other, because some physicist wrote it long ago. It isn't bernoulli.
Blogger Otto said...
The most influential book in the last 20 years has been the Bible. More people worldwide have read the bible or have read certain portions of it than any book.
None of the books selected had religion or God as a topic. Most were social science or faddish histories.
“I am going blind (until next February)”
Why are you waiting until February, Althouse?
Howard said...
"Guns Germs and Steel. It confirmed my belief in the superior utility of deterministic thinking in problem solving."
Interesting. What I found most remarkable about GGaS is that Diamond wrote an entire book to prove a proposition he believed to be false. He made this abundantly clear in the introduction.
Rather like Newton producing 20 proofs of the existence of God. You'd think one good one would be enough.
Descartes Error is a great book. I'd add Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories." Nutrition is still a confusing area, but that book (and the NYTimes article that preceded it) changed our world.
Any of NN Taleb's four books, though I like Antifragile best.
Ann,I think i am expressing most of your followers sentiment in wishing that your procedure in February is successful and that you can cope until then.
I agree Taleb would have to have one or two books in the top 20. I think the Big Short by Michael Lewis (which is a great example of what Taleb warns about) opened a lot of eyes and dramatically changed the way a lot of us think about wall street, supposed elites and white collar fraud.
I don't think enough people read it, or 10,000 Year Explosion might be in the top 10.
"Basic Economics"
Thomas Sowell
The singularity has been just around the corner for about 60 years and Kurzweil is nuttier than a fruitcake.
"The History of Pi" would be high on the list. You can get it through the Althouse Amazon portal, I am sure.
Althouse @ 9:30
cataracts?
My wife had it done and it changed her life.
For the better.
Now she can see to fly.
Wave as she goes over your house tonight.
I'll bite. Who explains flight better than Bernoulli? Asking as a pilot and amateur Aerospace instructor.
For those keeping score at home, the suggestions:
"The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe.
Salt.
"The Black Book of Communism" by Courtois et al.
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright [2006].
Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz.
"50 Shades of Grey" by EL James.
Fooled by Randomness, Taleb.
Quest for the Historical Mohammed. Ibn Warraq
The Book of Why by Judea Pearl.
Bart D Ehrman, Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the new Millennium
"Back to Blood" by Tom Wolfe
"The Plague of Dreamlessness" by M. Reese Kennedy.
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
"The Company" by Robert Littell (2002)
"An Anxious Age" by Jody Bottum.
The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira
Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
Git-R-Done, by Larry the Cable Guy
The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994 Published 2003.
the Google white paper on Hadoop.
Violence and the Sacred, Rene Girard
How to Program in C++
From Dawn to Decadence by Barzun (published in 2000)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.
Mike Lesk on C++
Guns Germs and Steel.
The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind & Language (Columbia Univ Press).
Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age.
Descartes Error Antonio Damasio
Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories."
NN Taleb's Antifragile
the Big Short by Michael Lewis
10,000 Year Explosion
"Basic Economics" Thomas Sowell
"The History of Pi"
Rules for Radicals, even though not that many people have actually read it.
Rusty suggests: "Basic Economics" Thomas Sowell
Yes! That should be required HS reading, IMO. Very sound thinking and well written.
I second the recommendation for John McPhee's various works.
In particular,
"Rising From the Plains" (Geology, ostensibly. Contains one of my favorite opening paragraphs.)
"A Sense of Where You Are" (Basketball and Senatorial politics, Bill Bradley)
"The Curve of Binding Energy" (Nukes)
Others:
"Spycatcher" (Peter Wright - hunting the "fifth man" in MI6)
"Simpler - The Future of Government" (Cass Sunstein. But don't call me when your blood pressure sprays out your ears)
Tank said...
Rules for Radicals, even though not that many people have actually read it.
good pick
Nobody's influenced by books that nobody reads. Other an Bowling Alone and Better Angels of our Naturs none of these books have much reach. I'd go for Freakonics, Thinking Fast and Slow, Jordan Petersen's 12 Rules for Life as books that have wide social reach and impact on how people think about things in the last 20 years. And maybe some books about exercise and diet that have changed the way people are thinking about what they eat and exercise though no particular title comes to mind. I'd like it if Taleb's Skin in the Game became a lot more influential but I don't think his ideas about committment and robustness are taking hold.
Fred Drinkwater said...
I second the recommendation for John McPhee's various works.
In particular,
"Rising From the Plains" (Geology, ostensibly. Contains one of my favorite opening paragraphs.)
"A Sense of Where You Are" (Basketball and Senatorial politics, Bill Bradley)
"The Curve of Binding Energy" (Nukes)
I would add Annals of the Former World (geology). It helps you see geology is really just stories that sometimes works and sometimes do not work, and gives you a heightened appreciation of deep time (if the land lifts one foot more than it erodes every thousand years, in ten million years you have a ten thousand foot mountain range).
Howard said...
"Guns Germs and Steel. It confirmed my belief in the superior utility of deterministic thinking in problem solving."
Diamond's "geography is destiny" theory is not particularly well regarded by historians.
Looking back at some old notes . . . the problem with Diamond's books is that he seems to believe that history is something that is done to people, rather than something that people create.
"The Forgotten Man", Amity Shales
Lewis W
I saw a brilliant short takedown of Diamond by the guy who wrote Confederates in the Attic. It was very elegant.
On problem with Diamond is time. Why did different cultures dominate at different times if it’s really all about that big plain at one latitude?
McPhee's Annals is, I believe, a collection of all of his books centered on Geology. The conceit is a trip from east to west along Interstate 80 (with its many convenient roadcuts), in the company of various geologists, but inevitably it concerns the geology and related issues (e.g. oil exploration) around the planet.
Memorable, actually.
Another favorite line -
During the climb up I-80 from Reno to Truckee, McPhee's companion says:
"I don't know what this glop is. You need a Californian."
As long as I'm on the subject: "Cadillac Desert" by Marc Reisner, about water in the US west.
"The Character of Physical Law", R. Feynman. A lucid non-mathematical fundamental physics course for non-physicists, in a slim paperback.
False premise to the question.
Why should there be a most influential book "of the past 20 years"? The question betrays a progressive conceit, as if what is "new" necessarily is more important that what is timeless.
Every book of the last 20 years will end up on the trash heap of history. They may be of sound and fury in some people's minds today, but they signify nothing of lasting import.
Ann, what sort of vision problem are you having? I suspect reading a computer screen does not help (?).
I'll bite. Who explains flight better than Bernoulli? Asking as a pilot and amateur Aerospace instructor.
Bernoulli reverses cause and effect. The air is moving faster because it went down a pressure gradient, not the opposite.
Wings get lift exlusively by throwing air downwards. The wing shape happens to do that most efficiently, that is, minimizing the amound of forward drag for the amount of throwing needed. That shape is just how it comes out of the fluid flow equations.
It's Halloween, so I would suggest Bastiat's THE LAW to frighten "liberals." You could pair it with any good textbook on logic, and have the two books form a cross that'll have "liberals" foaming at the mouth and maybe jumping out the nearest window.
Mark,
I suppose it depends what you mean by "book." I know many books that aren't obsolete and frankly never will be, but they're all either what is called "popular fiction," or scholarly works.
The former, for me, are mostly mysteries, with a smattering of sci-fi. The latter are mostly musicological. On my nightstand at the moment, there's Larry Niven's Lucifer's Hammer, several books by Catherine Aird, and Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder.
MDT: I thought I'd read all of Christie's novels but that name doesn't ring a bell. another addition to my reading list. ;-)
Rhhardin writes: Wings get lift exlusively by throwing air downwards. The wing shape happens to do that most efficiently, that is, minimizing the amound of forward drag for the amount of throwing needed. That shape is just how it comes out of the fluid flow equations.
What is the point at which the width of the wing reduces, rather than enhances, this effect?
https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Green-Environment-Environmentalists-Conservative/dp/0465031137
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Common-Sense-Suffocating-America/dp/0812982746
As long as we're not feeling ourselves bound to the proposed time frame, it's probably a good idea for everybody to get back into William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even for those who wish to speak against the book, you certainly should have read it before you attempt to refute it. And people who can't stop themselves from comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler should actually learn the first thing about the latter.
Blogger Lewis Wetzel said...
Looking back at some old notes . . . the problem with Diamond's books is that he seems to believe that history is something that is done to people, rather than something that people create.
Only read GGS, so can't speak to other Diamond books. My takeaway from that is human creativity is focused and shaped by geography.
BL, good idea. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is an outstanding examination of the evolution of the 'hows and whys' of Naziism [just as my earlier-mentioned The Looming Tower is an outstanding documentary of the evolution of Al Qaeda]. Ive read both twice and will read them again.
1. Win Bigly
2. Anna Karenina
Looming Tower was good. That’s when New Yorker staffers weren't infected with TDS.
For fairly recent non-fiction, Thinking Fast and Slow strongly affected the way I perceive my own brain function/malfunction. It's by the only psychologist to win the Nobel Prize (as there is no Nobel Prize for psychology)
The problem with Diamond's geography as history shtick is that it amounts to just-so stories. Diamond knows a present reality and then works his way to that truth using geography. It's a bit like Marxism that way, where you know a current reality and then show how it was caused by economics or the dialectic of history.
You know what geography or economics tells you. If the analysis is true, you should be able to predict the future. But you can't.
The Soviets were really shitty at predicting the future. I imagine that Diamond is no better.
Most influential book of the last 20 years?
Facebook of course.
'A screaming comes across the sky."
Gravity's Rainbow
Read and discuss.
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