FacebookTag Game. Name 10 books that stayed with you and if possible, the reasons why. Elisabetta Liverani indirectly tagged me. Im tagging friends I think would have the most interesting lists: Christopher Keelty, Vikram Paralkar, Mitu Pandya. Notice that all my fiction books are SCIENCE fiction. My experience has been that sci-fi writers have had far more to say, far more clearly, about the human condition than regular fiction writers.: 1. Foundation – Isaac Asimov. A man uses science to build a creative, rational, successful capitalist civilization. Perhaps the “foundation” of my own belief in the power of social engineering. Suck on THAT, Ayn Rand! 2. Dragons of Eden – Carl Sagan. The best thing he ever wrote. Opened my eyes to the fact that human behavior is a product of both our animal ancestry and our education. 3. Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegutt. The sequel to Slaughterhouse Five, but I wound up reading this 1st and it was the superior of the two. Beautifully told story of a way to perceive “time” as a continuous process instead of a static thing. As I’ve gotten older I am better able to perceive time in somewhat the same way. :-) 4. Player Piano – Kurt Vonnegutt. Extrapolates from the “current” rate of automation a future of uselessness for the average working person. Perfectly logical. I believed then and still do that this future is real if we don’t put our minds to the problem. 5. The Greeks – H.D.F. Kitto. A classic and very readable history of the politics & culture of ancient Greece. One thing I got from this was that “pure” democracy cannot work, and the US founding fathers knew what they were doing when they created a representative democracy. 6. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy – Barrington Moore, Jr. A book assigned in a political science course at Rutgers. Two inches thick and I’ve read it 3 times since then. My 1st glimpse into how social, economic, and political events combine to make history. 7. The Nerves of Government – Karl Deutsch. An application of the principle of feedback loops that explains how organizations and govts “steer” themselves. Changed my entire way of thinking about how politics works. 8. His Master’s Voice – Stanislaw Lem. Perhaps the most intellectual work of sci-fi ever. Is mankind even capable of NOT taking a gift of ultimate knowledge and turning it into a weapon? Are the prerequisites of Realpolitik just too powerful? 9. Hyperspace – Michio Kaku. What can I say? This guy enabled me to comprehend astro- and particle-physics. 10. Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card. A gripping sci-fi thriller that challenged my notions of “culture.” And the idea of a truth-speaker at your funeral sounded so compelling that I decided I would do a modified version of that when my mom passes.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 18:51:29 +0000
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