As with the Fiction post, this is a list of recommendations. Reviews of masterworks can be found on my old blog.

The world of non-fiction is as broad as broad can be. The following is essential reading, by subject, weighted toward quality of ideas. Prose style is important too.

 

Current Events

Noam Chomsky – Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman)

• Want to know how corporations and billionaires can get 70 million Americans to vote against their own self-interest? It’s all right here.

Ralph Nader – Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think

• Want to know what we can do about it? It’s all right here.

 

Essays, Letters, Speeches

Heywood Broun – Modern Essays

Albert Camus – Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

• “Tyrants know there is in the work of art an emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to those who do not revere it.”

The Dalai Lama – The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

• “The whole world should be demilitarized. So, on one level we should be working toward developing inner peace, but at the same time it’s very important to work towards external disarmament and peace as well, making a small contribution in whatever way we can.”

WEB Du Bois – The Souls of Black Folk

• “To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and character.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Collection

• “Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.”

Sigmund Freud – Civilization and Its Discontents

• “We achieve the most if we can sufficiently heighten the pleasure derived from mental and intellectual work. Fate can then do little to harm us.”

Sigmund Freud – The Future of an Illusion

Buckminster Fuller – Critical Path

Christopher Hitchens – Letters to a Young Contrarian

Abraham Lincoln – Complete Works

HL Mencken – Vintage Mencken

Native Americans – Great Speeches by

Genna Sosonko – Smart Chip from St. Petersburg

Richard Stallman – Free Software, Free Society

• “The users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software… The non-free program [software application] controls the users… this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.”

Studs Terkel – Working

Henry David Thoreau – On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Voltaire – Letters on England

Kurt Vonnegut – Palm Sunday

 

History

Svetlana Alexievich – Voices from Chernobyl

Joseph Campbell – The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Larry Gonick – The Cartoon History of the Universe

Lewis and Clark – The Journals

Elizabeth Cady Stanton – History of Woman Suffrage

Studs Terkel – Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

• “The atmosphere since the end of the Second War — it seems like the minute the war ended, the propaganda started. In making people hate each other.” — Peggy Terry

Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Barbara Tuchman – A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

• “Flowers covered the fields and forest floor and formed a cherished element of daily life.”

 

Literature

AC Bradley – Shakespearean Tragedy

• “One must constantly remember not to believe a syllable that Iago utters, on any subject including himself, until one has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts…”

Harold Bloom – Genius

Harold Bloom – Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human

• “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves.”

Harold Bloom – The Western Canon

Northrop Frye – A Natural Perspective

 

Memoir

Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Doris Lessing – African Laughter

Doris Lessing – In Pursuit of the English

Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton

Henry David Thoreau – Walden; or, Life in the Woods

• “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

 

Music

Louis Armstrong – Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans

Michael Azzerad – Our Band Could Be Your Life

Stanley Crouch – Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker

Bill Crow – From Birdland to Broadway: Scenes from a Jazz Life

Chuck D – Fight the Power

Woody Guthrie – Bound for Glory

Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro – Hear Me Talkin to Ya

Rex Stewart – Jazz Masters of the Thirties

Art Taylor – Notes and Tones

Michael Zwerin – The Parisian Jazz Chronicles

• “Important new ideas go through three phases — the joke, the threat, and the obvious.”

 

Psychology

Sigmund Freud – Three Case Histories

Carl-Gustav Jung – The Essential

Steven Pinker – How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker – The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

• “While conflict is a human universal, so is conflict resolution. Together with all their nasty and brutish motives, all peoples display a host of kinder gentler ones: a sense of morality, justice, and community, an ability to anticipate consequences when choosing how to act, and a love of children, spouses, and friends.”

 

Science and Math

Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene

Richard Feynman – Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman

Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time

• “In the quantum theory of gravity… because one is using Euclidean space-times, in which the time direction is on the same footing as directions in space, it is possible for space-time to be finite in extent and yet to have no singularities that formed a boundary or edge.”

David Foster Wallace – Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

Edward O. Wilson – Sociobiology: The New Synthesis

 

——

And finally, The George Carlin Book Club, from Brain Droppings by George Carlin.

• A Treasury of Poorly Understood Ideas
• Why Jews Point
• The Golden Age of Tongue Kissing
• Famous Bullshit Stories of the Aztecs
• The Meaning of Corn
• Feel This: A Braille Sex Manual
• Really Loud Singalongs for the Hard of Hearing